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PART II: TURNING DETROIT AROUND |
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Monday, 23 January 2006 08:25 |
PART II: "TURNING DETROIT AROUND"
Turning Detroit Around was the slogan Coleman Young adopted for his first two years in office, and only a Detroiter can fully appreciate the enormity of the task characterised by those three words. For by 1973 Detroit was a ruined city, a bombed-out shell of a great metropolis whlch had been progressively strlpped of its resources and then abandoned by literally hundreds of thousands of white citizens for the promise of the racially pure suburbs.
To accomodate the suburban flight, monstrous freeways were built, 65 miles of superhighways which were dug through some of the city's oldest and most vital neighborhoods in order to provide the white racists with a quick clear path in and out of the downtown business district. With the white exodus went the bulk of the city's tax base, thousands of jobs, and hundreds of small businesses, leaving Detroit with some 70 miles of abandoned storefronts. With the white exodus went the bulk of the city's tax base, thousands of jobs, and hundreds of small businesses, leaving Detroit with some 70 miles of abandoned storefronts. With the white exodus went the bulk of the city's tax base, thousands of jobs, and hundreds of small businesses, leaving Detroit with some 70 miles of abandoned storefronts.
Whole sections of the city, encompassing hundreds of square blocks, were writt (c)en off as 'bad risks' by the banks and insurance companies, which refused loans and coverage to homeowners and small business people throughout the central clty based solely on their geographical location.
The Riots of 1967 finished off what the automobile industry, the banks and the slumlords had started and furnished the fleeing whites with another compelling reason to relocate quickly. Housing and business property damaged in the Riot--the most severe in the nation's history--was left to rot indefinitely, and the boundless chaos of the aftermath of the 'disturbance' set the stage for a more subtle, yet no less devastating cataclysm: the wholesale destruction of dozens of remaining neighborhoods by an unholy conspiracy of corrupt HUD officials, white real estate profiteers, and a complacent, incompetent city administration.
Their scheme involved selllng homes, many of them in fatal disrepair, to poor Black people without the means to make the house payments each month. Since the federal government was underwriting the mortgages on these houses through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the inevitable foreclosures by the real estate speculators after three or four months of occupancy were rewarded with payment in full by the government.
The houses were then deeded to HUD, which was by the time of Coleman Young's inauguration the proud possessor of some 14,000 abandoned homes and 4000 vacant lots within the Detroit city limits.
* * * * *
The overwhelming complex of urban problems inherited by the city's first Black administration represented the culmination of a long process of deterioration and decay in Detroit which can be traced back to the beginnings of the automobile industry, early in the 20th century.
The rapid acceleration of industrialization during the first two decades of the century drew hundreds of thousands of European immigrants to the Motor City, raising the city's population from 300,000 in 1900 to a cool million in 1920, with another quarter of a million citizens already resettled in the city's expanding suburbs.
By 1950 the Detrolt area boasted a city population of 1.85 million people, plus another million suburbanites, and the decline of the city itself was well underway. Ten years later Detroit had shrunk to a million and a half residents, and the suburbs had posted a staggering 1.1 million increase, finally surpassing the city for good.
Within this polyglot populace could be counted an increaslng number of African-Americans: 150,000 by 1940, 300,000 by 1950, close to half a million by 1960, 700,000 by the mid- 70s. As the Black population increased and more and more whites fled the city proper, the racial balance began to tip to the African-American side--16.2% in 1950, 33% in 1960, 50% by 1975.
Yet only the political strength of the Black community grew in proportion to its numbers, while social and economic gains by Blacks were worse than pitiful. The Motown Record Corporation, for example, a Detroit-based, Black-owned company which left the city in 1972 to seek greater economic opportunities in the West Coast entertainment industry, is presently the nation's most successful Black business with a yearly gross of $50 million--a sum whlch represents just five days' net proceeds for General Motors, another Detroit-based company which posted $1.1 billion in profits for the second three months of 1977 to set a new corporate earnings record for these states.
Motown, however successful, is far from typical. Most Black enterprise, in Detroit and across the nation, is far less profitable, and nowhere has Black capital managed to make even the smallest dent in the structure of white American business.
Progress for Blacks within the industrial workforce has been even less hopeful, wlth African-Americans remaining in the lowest-paid unskilled positions and barred from advancement opportunities by virtue of their complexions.
