by Herb Boyd
Toward the end of the decade, in 1978 and 1979, Allied Artists Association was formed and launched a number of concerts to save the endangered Orchestra Hall/Paradise Theatre. Headlining the concerts were such notables as Dizzy Gillespie, Yusef Lateef, McCoy Tyner, and Donald Byrd, along with a corps of local musicians, including Sam Sanders, Teddy Harris, and the Hastings Street Jazz Experience, featuring Miller Brisker and Ed Nelson. These concerts were all reasonably successful, and they drew additional attention to the aims and goals of those who were interested in salvaging the historic building from the wrecker’s ball.13 Besides preserving a historic landmark, the artists had a self-interest in saving the venue, a stage where they often performed.
The Allied Artists Association (AAA) was able to get organizational footing after receiving a $7,500 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. Two other local organizations were also recipients of grants—Your Heritage House ($20,750) and Concept East Theater ($20,000).14 The AAA was comprised of a number of artists from various fields of endeavor—painters, poets, playwrights, graphic artists, journalists, musicians, and dancers. In order to survive, they believed it was necessary to merge their talents and skills and form an organization to oversee their individual and collective needs.
22
COLEMAN AND COCKREL
In the mid-1970s, Detroit’s hopeful signs on the cultural front masked the problems in the economic realm. Searching for relief, Mayor Young believed he had an ally in Washington, DC, now that a former congressman from Michigan, Gerald Ford, had succeeded Richard Nixon as president. Having averted a riot in the Livernois-Fenkell section of the city in the summer of 1975, Young was among several mayors invited to the White House for the announcement of President Ford’s plan for revenue sharing, a move no doubt facilitated by his resident guru, Emmett Moten.1 According to Young, Ford pledged $600 million of federal money for a Detroit subway. That promise was never realized, unless you count the funds received that were used to build the People Mover.
Mayor Young veered clear of the school busing controversy, choosing instead to focus on President Jimmy Carter’s administration, which had put a number of federal incentive programs in motion. In the fall of 1976, Young received $5 million from the government and wanted to use it to begin to finance his dream of building an indoor stadium next to Cobo Hall. He had to maneuver around a lot of pushback on the project, since both the Detroit Pistons, the basketball team, and the Red Wings, the hockey team, had expressed no intention of continuing to host their games in any downtown facility. Obviously they had witnessed the successful flight of the football Lions to the Silverdome in Pontiac, where there were sufficient parking lots and white patrons. After many court dates and fund-raising efforts, the deal was finalized for a hockey arena, not a stadium. Keeping the Red Wings in Detroit was key to Young’s objective. Once he got the club’s owner, Bruce Norris, to sit down with two other local movers and shakers—retailer Max Pincus and Joey Nederlander, owner of the Fisher Theater—a deal was cut. Now all Young needed was to generate about $40 million to complete construction. He was able to do this by borrowing against future block grants from the federal government. “When the arena was finished—before the approval of all of our federal loans actually came through—the naysayers whined that we had built it with smoke and mirrors,” Young said. “What the hell else did we have?”2 Young topped off this triumph by naming the building the Joe Louis Arena, a place where white men played and the only thing black was the puck. It wasn’t until 1984 that the Red Wings franchise signed its first black player, Brian Johnson, a right winger from Montreal. He played in only three games before being sent back to the minors.
