by Herb Boyd
I told him there are forty thousand addicts in Detroit. If we don’t do something this neighborhood is going to be devastated with HIV. He said, “How are they going to get it?” I said they share needles. He said, “You got to do something.” What we did was until we got the needle exchange program, we gave out bottles of bleach so that the addicts could clean their needles. We showed them how to clean their needles. In a sense I am sure that that made some difference here. Because it got to be a pattern that you just don’t clean the needle with water, you use bleach. We got the concept from San Francisco and we called it “teach and bleach.” Later we learned that it was not very efficacious. Coleman said, “Give them the needles. They ought to have the needles.” I said, you can’t do it, it is against the law. We finally got the law changed, the Ordinance changed. He was a progressive person to work for; that is the kind of person he was.3
After the law enforcement agencies were able to arrest its leaders and break up YBI, some remnants remained. Later they would be responsible for the scourge of crack cocaine in the early and mid-1980s.
When playwright Ron Milner finished his comic operetta Crack Steppin’ in 1981, it had nothing at all to do with drugs, which the writer absolutely abhorred. It was a fast-paced soulful musical produced by Barry Hankerson and had an extended run at the Music Hall, featuring choreography by Clifford Fears. The only thing with a bigger wallop at that time in the city was newly crowned WBA welterweight champion Tommy “Hit Man” Hearns, who had a date with WBC champion Sugar Ray Leonard to unify the weight division. Meanwhile, Mayor Young was trying his best to unify a city that was between extreme pain and agony, according to Felix Rohatyn, the noted finance wizard who had rescued New York City and was answering Young’s call for help. Rohatyn concluded that one of Detroit’s problems was the drain of revenue from suburbanites. He confirmed what Young had been saying all along, but of course with different words and in a different tone. A special election to impose an increase in the income tax was the only remedy for a city about to belly up.
In 1981, after much political horse trading and legislative finagling, the tax referendum was passed, and it was clear sailing for Young after another landslide victory. On the other hand, Councilman Cockrel, the presumed mayoral heir apparent, disillusioned by his inability to use his Council position to improve conditions in the city, decided not to run for reelection. This was a move, several pundits concluded, to prepare for his run for mayor in 1984.
To shore up his standing on the cultural front, Mayor Young tapped Dudley Randall of Broadside Press to be the first African American poet laureate of Detroit. One of Randall’s first acts was to drive to Lansing and corral several legislators to discuss the proposed dissolution of the Michigan Council of the Arts and how that would harm the children of Detroit. A year before, in 1980, Randall had written a poem, “Detroit Renaissance,” dedicated to the mayor. “Together we will build / A city that will yield / To all their hopes and dreams so long deferred,” he wrote with lines that are vintage Randall and with intimations of Langston Hughes. There was also an echo of Aldous Huxley about the creation of a “brave new world.”4
A towering symbol of this “brave new world” was Young’s Renaissance Center, which by 1981 was four years old, preparing to host and celebrate the second annual Detroit International Jazz Festival, in partnership with the older Montreux Festival, whose personnel had arrived from Switzerland. There was often much discussion about Detroit linking its jazz tradition with New Orleans, because the cities shared the seminal backbeat to their music. But as Emmett Moten said—and as a native of New Orleans who was Mayor Young’s economic development czar he knew exactly what he was talking about—“Detroit is older than New Orleans but has never taken advantage of its heritage.”5 At most major jazz jamborees, the main attractions are usually the internationally recognized musicians, and the plans here were no exception. With vocalists Sarah Vaughan and Detroit’s own Betty Carter as headliners, local musicians were naturally concerned as to what extent the festival would improve their lot. “This year we plan to have a better balance between local and national acts,” promised pianist Kenn Cox, a member of the program committee. Pianist/composer Harold McKinney, while praising the event, still had some reservations about the overall concept. “All the decisions are from the top down,” he lamented. “They have the money but they don’t know anything about the music.”6 McKinney, the vice chairman of MUSIC (Musicians United to Save Indigenous Culture), said that the festival placed far too much emphasis on entertainment and not enough on the economic and political conditions facing the musicians. “The music must be put into a larger cultural context. The festival could be an event that educated as well as entertained,” he said, evoking MUSIC’s founder, percussionist Roy Brooks, and his portmanteau word edutainment.7 Griot Galaxy was one of the local groups slated to perform at the festival, one that would not only balance the lineup but would tilt it toward the avant-garde, a term detested by Faruq Z. Bey, the nominal leader and saxophonist, because of its militaristic origins. In the city’s Cass Corridor near Wayne State University, not too far from Verne’s Bar and the Vernor Ginger Ale billboard, was Cobb’s Corner, where Griot Galaxy often alternated with organist Lyman Woodard and his band.