Let's take some statistics at random from, say, 1963. That year, up to 60% of the workers in some Detroit-area factories were African-Americans, but only 1/2 of 1% of all skilled workers were Black. At GM, where Blacks comprised 23% of the workforce, there were but 67 skilled Blacks out of 11,125 GM craftsmen. At Chrysler, where 26% of the workforce was Black, only 24 of 7425 skilled workers, 10 of 3000 clerical workers, and zero out of 1890 engineers were Black. At Ford's, with a 40% Black labor force, only 250 of 7000 skilled workers were African-Americans.
More specifically, of tool-and-die workers l.5% were Black; of structural steel workers, 0.5%; of printing craftsmen, 0.9%; of carpenters, 0.2%; of electricians, 2.1%; of machinists and job-setters, 5.2%.
And being trained as apprentices to move up into the skilled trades were an overwhelming 68 Blacks--elght fewer than in 1950.
But those Blacks who had skilled jobs--or any jobs at all--were extremely lucky members of their community, where fully 40% of the African-American population was unemployed. This figure included 67% of all Black men in their late teens and roughly 50% of all Black men in their early 20s.
A third of the Black population of Detroit enjoyed an income of less than $3,000 a year, and 83%--or five persons out of six--earned less than the median income of whites.
Looking to the public sector, less than 5% of Detrolt fire fighters were Black, and of 455 African-American residents of Detroit who applied to join the police department in 1962, only two were finally accepted.
Of FHA loans granted to Detroiters, a hearty 1% were approved for Blacks. In the schools, only 8% of Black youths in 1963 could be said to attend "integrated" schools, and 72% of black children attended schools whlch were 90 to 100% Black.
* * * * *
I came to Detroit in 1964 as a refugee from white American society attracted to this teeming center of African-American culture. Detroit was the birthplace of the Nation of Islam and the hotbed of bebop, the place where you could hear jazz all night long and cop weed or pills whenever you wanted to.
The plight of Black Americans was known to me from the street level, as I had enjoyed the honor of spending a number of my formative years in Flint, Michigan under the direct tutelage of some of the fastest young hipsters on the set, intense young men and women who held Malcolm X and Miles Davis in equal esteem and who introduced me to the wonders of daily marijuana use as a means for dealing more creatively with the terrors of life in white America.
Regular trips to the jazz mecca of Detroit were a central component of the hip curriculum, and my private research had led me to conclude that the Motor City was definitely the place to continue my studies on a permanent basis.
Within weeks of my arrival I had found my place as a beatnik organizer and producer of poetry readings, jazz concerts, underground journals and related cultural adventures with an interracial group of students, poets, musicians, painters, film-makers, diggers, dope fiends and political activists of several descriptions.
My contacts in the urban underground provided me with one of the only regular bags of reefer in the Cultural Center district of Detroit, and I was able to support my artistic activities with the earnings from my modest marijuana business--until I was so very rudely interrupted by the plainclothes goons of the Detroit Narcotics Squad in October 1964.
I pled guilty to possession of less than an ounce of weed, paid a fine and was sentenced to two years probation in Detroit's Recorder's Court. Nine months later I picked up another marijuana beef and found myself back in court for the second tlme.
Faced with a mandatory minimum 20-year prison term for sale of half an ounce of marijuana, I was forced to cop another plea and throw myself on the mercy of the court--not a very pleasant prospect in those primitive years of modern American jurisprudence.
My attorney solicited letters to the judge from prominent citizens, educators, published poets and writers, and political figures who would come to the defense of a dope-selling beatnik poet.
Chief among the proponents of my right to remain on the streets was none other than State Senator Coleman A. Young, a prominent Democrat from Detroit and a person who knew me not from Adam. Cleaving strictly to the principle that weedheads had no business in jail, Senator Young urged Judge Gerald W. Groat to release me from the bonds of the legal system and return me to my community, where I was--in the Senator's humble opinion--making a positive contribution to the cultural life of the city.
The judge turned him down, and I was sentenced to six months in the Detroit House of Correction. When I returned home, in August 1966, the Narcotics Squad immediately assigned an undercover team to infiltrate the Artists' Workshop, my center of operations across the John C. Lodge Freeway from Wayne State University, and I was busted again in January 1967--this time for giving two joints to an undercover policewoman who had signed up for a poetry workshop I was conducting at the time.
