Black Detroit

by Herb Boyd

  The center is merely continuing a tradition that began in 1955, when it was the Jewish Community Center, but with the radical demographic change in the neighborhood, a fresh approach has been applied. “We are offering the same services and outreach that the Jewish Center did years ago,” Lockett said. “It’s just with new residents. I think what we are doing could be a model for the rest of the city, particularly the working partnership with the banks.”

  28

  DHAKA IN DETROIT

  No matter how bright and promising Detroit has appeared from decade to decade, there is the inevitable dark side, a depressing stage of stagnation and apparent hopelessness. The focus in the previous chapter on the “talented tenth,” the city’s black elite, is but a glimpse of the possible that provides relief from the notion that Detroit is beyond salvation. It’s hard to ignore the misery index of a city where more than 70 percent of black children live below the poverty line. Many of them in single-parent households.

  But despite their circumstances, they are alive, which is not like so many, who are among the 15 out of 1,000 blacks in the infant-mortality statistics, a ratio almost three times that of white babies and comparable to many Third World countries.1 Obviously, poverty and the lack of nourishment and medical care are factors in low birth weight and infant mortality, and this problem is exacerbated by the decrease in funds for family planning and contraceptives.

  In several dramatic ways, Detroit compares to Dhaka, Bangladesh, where there is very little left of a once prosperous manufacturing base, where residents purchase most goods from other countries and seldom own or control the means of production. Securing loans, obtaining the often required collateral and/or credit, and family wealth are all key factors in owning one’s own business, but few aspiring black entrepreneurs in Detroit have possessed these requisites. When they have—and black businessmen and women in Detroit vary little from their counterparts in other states—four in ten of them operate in the health care, social assistance, repair, maintenance, laundry, and personal services sectors. New York City had the most black-owned businesses in 2007 with 154,929 (or 8 percent of all the nation’s black-owned businesses), followed by Chicago with 58,631 (or 3.1 percent), Houston, with 33,062 (or 1.7 percent), and Detroit with 32,490 (or 1.7 percent).2

  Black businesses were enduring their usual dismal prospects, and given that the city’s population was becoming more African American by the day, it’s little wonder that the overall forecast for the city was doom and gloom. The New Year, 2008, was hardly under way before a grim report from Crain’s indicated that nothing had changed in the last several months in Detroit. “Imagine living in a city with the country’s highest rate of violent crime and the second-highest unemployment rate.” This was just the opening salvo describing the nightmare scenario as the article went on to conclude that “the Motor City grabs the top spot on Forbes’ inaugural list of America’s Most Miserable Cities.”3 For Detroit to earn this inglorious notice, economists took the aggregate sum of several indicators, indices, and measures—each prefixed with the word misery—of 150 major metropolitan areas with a minimum population of 371,000, and Detroit came out on top, with Flint in third place. This comes as no surprise if unemployment is a chief factor, because both Detroit and Flint have for years been at the mercy of whatever happens in the automobile industry, and during this period, downturn was the direction both cities experienced. An even more disturbing omen and indication of Detroit’s future was forecast by native son Mitt Romney, who in the New York Times wrote an op-ed titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” At the time, Romney had lost the Republican presidential nomination to Senator John McCain of Arizona, and his bid for the land’s top office was in no better shape than the automobile industry, which he believed needed a turnaround, not a bailout.

  “I was born in Detroit,” Romney wrote, “the son of an auto chief executive. In 1954, my dad, George Romney, was tapped to run American Motors when its president suddenly died. The company itself was on life support—banks were threatening to deal it a death blow. The stock collapsed. I watched Dad work to turn the company around—and years later at business school, they were still talking about it. From the lessons of that turnaround, and from my own experiences, I have several prescriptions for Detroit’s automakers.” He proposed that labor agreements be aligned in pay and benefits to match those of workers at the foreign car companies, that retiree benefits be reduced, and that the management teams and sales forces be replaced. “A managed bankruptcy may be the only path to the fundamental restructuring the industry needs,” he concluded.4 This was mainly his prescription for the auto industry, though in a way, he was prescient as to what would arrive for the city in a few years. There was a young man in the other party with his own ideas about how to handle the problems Detroit was facing, and how Romney’s own words would come back to haunt him.

  That young man was Barack Obama, a one-term senator from Illinois who gained national attention in a speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004 and rocked the nation four years later when he defeated Hillary Clinton in the primaries and went on, with Joe Biden as his running mate, to win the presidential election. During Obama’s campaign appearance at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit in the summer, Katherine Brown was among the twenty thousand clamoring to see him. “I stood in a long line that stretched along the waterfront,” she told a reporter. “He was fantastic and the cheering was so loud and constant there were times when you could hardly hear what he was saying.”5

  What he said there was similar to his remarks earlier at an unscheduled stop outside an engine plant in Flint. “Flint, this is our moment,” Obama said. “This is our time to unite in common purpose, to make this century the next American century. . . . And if you’ll vote for me, if you’ll work with me, if you’ll organize with me, we will win Michigan, we will win this election, and you and I together will change the country and change the world.” And possibly change Detroit’s Third World status?

