by Herb Boyd
Another portent of resurgence was delivered during the Motor City Music Foundation 2000 awards ceremony, sponsored by the Detroit Metro Times, an alternative newspaper with a number of African American employees. Along with awards for nationally acclaimed artists with Motown roots, including Stevie Wonder and CeCe Winans, numerous local artists were also saluted for their achievements. Among the nominees were jazz vocalist Ursula Walker, blues singer Alberta Adams, and saxophonists George Benson and David McMurray. Twenty years was a time to celebrate, particularly at the beginning of century, and that’s what the Metro Times was doing for several weeks after a score of years as the city’s leading alternative paper. It was also a time to look back and get a bead on the future, as the paper’s former editor Larry Gabriel did in September. “We’ve been celebrating this 20th anniversary over the past month and going over many of the things that have made the Metro Times what it is,” he wrote. “All of this seems to beg the question of what the future holds. You can make a lot of predictions and most of them will be wrong. Trust me on that. But you can wonder and dream.”7
Predictions and looking to the future are always at the core of a mayor’s State of the City Address, but by the end of the year, much of what Mayor Archer hoped for to rejuvenate the flagging revenue was still stuck in the pipeline. In January 2001, Archer was enthusiastic about the prospects ahead as he began his seventh year in office. He was especially proud to announce that the homicide rate was the lowest since 1968. He was equally effusive about Comerica Park, the new home of the Detroit Tigers. His praise for African American investor Bill Brooks, who had laid plans to renovate the long dormant neo-renaissance-style David Whitney Building, was well-intended but rather myopic. Brooks’s dream, as well as the mayor’s hopes for Belle Isle and the city’s incredibly sclerotic educational system, were still dormant on the drawing board. The mayor’s rose-tinted glasses merely reflected the tangle of red tape that kept him from realizing his most cherished prospects.
If Archer needed a businessman to single out for accolades, George Hill may have been a better choice. Hill was the president of Adhesive Systems. This black-owned, Detroit-based company had for seven years produced thirty types of adhesives and sealants for Kraft Foods. Black shoppers who purchased Velveeta pasteurized prepared-cheese product and Stove Top stuffing were most likely unaware that they were helping a local black entrepreneur and his employees. Adhesive Systems has been in business since 1987 and has annual sales of approximately $15 million and a diverse forty-seven-person staff that includes chemists, engineers, and factory workers. But more than sealing Kraft packages, Hill and his company play a key role in holding the community together. “We’ve been responsible for anchoring this industrial park and not letting it go to ruin,” Hill said. “We have provided employment, tax revenues, education and training and a whole host of things to the neighborhood to stabilize it.”8
No revitalization of black Detroit has been done without the stabilizing role of the city’s churches. A solid indication of this fact occurred when the churches, led by the Rev. Jim Holley of Little Rock Baptist Church, launched an Adopt-a-School initiative, an offshoot of the Detroit Safe Streets Program, which began after a rash of schoolgirl rapes. The goal, according to Bernard Parker, the Detroit Public Schools’ deputy CEO of community responsibility, was to get all 263 schools formally adopted by one or more churches. “By doing so,” Parker told the press, “people and resources can be organized around making the school a success.” The pairing of churches with schools combined a large swath of the city’s spiritual and intellectual capital—Little Rock Baptist and Mount Zion New Covenant Baptist Church adopted Northern High School; Galilee Baptist Church adopted Osborn High; historic Second Baptist embraced Duffield Elementary, which so many of Detroit’s notables had once attended; Bethel AME locked hands with Golightly Educational Center, named after Cornelius Golightly, the esteemed educator; Hartford Memorial Baptist Church, famous for hosting appearances of such legends as Paul Robeson, was linked with Mumford High School.9 In 1985, thanks to Eddie Murphy and his role as detective Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop, in which he wears a Mumford sweater, the school received national attention. Any mention of the three Beverly Hills Cop films without citing Gil Hill, who portrayed Foley’s boss, Inspector Todd, would be a serious oversight, given Hill’s importance to the city’s history as a real-life police detective and president of the City Council.