In November 1977, Mayor Young won reelection by a wide margin. To some extent, winning a second term was a testament to his popularity. “I have a long relationship with Mayor Young,” said the Rev. Charles Butler. “. . . I know the mayor to be an extremely brilliant man. Some folk think that he is uninformed, blunt, and stupid because he doesn’t mind using some choice words from time to time.”3
Without question, the mayor had a large following, a particularly huge and effective black constituency. But there were detractors, political activists who were critical of his administration and its policies. “When Carter was president,” said community activist Roger Robinson, “Young could have mobilized the entire city. He could have taken a quarter million people to Washington to demand justice for Detroit and urban America. He had that skill, and clearly had the roots and analysis to have done something like that. He could have, in fact, put together a class and urban coalition that went across many lines, and used Detroit as the example. But he didn’t, and that’s the failure.”4
Robinson’s disappointment was shared by many Detroiters, especially those on the left. Young’s shortcomings were all the more glaring to those who cherished his leftist background and put their faith in his promises. Attorney Ken Cockrel, who was not a true believer, mounted the greatest opposition. His successful bid for a council seat in 1977 was the political springboard required to ensure him a run in the next mayoral race. Sheila Murphy, his future wife, was instrumental in his campaign, as she would be in the subsequent organizing of the Detroit Alliance for a Rational Economy (DARE), which would be a kind of research arm for the councilman.
At that time, irrational was clearly the best word for Detroit’s economy; its wheels were spinning, but it was going nowhere fast. Nor was there any real concrete progress in race relations by the time of the mayoral election of 1977. It became less a black-versus-white contest than a black-versus-black when Councilman Ernest Browne sought to stop Young from winning a second term. Browne hoped to win the election by appealing to white voters, but more and more of them were fleeing. Browne’s gambit was dead on arrival, and Young won decisively, unlike his narrow victory over Nichols in 1973.5 As Young commenced his second term in office, Cockrel was beginning his first on the council. Many envisioned a political showdown.
The euphoria from Young’s victory was gradually swept away like the confetti at Manoogian Mansion. With the city on the brink of economic collapse, the Young administration had to contend with a shrinking industrial base that was inextricably tied to the manufacturing of automobiles and related industries. In 1978, the unemployment index was becoming grimmer, fast approaching 20 percent. Again, with smoke and mirrors, Mayor Young was able to get the unions and financially beleaguered Chrysler—on the verge of experiencing its first billion-dollar annual loss—to the negotiating table and win a few concessions from each to stave off a crisis that in reality only the federal government could rescue them from. When the government stepped up and bailed out Chrysler, Detroit and the Young administration finally exhaled. Despite the infusion of cash, all was not well at the company. Nothing resonated as balefully as the plight of workers punching the time clock for the final time at Dodge Main, which closed in 1980.
As the saying goes, when one door closes, another one opens. Dodge Main was gone, but a new GM plant was on the way. By force of eminent domain, the Polish neighborhood was demolished. The protests mounted to stop construction of the plant were futile. The Metro Times, an alternative newspaper, had just begun its run, and the Poletown story got it off to a most auspicious start, thanks to the fearless reporting of the late Jeanie Wylie, who was among the protesters arrested. She believed that to get to the heart of the story she had to be a participant. That way she would understand the passion and loss felt by thousands of displaced homeowners. “Detroit was nearly bankrupt when it made the decision to level Poletown in order to accommodate GM’s new Cadillac plant,” Wylie wrote. “Times were extremely hard for city residents. Businesses had been fleeing Detroit for some time. Certainly something had to be done, but I question whether the solution was for General Motors and the City of Detroit (and the union, the church, and the media) to coalesce to displace 4,200 people.”6
A large number of African Americans were displaced too, but they were grieving more when the layoffs
