by Herb Boyd
On August 16, with the same emotionless delivery as his father’s, Judge Crockett announced his decision in the case of Officer Lessnau, finding him not guilty of assault with intent to cause bodily harm. Five days later, the jury reached a verdict in the Budzyn case, but it was sealed until the Nevers trial ended. A few days later, both Budzyn and Nevers were found guilty.
Before they were sentenced, both Nevers and Budzyn apologized to Malice Green’s family in the courtroom. Then Judge Crockett pronounced sentence. Larry Nevers, 53, was given 12–25 years in prison, with no parole permitted until he served at least nine years and eight months. Walter Budzyn, 47, was sentenced to 8–18 years, with a minimum of six and a half years. Before they were led from the courtroom, both former police officers asked that they be sent to out-of-state prisons. They said that, as new prisoners, they wanted to dodge any chance of cell block confrontations with prisoners whose incarceration was the result of their work as Detroit policemen. The Michigan Department of Corrections made arrangements for both men to serve their time in Texas.11
Mayor Young felt that the officers had committed murder (a politically incorrect thing to say at the time but typical of Young). Meanwhile, Dennis Archer, his successor, maintained silence on the case before, during, and after his mayoral triumph in 1993.12
From a humble background, Dennis Archer had diligently worked his way up the ladder of success to become the city’s mayor. He was always grateful to Mayor Young for his support and encouragement. After working his way through college in a succession of menial jobs, Archer earned his teaching degree from Western Michigan University, and then after he spent several years in night classes at the Detroit College of Law, the parchment was his and he was ready for the legal arena. He moved in steady progression from an outstanding career as a lawyer to become the president of the predominantly black Wolverine Bar Association in 1979. Four years later, he was the leader of the National Bar Association. In 1985, Governor James Blanchard appointed him to fill a vacancy on the Michigan Supreme Court. A year later, he was elected to an eight-year term on the bench, the first African American to hold the position in twenty years and the second in the state’s history. Otis Smith had been appointed to the position in 1961 by Governor John Swainson.
What appeared to be a terminal success for Archer turned out to be just another momentary plateau. In 1990 he resigned from the bench, leaving a guaranteed annual pension of $50,000 on the table, to pursue the elusive office of mayor. “When Archer decided to run for mayor in 1990,” Joe Darden and Richard Thomas wrote, “he had a private meeting with Mayor Young and told him he would like to ‘emulate’ what the mayor had done. Young, who was very ill and in his seventies, refused to commit himself to his onetime reelection campaign manager, no doubt because he was contemplating running for a sixth term.”13 In his autobiography, Young mentioned Archer only once in passing, devoting his most caustic response to his longtime political ally, former congressman George Crockett, who had introduced Archer’s candidacy. The split between Young and Crockett had been two years in the making, going back to 1988, when Crockett approached Young to be his successor in Congress. Young told him he didn’t want to be a congressman, “didn’t consider it a promotion, and in fact didn’t like a goddamn thing about Washington.”14
The rejection of the offer apparently upset Crockett, according to Young, because after the election in which Crockett won, he claimed that Young had supported his opponent, Council member Barbara Rose-Collins. Young vehemently disputed the allegation, though two years later, in 1990, he did back the candidacy of Rose-Collins, who was victorious. As for the mayoral race in 1993, Young, his health showing no signs of improvement, decided not to pursue reelection and threw his support to the city’s general counsel, Sharon McPhail. While she did well, coming in second in the crowded primaries, she failed in the general election, losing to Archer by 56 or 57 percent to 43 percent, depending on the source. Seven years later, she once more waged a vigorous campaign and became the Wayne County prosecutor in a race against future mayor Mike Duggan. She charged that Duggan was really a stalking horse for county executive Ed McNamara to prevent a federal investigation of McNamara and his cronies. McPhail’s supporters were convinced she had defeated Duggan, but the out-county votes, particularly from Duggan’s hometown of Livonia, were difficult to recount, and therefore the victory was Duggan’s.