With no cover charge and featuring some of the finest jazz and blues musicians in the city, Cobb’s Corner was jam-packed every night of the week. Most of the patrons were students at Wayne State or part of the veritable army of homeless and unemployed residents who lived nearby in an assortment of shelters, including the Salvation Army’s Harbor Lights. When the downtrodden denizens, many of them on some form of public assistance, were not crowded in Cobb’s for the music, they stood in the soup lines scattered from a church pantry on the east side to a rescue mission on the west side. Even those lucky few holding down a job at one of the automobile plants were struggling to make ends meet, on the average making less than twelve dollars an hour. The cost of living, rent, taxes, and the other bills left them with little money for an evening out, a movie, or a game of their favorite sports team. The laid-off workers at Chrysler knew it was futile to think they would be called back soon, and even if they were, they knew there was no way they could expect the high wages they once commanded.8 Reaganomics was the law of the land, and Mayor Young’s castigation of the president practically eliminated any chance of federal aid for the city. The “winter of crisis” the mayor had predicted in December 1982 arrived with little relief in sight.
As usual when bad times hit the city, black Detroiters bore the brunt of the storm. They were the majority in the long lines at the Soup Kitchen Saloon, but not for a handout. Located on the east side near the city’s waterfront, the Saloon was Detroit’s home of the blues, where such performers as Albert Collins and the duo of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee kept the music tradition alive at this 140-year-old watering hole. When blues diva Sippie Wallace was booked at the joint, an overflow crowd was guaranteed, and she never failed to please with her way of wrapping her wonderful voice around the issues of the day. “She didn’t make you cry in your beer,” said the saloon’s owner, Brian McDonald. Her songs were tales of woe, he said, “but they were the kinds of stories where everybody lived and saw the next day.” She and Bonnie Raitt were close associates and often performed together.9 The blues permeated the city. It was as if John Lee Hooker’s voice was echoing from every nook and cranny, every shelter and back alley, every unemployment and welfare office. Aspects of the blues spilled from the paintings of Charles McGee, Allie McGhee, Al Loving, Harold Neal, Ibn Pori Pitts, Bennie White, and Gilda Snowden; from the sculpture of Oliver Lagrone; from the punches of boxer Alvin “Blue” Lewis; from the leaps and pirouettes of Carole Morriseau; and from the plays of Bill Harris. Soon its baleful moan began emanating from the churches, never more sorrowfully than from the choir at New Bethel Baptist Church when their songs and prayers were extended to their stricken leader. As ever, Mayor Young got it right. The winter crisis seemed long and unbe
arable.