Setting aside his badge for a while and taking a break from Hollywood, Hill sponsored a testimonial resolution for Maxine Rayford Taylor by Councilmember Kenneth K. Cockrel Jr. Taylor was being saluted for her thirty-three years as a teacher in the public school system, including stints at Jamieson, Joseph Campau, Bennett, Fannie Richards, and Maybury, and her favorite post, according to Cockrel, McMillan Dual Multicultural School. The resolution was adopted unanimously by the nine council members, and they wished Taylor a happy retirement and time to devote to her hobbies of dancing and playing the piano and flute.10 Such a measure was a daily routine for Hill, though his mind was probably preoccupied with campaign matters after earlier in the year announcing his intention to run for mayor in 2001.
Hill, like many other leaders in the city, and none more so than Mayor Archer, were concerned about another alarming increase in fatal shootings by the Detroit police. Detroit, according to reports from several local papers, had the highest number of fatal police shootings among the nation’s largest cities. This was not news to Archer, who in September announced that he would ask Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate every fatal Detroit Police Department shooting, an inquiry welcomed by Police Chief Benny Napoleon.11 Reno had already been approached about such an investigation earlier in the year when she met with Arnetta Grable regarding the killing of her son Lamar Grable and two others in 1996 by Officer Eugene Brown. Through her attorney, David Robinson, she had initiated proceedings leading to federal consent decrees. Police Chief Napoleon, following a public outcry about the number of civilians being shot by the police, ordered that the department reinvestigate Brown, who had been cleared by the Wayne County Prosecutors’ Office of any wrongdoing. Brown, during his seven-year career, had shot nine people, three of them fatally.12
In the spring of 2001, when Mayor Archer announced that after seven years in office he would not be seeking another term, the candidates for the position assembled at the starting line—Councilmember Nicholas Hood III, businessman Charles Beckham, and Bill Brooks, a former GM executive, were there before Archer voiced his intentions. Another contender was Police Chief Benny Napoleon. The local pols began to toss in a slew of other candidates, including Sharon McPhail, whom Archer had defeated in 1993; Geoffrey N. Fieger, who had been the Democratic candidate for governor in 1998; and Kwame Kilpatrick, the offspring of two political notables, one a minority leader in the State House, the first African American to hold the position. At this early stage, no mention was made of Gil Hill, who with Kilpatrick was a finalist after the September nonpartisan primary was over. In physical terms, if not financially, it was Hill’s David versus Kilpatrick’s Goliath. It was also the old man (Hill would be seventy on November 6, Election Day) against the young man, Kilpatrick, thirty-one.
“For a long time [Hill] ran far ahead in the polls. . . . But Kilpatrick . . . [grabbed] a ten-point lead,” wrote political analyst Jack Lessenberry. “Mr. Kilpatrick creamed the favorite in the primary, winning an absolute majority in the crowded field, with just over 50 percent to Hill’s anemic 34.5 percent.”13 Assessing the results of the primary, it didn’t look good for Hill, who was bulldozed by the former college football tackle. Kilpatrick won virtually every demographic group except the oldest voters. He took the majority of the absentee ballots, which Hill had believed would be his. Hill had clearly underestimated his opponent’s charisma, his oratorical skills, and the financial clout he had quietly and cleverly amassed. It was clearly going to be an uphill battle, but the veteran officer had no quit in him and promised to mount a more form
idable campaign than he had mustered in the primary.
It would be for naught.
26
KWAME TIME!
Gil Hill took to the hustings and began stumping like never before, but it was too little and much too late. Kwame Kilpatrick, bolstered by the acclaim received during his speech in Los Angeles at the Democratic National Convention the previous year and by the largess of corporate bucks, won impressively, 54 to 46 percent, according to the election results from several media outlets. Still in his thirties, Kilpatrick had no compunctions about being dubbed the Hip-Hop Mayor. The diamond stud in his ear, much in the manner of the late Prophet Jones, gave the title additional cachet.