Archer took office promising to uphold his campaign pledges to build bridges between the city and the suburbs, between downtown Detroit and the surrounding neighborhoods, and between blacks and whites, pledges diametrically opposed to the outlook of his predecessor. Unlike Young, who often expressed his disgust with Washington, Archer forged a friendship with President Bill Clinton that gained him entrance to the White House in January 1994 and a night sleeping in what he thought was Abraham Lincoln’s bed. “At the root of [Archer’s] vision for Detroit was adherence to a view that to stabilize and revitalize the city required bridge-building, negotiation and compromise with the suburbs and the white business elites. It is a vision that sees cultural separatism as an economic dead end for African Americans.”15 Although Archer took exception to many of Young’s policies, he nonetheless continued many of them, particularly the development of downtown Detroit. He would learn, as Young clearly realized, that “the forces of economic decay and racial animosity were far too powerful for a single elected official to stem.”16 The crisis too much for even two elected officials to stem. In effect, Archer inherited an illusion of sufficiency and well-being, one that had begun to unravel before Young took office and fully accelerated under Archer’s watch. The depletion of financial reserves, a dwindling tax base, a steady decline in population due to white flight, and corruption lurking vulture-like on the horizon presaged the future chapters of a doomsday scenario.
Under Archer, there may have been relative improvement in race relations. He certainly did a good job enticing new corporations to the city, but there were still some troubling social and political issues that seemed impossibly tough to gauge and remove.
Black-on-black violence continued to gnaw at the city, and no incident symbolized this problem more than the attack on Rosa Parks. “On August 30, 1994, at the age of 81, Parks was mugged in her home by Joseph Skipper, a young black man,” recounted Jeanne Theoharis. “Skipper broke down her back door and then claimed he had chased away an intruder. He asked for a tip. When Parks went upstairs to get her pocketbook, he followed her. She gave him three dollars he initially asked for, but he demanded more. When she refused, he proceeded to hit her.”17 Despite her age, Parks tried to ward off his blows, showing the resolve acquired during her days of activism. However, the volley of blows were too much and, at last, she relented and gave him all of her money—$103. After he departed, she called her good friend Elaine Steele, who had become a constant caretaker. She phoned the police, and a half an hour later, they arrived to see a battered civil rights icon. The irony of the attack was inescapable. Here was a woman who had risked her life to bring an end to a segregated society, an avowed nonviolent opponent of racism and discrimination, now waylaid by one of her own. It was a horrible moment that circulated around the globe but with a particular resonance of despair in Detroit. But Parks refused to see her tragedy as a sign of community dysfunction, Theoharis observed. “Many gains have been made. . . . But as you can see, at this time we still have a long way to go.” Skipper was sentenced to eight to fifteen years, to be served in an out-of-state prison for his own safety.18
Matel Dawson, seventy-eight, a longtime employee of the Ford Motor Company, was in 1980 beginning his donations to the United Negro College Fund, the NAACP, and other charitable organizations, which by a decade or so would amount to more than a million dollars. Dawson, a native of Louisiana and a forklift operator at Ford’s Dearborn assembly plant, said he established the scholarship funds in his name and grandparents’ names at Louisiana State University. His reason for giving, he said, originated with his parents. Plans we
re under way to set up a scholarship in their names as well. That he was able to donate such a large sum of money from his salary of $23.47 an hour and from fifty years of working overtime earned him national attention, something that he was proud to proclaim. When he’s gone, he said, “I want people to say good things about me.”19