hit the Detroit Police Department. This story was chronicled in the Metro Times’s first edition with a profile of Sergeant Willie Bell, president of the Guardians of Michigan, a five-hundred-member black police officers association. Bell, an eleven-year veteran, recalled that there were very few black police officers in the higher ranks before Young became the mayor. “Before Coleman,” or BC, as he called it, “affirmative action was only a token activity.” He was particularly perturbed by the recent layoff of seven hundred officers, of whom 75 percent were African American and 40 percent were women. The Detroit Police Officers Association (DPOA), representing 3,700 officers, mostly white, refused to discuss alternative layoff plans. “Can you imagine the hostility,” he said, “if the police would have been laid off without using the seniority rule?” By this rule those last hired would have to be the first to go.7
In the summer of 1979, Detroit’s economic woes were exacerbated by a deeply emotional one for the community when the venerable Rev. C. L. Franklin was shot by a burglar in his home on LaSalle Boulevard. Alerted that someone had pried open the screen and climbed through his upstairs bedroom window, Franklin retrieved his pistol and confronted the burglar. There was an exchange of gunfire. Franklin was hit twice. One bullet struck his right knee, and the other ruptured the femoral artery in his right groin. By the time the ambulance arrived, Franklin, sixty-two, had lost a lot of blood. As he was being removed from his home and taken to Ford Hospital, he went into cardiac arrest. It was later estimated that his brain was without oxygen for nearly a half hour. When his family arrived at the hospital, the esteemed pastor was unresponsive and comatose. The New Year arrived, and Franklin remained in a coma. The cost to maintain him at home, where he would be better treated and possibly recover, was extremely high, and to meet these expenses, Aretha summoned the faithful to plan a benefit concert at Cobo Hall.8
The Rev. Dr. Clarence LaVaughn Franklin died on Friday, July 27, 1984. It took two days of “homegoing” at New Bethel to accommodate the thousands of mourners. The services included words of praise from the Rev. James Holley, Robbie Smith, and noted Michigan Chronicle religion writer Robbie McCoy. Mayor Young, in consultation with the family and Fannie Tyler, Franklin’s private secretary, trimmed the list of speakers, leaving it for the Rev. Jesse Jackson to begin the remarks from dignitaries. Jackson’s sermonette recounted Franklin’s magnificent odyssey with a particularly sonorous note about how his influence reached well beyond Black Bottom, “beyond New Bethel into the heart of Black America.”9
Franklin’s death left the city with a gaping spiritual hole that several ministers sought to fill, including the Revs. Holley, Charles Adams, Malcolm Dade, Charles Butler, Nicholas Hood, James Wadsworth, and Wendell Anthony, who succeeded the Rev. Wadsworth at Fellowship Chapel after his death in 1986. Anthony, a graduate of Wayne State University, where he was a student activist, would later head Detroit’s branch of the NAACP. Detroit’s nationally recognized pastor was stilled, black unemployment continued to hover around 25 percent, and the decennial census was about to show that, like the economy, the city’s population was spinning downward. The Republicans were gearing up for their July convention in the city, and the hope was that they’d shell out a few bucks and give the local consumer index a jolt. Still, the cowboy—or Prune Face, as Mayor Young called Ronald Reagan—was on the horizon, and it was time for the Democrats to run for the hills, or the suburbs.
Cockrel wasn’t running for the hills but contemplating a run to supplant Young. Cockrel objected vehemently to Young’s development plans, particularly his promise to give General Motors tax breaks. “I don’t see how we can justify giving a multibillion dollar corporation tax relief, when we are asking our citizens to dig down into their own pockets,” Cockrel said.10 Young was outraged when he learned of Cockrel’s stance on his plans, though it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. “I think Ken is a bright young man, probably has a political future, although I’m amazed at some of his positions he has taken on tax incentives—the whole question of whether GM needs the money. They ain’t running no . . . welfare program.”11
Near the end of his fifth and final term in office, Young was on a plane flying back from Lakeland, Florida, where he had been invited to the spring training camp of the Detroit Tigers. He was traveling with Emmett Moten, head of the city’s Community and Economic Development Department (CEDD). “Mr. Mayor, let me ask you something,” Moten said. “Now that you are near the end of your political career, who would you like to see become the next mayor?” Moten said the mayor thought for a second or two, and then said there were two men he liked for the position. “Dave Bing and Kenny Cockrel,” he replied. “Both are smart, hard working young men and I think they can do the job.”12