  A portion of the world was changed on November 4 when Barack Obama became the nation’s first black president. Obama won despite the early setbacks when he removed his name from the ballot after Michigan moved up its primary. His Republican adversary, John McCain, saw this as an opening, but the polls showed him the error of his ways, and he eventually conceded the state to his opponent; and Obama and Biden took Michigan by a double-digit margin, compiling a three-to-one margin in Wayne County. Some of Detroit’s old-timers compared the celebration of Obama’s victory to the ones from their youth when Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling. “I never thought I’d live to see the day a black man would be in the White House in the Oval Office and not be a servant,” said Addie Thompson, an eighty-eight-year-old woman who first voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She celebrated the moment with her family on the city’s west side. “When I heard the news I couldn’t believe it. I broke down in tears.”6

  A more official celebration occurred at the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit, where practically every political bigwig in the Democratic Party lined up for an opportunity to address the overflow crowd. “This is a great day to be a resident of Detroit,” said interim mayor Ken Cockrel Jr. “It’s a great day to be a Michigander, it’s a great day to be an American. Not only have we made history, but we have begun to chart the course for a new direction in this country.”7

  A new direction for the city, too, was probably on Cockrel’s mind that evening. Two months earlier, in September, he was given the reins of the city when Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, after pleading guilty to felony charges, resigned. His fall was another reminder of the city’s Third World circumstances. Cockrel, formerly the president of the City Council, Governor Jennifer Granholm, and even a rather contrite Kilpatrick talked about the city “moving forward,” despite the embarrassing setback. It all began with Kilpatrick’s extramarital affair with his chief of staff Christine Beatty. To keep the affair secret, the mayor fired three police officers; they sued the city. Kilpatrick then fraudulently used
more than $8 million to settle the lawsuit before it went to court. But the Detroit Free Press, through the Freedom of Information Act, was able to secure steamy text messages between the lovers from their cell phones, which contradicted their testimony under oath that no such affair existed. Beatty had already resigned when the affair became public, and Kilpatrick was hit with eight felony charges, plus two more after investigators said he interfered with the police officers in their attempts to serve a subpoena related to the text messages. “Mr. Kilpatrick’s lawyers tried unsuccessfully in recent days to negotiate plea agreements that would not involve jail time, but prosecutors were adamant. Mr. Kilpatrick will serve 120 days in county jail for the guilty pleas to two felony counts of obstruction of justice. He also pleaded no contest to one of the assault charges. The others were dismissed.”8 Kilpatrick had entered the political arena with great pizzazz and promise, but was apparently unable to set aside those youthful impetuosities, the often fatal temptations of love. When the charges first seeped out, he vehemently denied them, declaring that his accusers, including the city’s media, were imbued with a “lynch mob mentality.” Later, he said, “I take full responsibility for my actions. I wish with all my heart that we could turn back the hands of time and tell that young man to make better choices. But I can’t. Our challenge now is to put the anguish and turmoil of recent months behind us and join in a common cause to love our city, to love one another, and move forward together.”9

  Moving forward would be done without Kilpatrick, but it would involve a tonnage of sludge and criminal charges against Monica Conyers, the congressman’s wife, who assumed the helm at the City Council after Cockrel became the interim mayor. A year later, the often embattled councilwoman pled guilty to accepting a bribe in the Synagro sludge scandal. While black America was still excited about the prospects of the Obama administration, Detroit was enduring one scandal after another.

  To expunge the grime of corruption that smeared the city required a squeaky-clean personality, someone who could push the scandals to the back pages and command the front pages with panache. Dave Bing may not have been the white knight the beleaguered wished for, but at least he was not mired in controversy and had brought Detroit a certain amount of fame and prestige as a Piston and as a very successful businessman.

  In the middle of October 2008, alerted to the shenanigans at Manooghian, Bing announced that he was a candidate to become the next mayor of Detroit. Used to being at the top of the heap, Bing finished first among fifteen candidates in the nonpartisan primary. Still, there was another round before the fight was over—a runoff against Cockrel, who amassed the second highest number of votes.

  Once again Bing was the winner, rewarded with the task of completing Kilpatrick’s term, slated to end on December 31, 2009. Almost immediately upon taking office, Bing set about dealing with the city’s pressing union issues. He placed the city’s outrageous total of 51 union contracts in the crosshairs, wrote Drew Sharp in his biography of Bing, at which his subject took umbrage. “He terminated 16 of those contracts, quickly developing a reputation as a union basher. He eliminated 400 city employees off the books.”