During his long association with Ford and the UAW, Dawson admired the work of labor leader Horace L. Sheffield Jr. and, like his fellow workers, mourned the passing of the great labor leader. For more than a half century, Sheffield, seventy-nine, had been an indomitable fighter for workers’ and civil rights. He died on March 1, 1995, of congestive heart failure at Receiving Hospital. The Sheffield family had made its trek from Vienna, Georgia, to Detroit in 1919, when Horace was three years old. At eighteen, he began working at Ford and by 1941 was among the courageous union officials in the United Automobile Workers Local 600. He was a key organizer in a strike against Ford demanding an end to discrimination. Sheffield extended his activism as president of the Detroit Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and was a founder of the radical Trade Union Leadership Council (TULC). The same energy for self-determination that he committed to labor was applied during his tenure as director of the Detroit branch of the NAACP. He marched with Dr. King and met with Henry Ford II. Whether speaking to a crowd at a union rally or composing words for the various columns that he wrote, Sheffield was a thoughtful and deep thinker who was unsparing in his critique of what he felt was wrong in the world of labor and organizing. “During my three terms as president of the Detroit branch of the NAACP,” said Arthur Johnson, “we launched with the active support and participation of Horace Sheffield the campaigns to achieve fair banking practices, nondiscriminatory insurance rates in Detroit, and the ‘Buy Detroit’ campaign. He helped to shape our strategies and to sustain our will in these battles.”20 Sheffield’s son, Horace Sheffield III, has extended his father’s legacy and social resolve through his personal commitments and his leadership in the Detroit Association of Black Organizations.
A hale and hearty Sheffield Jr. would have been involved in the newspaper strike of 1996 and probably a member of Readers United, a coalition of community activists and concerned clergy who were instrumental in giving the strike wider exposure as well as helping to raise benefit funds for the workers. Perhaps he would have also weighed in on the announcement by Mayor Archer concerning the creation of casinos in the city with an interest in the proposal that 50 percent of the workers be residents. In the meantime, black workers in Detroit, no longer receiving compensation or willing to deal with rejection, made fewer and fewer trips to the unemployment office. One look at the labor index of the day reflected their disappointment. In 1995, Detroit had 55 jobs per 100 persons, compared with Bloomfield Hills, a wealthy outlying suburb, with 272.7 jobs per 100 residents.21 Moreover, the report adds, the high-paying blue-collar jobs that had created and then sustained the black middle class had moved out of the city. What remained were a limited number of low-paying positions and white-collar jobs that were customarily out of the reach of prospective black workers. In short, the process of deindustrialization, the disappearance of the manufacturing jobs that were part and parcel of the Detroit experience, was a terrible fact of life, and more and more people looked to the underground market to satisfy their needs. There were cynical reports that Detroit resembled a Third World country with its concentration of poverty compounded by a declining tax base, spreading squalor, inadequate health facilities, and high infant mortality.
Detroit’s daunting Third World circumstances did not stop Dr. Charles Wright and his cohorts. They forged ahead with their plans to celebrate the new site of the Museum of Afro-American History, including a brown-bag lunch for the local taxi and limousine drivers. On Saturday, April 12, 1997, the public was invited to the ribbon cutting and dedication ceremony performed by Mayor Archer. A week later, the expansive rotunda was filled with authors from around the country, including Yolanda Joe, Elza Dinwiddie-Boyd, Jonell Nash, Cheryl and Wade Hudson, and Dr. Wright, promoting his new book, The National Medical Association Demands Equal Opportunity.22
It had been four years since the ground was broken for the museum’s third site on Warren Avenue and Brush Street. The building, 120,000 square feet, was designed by black architect Harold Varner of Sims-Varner, Inc. He had been influenced by the buildings that he had visited in Africa. The rotunda was constructed with superbly balanced acoustics that allowed a person to whisper at the center and be heard clearly throughout the expansive room. Varner also designed the expansion of the Cobo Center, the remodeling of Martin Luther King High School, the overhead bridges that connect the Millender Center to the Renaissance Center, and the Coleman A. Young Building at the Millender Center.23 Dr. Wright explained that the museum’s core gallery “was complemented by two exhibition galleries devoted to the arts, history and technology.”24 Wright employed the historian Norman McRae and Robert O. Bland, both renowned educators, to keep the historical record accurate and up to date. McRae, who was among the city’s foremost historians, taught at Wayne State University. Bland was the vice president and dean at Lewis College of Business.