By the fall of 1979, Cockrel seemed less concerned about keeping his membership in the Detroit Alliance for a Rational Economy (DARE) separate from his role as a councilman. In September, at the Sacred Heart Seminary, he was a speaker at the conference on city life sponsored by DARE. Cockrel questioned the priorities of a system that gave Max Fisher [chairman of Marathon Oil] $12 million but couldn’t find funds for the Detroit General Hospital. He said the whole process of electoral politics was a facade. “It does very little to change structures that systematically screw the economically oppressed,” he stated. “It’s time the people of Detroit made its demands heard. It’s time the city council and the mayor respond to the people who voted for them, or maybe we need some electoral upheaval.”13
When Cockrel assumed his seat on the city council, a minor electoral upheaval had occurred. It’s probably not so incredible, given Detroit’s history of labor activism, that two of the city’s most prominent elected officials were at one time affiliated with leftist organizations and avowed Marxists. Even so, in 1979 they were not ideologically compatible. Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin summed up Cockrel’s influence thus: “When conventional politicians, historians, and unionists talk about seminal groups of that time, they don’t acknowledge the League [of Revolutionary Black Workers, of which Cockrel was a founder and leader]. Coleman Young’s autobiography doesn’t mention them once. We think that’s a testimony to how much they feared the League and the movement the League represented.”14
23
POSTINDUSTRIAL BLUES
Detroit City
It was the finest city it was
Yes, Detroit City
It was the finest city it was
I’m crazy ’bout that city
And I love its pretty girls
When you leave that city
And you feel this kind of love
When you leave that city
And you feel this kind of love
Just one goes out easy
And you find a good place to go
You don’t need a lot of money
To have a real good time
You don’t need a lot of money
To have a real good time
Just be a real good boy
And everything will turn out fine.
—FATS DOMINO, “DETROIT CITY BLUES”1
According to the Census of 1980, there were 1.2 million people in Detroit. The non-Hispanic white population constituted a little over 34 percent; blacks represented more than 63 percent, and Latinos, about 2 percent. Along with this black numerical majority, of which there was a serious undercount, depriving the city of state and federal money, came the unwelcome prospect of deindustrialization, the disappearance of jobs that the city’s working class had depended on for years. “Like my father,” said one young black man, “when I graduated from high school I wanted to work at Ford, buy me a car, and get on with raising a family.” His dream and plans belonged to thousands of Detroiters, but ahead of them loomed the nightmare of automation, cybernation, outsourcing, and the general relocation of the factories that had been so indispensable to the livelihood of their fathers and grandfathers.
A more ominous menace was taking shape as well—the spread of opiates, particularly heroin, and co
caine. With the traditional routes to middle-class success closed, young black Detroiters sought other means of survival, mainly via the underground economy. Too many black youngsters succumbed to the lure of the loudspeakers from cars operated by Young Boys Inc., advertising the income to be made from running drugs. The gang, widely known as YBI, had been around the city for several years, but with the economy in a downward spiral and job opportunities increasingly unavailable, they seized on the desperation of the poor youngsters who could peddle their drugs without facing prison terms if caught. Between 1978 and 1982, YBI, through three separate subgangs—Big Boy, Raymond, and WW, so named after the gang leaders—controlled most of the heroin trafficking in the city. They became so notorious that they are cited in an international encyclopedia of drugs.2 According to police estimates, at its peak the gang had revenue of $7.5 million a week.
Young Boys Inc. was a plague on the Young administration, and something had to be done about it, especially the health crisis it was creating with the epidemic explosion of drug addiction. From the very beginning of the Young administration, George Gaines had been the actual director of the Health Department—whenever the appointed director left, Gaines, who had a master’s degree in public health, was in charge. “They would get another director, and then he would leave,” he said. “I would run the department again.” The directors, Gaines confided, left for various reasons. Some were not prepared for the job and others couldn’t handle the pressure. Compounding the heroin peril was the outbreak of HIV, which the medical community believed was related to the sharing of needles by addicts. Gaines said he discussed the problem with Mayor Young.