  Later, Bing would say that these were moves he had to make because the city was stuck in such a deep economic abyss that it should have filed for bankruptcy then. Moving the city forward meant paring down the payroll and sending a number of Detroiters to the unemployment line.10 Such drastic moves could have destroyed any hopes of his winning the full-term election in November 2009, but he won handily, defeating perennial candidate Tom Barrow. Now it was his turn to take the stage at the illustrious Fox Theatre for his inauguration. Bing said, “We will no longer be defined by the failures, divisiveness, and self-serving actions of the past. We are turning the page to a new time in Detroit, focused not just on the challenges we face, but the opportunities we have to rebuild and renew our city.”11

  Mayor Bing was slowly warming to his new position when he was confronted by the cold reality of gun violence. Throughout the nation over the previous decade, from 1999 to 2009, gun violence had taken the lives of thousands of young black men and women, and hundreds of them were unarmed victims of unwarranted police violence. Few of these terrible tragedies were as heart-wrenching as the killing of seven-year-old Aiyana Jones by a police officer in May 2010. It was around midnight, and Aiyana was asleep on the couch with her grandmother nearby watching television. Neither of them had time to react to the thud at the door nor the flash-bang grenade tossed into the living room by the police at the start of the raid. Officer Joseph Weekley immediately began firing his MP5 submachine gun blindly through the window into the smoke and chaos. One of the bullets entered Aiyana’s head and exited through her neck. She was killed instantly. The SWAT team had come looking for a murder suspect who lived upstairs but left with only a dead child. The entire horrendous episode was caught on camera by a television crew working on The First 48, a true-crime program for A&E. It was hard to dispute the filmed evidence, but the police tried, even suggesting that Weekley’s gun discharged accidently after he was bumped by the grandmother.

  “There is no question about what happened because it’s in the videotape,” said Geoffrey Fieger, the attorney for the family. “It’s not an accident. It’s not a mistake. There was no altercation.” Aiyana was shot from outside on the porch. The video showed the officer throwing the stun grenade through the window and within milliseconds firing from outside the home.12 Despite the conclusive evidence, two trials ended in mistrials, and the prosecutor dismissed the remaining charge. Weekley was not punished in any way—justifiably, it was argued, because his actions were and are standard operating procedure for SWAT raids.

  Mayor Bing’s response to the tragedy was much too slow, and the media and a number of residents took him to task for this. His reaction was methodical, his remarks measured, as if choosing to err on the side of caution. “I want the facts to prove what happened,” he told a reporter. “You have a lot of people who get very emotional and I understand that. [But] you’ve got to control emotion and you can’t just jump off the deep end because a tragedy happened. And this is obviously a tragedy.”13 Where was Police Chief Warren Evans, who had up to this point done a fairly commendable job reducing crime in the city? According to one report, he was overseas while his mayor was in over his head, flummoxed and bewildered by the entire situation. Bing would be even more flustered and upset when he learned that Evans had given the producers of the show permission to film the police for their cinema verité. Nor was he aware that Evans was involved in the creation of a reality series pilot called “The Chief” for A&E. “Evans was seen sporting an assault weapon strapped around him as he made arrests.” Two months later, he was fired.14

  Although troubled by the child’s senseless death, Mayor Bing turned his attention to another pressing dilemma—the city’s public school system’s declining attendance and a $300 million annual city deficit. The public schools of Detroit were always a key concern of the mayor. Four years before, in 2005, he had invested money in the development of charter schools. That action precipitated a confrontation with the Detroit Federation of Teachers. By 2009, the problem in the public schools remained as pressing as ever, but Bing now had the expertise of Robert Bobb to help him through the educational quagmire. With more than thirty years of executive management experience helping governments, businesses, and schools find funding and operational solutions, Bobb appeared to be perfectly suited to navigate Detroit’s troubled waters. In four cities he had served as a city manager. He’d been president of the Washington, DC, Board of Education before accepting Governor Granholm’s appointment as emergency financial manager of the Detroit Public Schools (DPS). Exercising severe cost-cutting measures, Bobb reduced the deficit to $86.8 million by the summer of 2009.15 He and Bing were newsmakers of the year in 2010, and Bobb was on a roll, appearing on Meet the Press along with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who had said on one occasion that Detroit has “arguably the worst urban school
district in the country.”16

  Bobb was a strict and forceful manager, and with an almost drill-sergeant mentality, he told the school’s principals that they had a year to turn things around at the lagging schools. When they didn’t, he applied his take-no-prisoners attitude, closing fifty-nine schools, firing central office staff, and selling off idle assets in order to trim the budget deficit. He “expanded Advanced Placement offerings, more than doubled reading and math lesson time for younger students, obtained contract concessions from the teachers union, launched a $500 million school rebuilding campaign (with voter approval) and upended a culture of inertia and waste.”17

  A day or so after Aiyana was shot and killed, Bing asked Rochelle Collins, his government liaison officer, to resign, allegedly while she was on sick leave. She filed a lawsuit charging wrongful dismissal in the workplace with Bing and Karen Dumas, his chief communications officer, as the defendants. Even more seriously, she accused Bing, Governor Rick Snyder, Bobb, and Kirk Lewis, the chief mayoral adviser, of “concocting a covert scheme in February 2011 that would have put Bing unilaterally in charge of all city financial affairs.”18 The showdown between Collins and Dumas was resolved when the City Council voted 6–3 to approve a $200,000 settlement to Collins (Joann Watson, Kwame Kenyatta, and Brenda Jones voted against it).

  Soon afterward, Dumas resigned, and another potentially damaging city scandal was nipped in the bud. The always resourceful Dumas told reporter Jim McFarlin that she continues to meet with Bing to discuss various business matters. Bing’s biggest problem, she said, was that “he’s too nice.”19