On July 25, 1984, Judge Horace Gilmore relieved some of the depression for black Detroiters when he ordered the city to rehire eight hundred black police officers who had been laid off by Young during the budget cuts in 1979–80. This action gave fresh meaning to the blues. The mayor was also caught in the grip of a civil case in which the city was accused of violating federal racketeering and antitrust laws. At the crux of the lawsuit filed by officials of Oakland County was the charge that suburban constituents overpaid for water and sewer services because “of the city’s sludge-hauling contract with Vista Disposal, Inc., which is operated by one of Mayor Young’s protégées, Darrlyn Bowers.” Bowers and Charles Beckham, the former city Water and Sewage director, were convicted in federal District Court of bribery and conspiracy in a related case. Young recalled that the government’s special prosecutor attempted to involve him in the case as an “unindicted co-conspirator,” but there was no basis for it, despite a taped conversation, which was deemed immaterial. Much of the case centered on an alleged bribe of $16,000 that the prosecution claimed Beckham received.10 On the witness stand during the trial, Beckham told the court that the content of the envelopes supposedly containing the money was nothing more than details of a contract and a reading of Bowers’s water meter. The feds were unable to snare Young, but both Beckham and Bowers were convicted and sentenced to four and a half years in jail. The taint of Vista stuck to Young throughout his succeeding years in office. John Feikens, the federal judge overseeing the case, had appointed the mayor as receiver of the Water and Sewage Department, making Young the shit czar, as he called the assignment. Judge Feikens had once co-chaired the Michigan Civil Rights Commission with Damon Keith and now believed that the Young administration was not prepared for the receivership. According to Young, Feikens had authorized the wiretaps of his friends and entrapped them in the sludge scheme.11 Young believed the feds were out to take him down. In his autobiography he expressed feelings that he was under surveillance, the target of eavesdropping, and the victim of innuendoes.
All of these court proceedings meant very little to blue-collar Detroiters, black or white. Most of their attention was riveted on the Tigers and a pennant race that would find them winning the title in a wire-to-wire romp and defeating the San Diego Padres 4–1 in the World Series. For a moment in the city, the often troubled race relations were perhaps benefiting from the smooth fielding and timely hitting of Tigers shortstop Alan Trammell (white) and second baseman Sweet Lou Whitaker (black). It’s hardly news that most of the fans at the game were white, but whites were a minority in the cheap seats. The so-called Bleacher Creatures were mostly black fans, cheering from seats that put them closer to Chet Lemon, the fleet black centerfielder who covered as much ground as the grass.
This was the Tigers’ first World Series since they’d beaten the Cardinals in 1968, a victory that was followed by a wild celebration with a spree of vandalism. It was worse in 1984 as thousands lined the streets to cheer the conquering heroes when they assembled at Kennedy Square. Suddenly that evening celebration morphed into a citywide conflagration. To Mayor Young, it was a civic disturbance akin to Devil’s Night, the night before Halloween that had lit up the city a year before, in 1983. This was a far cry from ringing doorbells, soaping windows, and turning over garbage cans that was the mischief of the previous generation of children. “For reasons no one understands,” wrote Ze’ev Chafets, “America’s sixth largest city erupted into flames. Houses, abandoned buildings, even unused factories burned to the ground in an orgy of arson that lasted seventy-two hours. When it was over the papers reported more than eight hundred fires. Smoke hung over the city for days.”12 A few years later, during another outbreak of flame and fury on Devil’s Night, Chafets was stunned to see elderly black men with long black coats covering their bathrobes standing on their porches armed with shotguns and garden hoses. They were just the opposite of the large number of young black men who were arrested during the night of flame and mayhem, which perversely had become a kind of tourist attraction.
Tourists to Detroit, particularly those with an interest in the city’s black nationalist tradition who wanted to visit the Shrine of the Black Madonna, were welcomed at the church by the esteemed Rev. Cleage (Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman). His church, later renamed the Pan-African Orthodox Christian Church, had a formidable political arm called the Black Slate. It played a decisive role in the city’s politics, beginning in the early seventies when it helped elect Mayor Young. In 1981, it was the organization behind the election of Barbara Rose-Collins to the City Council. While the Black Slate continued to endorse candidates and orchestrate various social and political events, Pastor Agyeman managed the church and the Black Slate from Houston. Although Jaramogi was no longer a visible force in the city, his former comrade-in-arms, the tireless James Boggs, was still as voluble as ever, his pen no less capable of speaking for the powerless. From this radical perspective, black Detroit and its denizens, including Latinos, Native Americans, and Asians, were expendable to the powers that be. “Our communities have been turned into wastelands,” Boggs wrote. “Public transportation is not only constantly breaking down but its cost has become prohibitive. Crime has become so normal that we fear one another more than we used to fear wild beasts.”13 Boggs made this comment in September 1984, and it contradicts Mayor Young’s assertion a few months later when he proudly proclaimed—citing an award from the International Society of Crime Prevention Practitioners—that Detroit had the best crime-prevention program in the country. Boggs and Young were right about the hostility directed at the city from the suburbs, given that Detroit was fast becoming the blackest city in the nation. As more than one commentator noted, it was hard to distinguish whether the hatred was for Young or the city; for black (and white) Detroiters, the two were inseparable.