As early as the summer of 2001, the Detroit Free Press reported that Kilpatrick, then a state representative in the previous year, had solicited a $50,000 contribution to his civic fund from the president of a homeless shelter. Later that year, he urged the Detroit–Wayne County Mental Health Board to award the director of the shelter a $22.7 million contract. The move sparked an Internal Revenue Service inquiry and possibly marked the beginning of his pay-for-play political machinations. It didn’t hurt to have the backing of Ed McNamara, the Wayne County executive, whose chief of staff was Kwame’s father, Bernard Kilpatrick. The confederacy of collusion was taking shape; the surface of Kwame Kilpatrick’s ultimate downfall had been scratched.1
At his inaugural ceremony at the Fox Theatre, Mayor Kilpatrick, with his family occupying the front-row seats, announced, “I stand before you as a son of the city of Detroit and what that represents. This position is personal to me. It’s much more than just politics. I want you to understand that.” The speech underscored a promising beginning, and the deal was sealed when the Winans singers asked the audience to join hands, as Kilpatrick and former Mayor Archer did, and sing along: “Together we stand, divided we fall. Let’s build a bridge, tear down the walls.”2
But owning up to a hip-hop lifestyle may have been detrimental to the young, flamboyant mayor. He was hardly in office before he was besieged by a flurry of rumors about wild parties at Manoogian Mansion. While none of them was confirmed, they were enough to fuel the media and public perception of a mayor less than serious about his comportment. The rumors and innuendoes reached a critical mass, and when some of the allegations were confirmed, there was no way for him to tamp down the furor or hold back the tide of incrimination.
When Kilpatrick moved into the mayor’s mansion, he couldn’t see from his window a city simmering in discontent, a gloomy, opaque future that all of his high-sounding rhetoric about a “Motor City makeover” could not brighten. “You need to come back to the people who helped raise you,” he told a graduating class of Detroit’s Renaissance High School in a speech in the summer of 2002. He stressed the “awesome responsibility” that those fortunate enough to attend college had to those who could not.3 During moments like this, the mayor seemed to be headed in the right direction, his moral compass fully functional, homed in on rebuilding the crumbling neighborhoods.
Along with the concern about Kilpatrick’s morality, the city residents should have been equally concerned about the neglect from the state’s capital. In 2002, the state of Michigan shared revenues with the city of about $333 million a year, but from that apex the number gradually began to dwindle. The dial on Detroit’s economic meter dipped precipitously, and in nearly every category, from employment to housing startups, the outlook was increasingly dreary. As white workers moved to the suburbs, along with them went a considerable percent of the city’s revenue base, a factor that would become even more critical by 2005. Some of this shortfall might have been foreseen and forestalled, but Kilpatrick and his colleagues were dealing with other pressing problems.
Mayor Kilpatrick was not the only prominent black man in the city snared by luxury and excess. In 2003, La-Van Hawkins, a native of Chicago, owned more than a hundred Pizza Hut franchises in Michigan, as well as Sweet Georgia Brown, a posh new restaurant in Greek Town. His sales numbers—$300 million—were almost as gargantuan as his nearly three-hundred-pound body. His earnings made his francises the twelfth largest black-owned business in the United States. When he was not relaxing at one of his lavish mansions or flying high in his private jet, he was tooling about town in his Bentley convertible, presenting an obvious appearance of wealth and prestige. He was the darling of Detroit’s nouveau riche and a posse of clamoring political aspirants, all hoping to get his attention and his financial backing. “I’m proof that you can do anything,” Hawkins boasted in a profile in Ebony magazine. “I’ve succeeded against all odds because I refused to be denied. . . . From rags to riches, I did it my way; from the projects to the boardroom, I did it my way.”4 It was perhaps inevitable that the mayor and the mogul would meet. That happened over a lunch at Sweet Georgia Brown. Kilpatrick said he was glad to have an entrepreneur like Hawkins “infusing new energy into our business community. . . . He is not the blue suit, blue shirt, red-tie wearing business-person from the traditional type of business community. That has inspired a totally new group of people.”5 The two men exchanged their ideas about success, then went their separate ways to decline and disappointment.