In the fall of 1997, black Detroit was dealt a triple punch of despair. First there was the death of Judge George Crockett Jr. He was being mourned when Joyce Garrett and then Coleman Young died. Crockett’s death on September 7 did not come as a shock to Detroiters. He had suffered a stroke and spent the last five days of his life in a hospice in Washington, DC. Crockett was eighty-eight when he died. Twenty days later, on September 27, Joyce Garrett made her transition at sixty-six in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Of the three notables, Garrett, who had a string of accomplishments before becoming “the first lady of Detroit,” was the least known to a national audience.
Born Joyce Finley in Detroit in 1931, she established her intellectual acumen and brilliance when she passed the Foreign Service Examination and became the first African American female Foreign Service officer. She was on a diplomatic track when she decided to return to Detroit, where she resumed her education, earning a master’s degree in political science from Wayne State University in 1966. Over the course of the two years that followed, she held several important civic offices, including assistant director of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission. By 1968, Finley, now Joyce Garrett, was a loyal companion to Mayor Young and was chosen as his aide-de-camp. Later she supported her daughter, Shahida Mausi, as she rose in the ranks of city government.
Coleman Young’s passing at seventy-nine on November 29, 1997, was as newsworthy as his tumultuous life. A huge photo of him dominated the front page of the Michigan Chronicle, where his legacy was exhaustively recounted by Patrick Keating. The combative civil servant died of respiratory failure at Sinai Hospital almost two months to the day after the departure of his companion. On December 5, live coverage of his funeral services from Greater Grace Temple was carried on all the major local television outlets as well as nationally on C-SPAN. The Rev. Charles Butler conducted the services, moderated by radio maven Martha Jean “the Queen” Steinberg, with practically every elected official of significance in the state in attendance, including Governor John Engler, Senator Carl Levin, and Mayor Dennis Archer parading to the podium. Aretha Franklin closed the services with a powerful version of “The Impossible Dream,” from the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, her voice exceeding one plateau after another as she sang of the “unreachable stars.”
At the same time that the city’s first African American mayor was being laid to rest, Wayne State University was swearing in its first black president. Dr. Irvin D. Reid came to Wayne from Montclair State University in New Jersey and placed his expertise in applied economics to work almost immediately. The first thing he did was increase the $27 million annual budget to $80 million. He oversaw the expansion of the university, especially its research capability and its spinoff businesses in the midtown sector. A black president, however, didn’t mean that the student body would undergo a similar dramatic chang
e in color. Since its inception in 1868, the school has maintained a lopsided ratio of white to black students which has always struck many residents as odd since the city became predominantly black. Even more distressing, only 10 percent of the black students admitted earn a degree within six years. One problem may be that the educational pipeline from Detroit’s public school system has not adequately prepared students for a college curriculum. Many of the black students receive remedial and tutorial assistance. Of course, there were a number of exceptions, and the Rev. Dr. Wendell Anthony was one. Long before he gained national attention in 1998 when he was arrested outside the US Supreme Court building for protesting the Court’s failure to hire African American clerks, Anthony’s activism bona fides were very impressive. Political activism began for this native of Saint Louis during his days at Central High School, which gave him a leg up on the other students at Wayne State. A black studies major, he was a campus leader who was well-grounded in the liberation movements in Africa. This was the fodder and training he needed after he left the academy, entered the ministry, and by 1993 was at the helm of the local branch of the NAACP, the organization’s largest affiliate. He was often at the forefront of marches and demonstrations, and he was just as formidable in the pulpit. Soon he had his own church with a congregation to shepherd. “For how long can the court judge diversity and equity, if in fact it lacks the diversity and equity it claims to judge,” he told a reporter during the 1998 demonstration at the Supreme Court.25