The suburban disconnect was a pressing reality for Detroit in 1985, but Boggs’s point about the fear factor in the city should not be minimized. During an hour-long presentation of American Black Journal, a local cable-television show hosted by Ed Gordon, teen violence was the topic discussed by a panel consisting of Dr. Emeral Crosby, the principal of Pershing High School; James Younger, head of the Detroit Police Department’s felony prevention division; and Professor Hartford Smith of Wayne State University’s School of Social Work. It was a lively discussion that included a number of call-ins and one unidentified young man on the show who said that everyone he knew carried a gun, “not with the intent of hurting anyone, but simply to protect themselves from attack.” He said he had been shot once in front of his home. Smith chimed in that America’s cities were becoming populated with more sophisticated delinquents than ever before, a situation exacerbated by a deteriorating sense of community. “We’ve seen for the first time in American society the tip of a very ugly iceberg,” Smith said. “We live essentially in a community of strangers, which leaves many youth to their own tactics of survival.”14
Detroit’s internal violence was given an even larger platform of exposure when the ABC News television show Primetime promised a balanced portrait of the city with Mayor Young at the center. But Young had been snookered; the purportedly objective story was basically a dreary account of a city gone down the tubes with little indication of hope or uplift. As if to accentuate what the panelists had discussed on American Black Journal, the Primetime segment closed with a “mourning mother sobbing over her son’s grave, one of a series of poignant shots that were portrayed as extemporaneous but which many people felt were contrived,” Young recounted.15
Contrived or not, the show left an indelible stamp on Detroit as a city overrun by violence, the “murder capital” of America, a designation first applied in 1974 but not accurate until 1987, when there were 62.8 homicides per 100,000 residents. There was clearly a steady escalation of murders in the city, so much so that in 1986 Pistons star Isaiah Thomas led a march against crime. Ironically, just as the marchers, led by Mayor Young, started the procession downtown, an announcement
came that a police officer had been killed by a man who thought he was a prowler.16
Detroit got a spiritual and musical uplift when the Winans, the city’s legendary gospel group, released their fifth album, Decisions, in 1987 on the Qwest label, particularly from “Ain’t No Need to Worry,” featuring Anita Baker. The single earned the group and Baker a Grammy. With lyrics like “Ain’t no need to worrying / What the night is gonna bring / Because it will be all over in the morning,” it was just the message a depressed community needed to shake off the negativity bombarding it from near and far.
A grave concern for many black residents in the mid-1980s was crack cocaine, use of which spread like wildfire across the country. In Detroit and elsewhere, especially among the poor, powdered cocaine gave way to crack, a stable, dampness-resistant form of the alkaloid more easily stored and sold in small quantities to the nonwealthy. Nearly every neighborhood had at least a “master chef or two” who could cook the rocks to perfection. “At first it was like a fad, almost recreational but it soon became something else, and suddenly all the fun was gone,” users often confessed. He was talking about the rapid buildup of tolerance, the brain’s weakening response to successive doses, which in susceptible persons leads to a strong psychological dependence unlike the physical addiction of heroin yet sometimes rendering a person unable to stop smoking it until either all of the money or all the rocks are gone. In 1986, according to one report, Detroit registered the nation’s fastest acceleration of crack abuse. It was estimated that at least fifty thousand metro Detroiters were hooked on the little rocks, and, unsurprisingly, most of them were young black men and women. The distribution of crack was a $1 billion-a-year business in the city, and it left thousands of users doing almost anything for the next hit on the pipe.17