When a referendum vote reestablished an elected school board, it was not a happy development for Mayor Kilpatrick. He had his own plan to prevent a fully elected school board, which might minimize his control. This setback, however, was not enough to cause him to lose his reelection bid in 2005. In fact, he used the turmoil around the referendum as a weapon against Freman Hendrix, his challenger. He depicted him as a tool of the rich white suburbs. His campaign team aired dramatic footage in an ad reminding voters that when Hendrix was deputy mayor under Archer, he ordered the police to forcibly remove protesters, including a female senior citizen, from a meeting of the state-appointed school board takeover.6
This ad, along with sizable monetary contributions from a third-party group for Kilpatrick named The Citizens for Honest Government, was successful in reversing a lot of the negative reports alleging that Kilpatrick had charged over $200,000 on his city-issued credit card for travel, meals, and entertainment during his first thirty-three months in office. At the same time, his father’s defense refuted allegations of a raucous party at Manoogian Mansion. It was all a lie, he said, comparing it to the falsehood that the Jews were to blame for the Holocaust. He later apologized for this statement. According to Kilpatrick’s spokesman, Howard Hughey, the mayor’s expenses were part of his effort to attract business to the city, which had struggled with a steep population decline since the 1950s and the resulting erosion of the tax base.7
The run-up to the general election had Hendrix, who charged that Kilpatrick’s platform was nothing more than “smoke and mirrors,” a clear winner. The media were ready to make that announcement of his victory. Fortunately, they didn’t make the mistake that the Chicago Daily Tribune did in 1948, with headlines declaring that Thomas Dewey had defeated the incumbent president, Harry Truman. The Kilpatrick campaign was given a boost by the turnout of young voters as well as his warm words of compassion and an expression of renewed maturity at Rosa Parks’s funeral. She died October 24, 2005. One paper called his 53 to 47 percent margin of victory over Hendrix as “stunning,” but it was no surprise to Detroit Free Press columnist Desiree Cooper. “Perhaps it was the Rosa Parks factor,” she wrote. “Her funeral last week was a marathon of speeches exhorting blacks to remember the hard-won civil rights battles, especially voting rights. . . . If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the state takeover of the Detroit school board: You don’t mess with the right to vote. What happened during Tuesday’s election? The black bourgeoisie was pitted against the working poor, the darks against the lights, the intellectuals against the street fighters. It might have been a lot of things, but it wasn’t a surprise.”8
Rosa Parks had been ailing for several years, confined to a wheelchair and reportedly suffering from dementia before she passed away. More than four thousand mourners packed Greater Grace Temple
, and hundreds more stood outside the church that late October morning for Parks’s funeral, which capped a week of services in tribute to the civil rights icon, including one in the nation’s capital at the Capitol Rotunda, where a woman renowned for refusing to relinquish her seat was the first to lie in state at this hallowed space. As expected, there was chorus after chorus of “We Shall Overcome” before the church’s bishop, Charles Ellis III, who led the service, bade the great lady farewell. “Mother Parks, take your rest. You have certainly earned it.”9 The line of dignitaries filing past her casket was endless, all of them deeply moved when Aretha Franklin, as she did at Coleman Young’s funeral, filled the church with a magnificent rendition of “The Impossible Dream.”
Having laid the “mother of the civil rights movement” to rest, the city and its leaders had to get back to work, many of them carrying a renewed sense of energy and dedication to doing the right thing and ensuring the continuance of Parks’s indomitable spirit and commitment. Franklin, the diva, had to keep to her busy schedule and travel to Washington, DC, and accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush. The defeated Hendrix had to find another way to continue as a public servant. Cooper, the reporter, had to deal with a huge number of letters and e-mails from her readers. One even took umbrage at her analysis of Kilpatrick’s victory, declaring it was “simplistic.” He wrote that “Cooper suggests that Kilpatrick won because he played the race card before a poor, uneducated electorate. I’m a white philosophy professor who lives in Sherwood Forest. I, reluctantly, voted for Hendrix, but I have many educated, affluent, sensible and even white friends who voted for Kilpatrick, for reasons I understand and respect.” Furthermore, he added, “Hendrix was an uninspiring candidate . . . he was arrogant on the campaign trail, he lacked details . . . and he ultimately couldn’t match Kilpatrick’s intelligence and charisma.”10