A challenge to the constitutionality of the Michigan marijuana laws was quickly mounted, and while I fought the case in the state's appellate courts on a pre-trial basis for two and a half years, I gained great local notoriety as a popular marijuana advocate, left-wing activist, organizer of rock & roll festivals and benefits, manager of the MC-5 and media strategist for the White Panthers, an anarchist gang of LSD-crazed hippies who swore public allegiance to the Black Panther Party and the international communist revolution.
By the time my case came to trial in July 1969--on the same day two Americans landed on the moon for the first time in human history--I was so hot that my probation officer had ordered me to stop reporting to him at the Recorder's Court building. My very presence in the building, or so he told it, caused the police to go apeshit, and it was on my p.o.'s advice that I finally split town to resettle 50 miles west in Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan.
I was eventually found guilty by a Recorder's Court jury of possessing two joints and sentenced to 10 years in prison without appeal bond or possibility of parole, then dragged out of court and shipped off to Michigan's Marquette Prison, an Upper Peninsula penitentiary situated on the shores of Lake Superior, 5OO miles from Detroit.
A series of organizing activities among African-American convicts at Marquette led to my transfer to Jackson, "the world's largest walled prison," where I spent many months in administrative segregation--a polite name for what is known to prisoners throughout the world as "the hole."
Meanwhile my family, friends and political supporters were organizing a massive defense campaign in my behalf, enlisting as many public figures as they could get to endorse a left-wing marijuana maniac who persisted in making more trouble than he could handle.
Lobbying efforts in behalf of a comprehensive reform of the state's archaic marijuana statutes were undertaken as part of that campaign, and our principal advocate in the Michigan Senate was none other than Coleman A. Young, now Floor Leader of the Democratic majority and one of the major political powers in the state. Another Black Senator from the Detroit area, Basil Brown, played a leading role in the freedom effort on my behalf, and both men helped us organize state House and Senate support for my legal challenge to the weed laws, which was then inching its way toward the Michigan Supreme Court.
I was released from prison in December 1971 after John Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, Commander Cody, Phil Ochs, Archie Shepp, Allen Ginsburg, Bobby Seale and a wildly improbable collection of musicians and movement activists joined with 15,000 marijuana reform advocates in Ann Arbor's Crisler Arena to demand my freedom.
I went home to Ann Arbor, where my sprawling commune had fled in 1968 to escape the Detroit police, and spent the next two or three years operating simultaneously as a community organizer and music business entrepeneur, plotting the election of third-party radicals to the City Council, managing bands and producing the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festivals.
A severe back injury in the fall of 1973, followed by the death of my beloved father and a total emotional collapse six months later, led me to consider drastically altering what had become for me a very dangerous life-style. And the relentless quest for the next meal, which forced me to fall back on my music business skills to support my family, finally led me straight back into the Motor City to manage a new downtown nightclub.
There, in the now-defunct Shelby Hotel, I spent many happy months in the Depression years of 1974-75 reacquainting myself with my many Detroit friends and the myriad delights of life in the urban night.
In my absence, I soon discovered, the Detroit of the late 1960s, the incipient police state which had seemed eternally dedicated to total control of the streets and their African-American inhabitants, had undergone a radical change.
Coleman Young was now the mayor of Detroit, fighting mightily to implement his campaign demand that the police be absolutely responsible--and equally responsive--to the community which paid their wages.
Foremost was Coleman's insistence that the DPD be transformed into a 50-50 black-white and male-female service force with roots in the neighborhoods and its feet on the streets. The first of 50 police mini-stations were being opened, forcing officers out of their menacing squad cars and into storefront offices in the city's endless decaying business strips.
But it was more than just changing the mission and the composition of the police force that was happening in Coleman Young's Detroit. The mayor had campaigned under the general slogan of Turning Detroit Around, and it was apparent as early as his inaugural address that he intended to carry out his promise as swiftly and as thoroughly as possible.
Business and community leaders were being mobilized into task forces to deal wlth questions of economic development, unemployment, repairing the damage of the HUD housing scandals, and rebuilding the city in every way.
Coleman made a personal commitment to restore Belle Isle, the city's gorgeous island park which had been allowed to deteriorate by previous administrations because of increasing Black use, to the tune of $10 million, and he pledged to revitalize nightlife and the entertainment industry in what had been, until the 1970s, an important national center of Black performing and recording activity.
Above all the city's first Black mayor was concerned to blaze new trails in race relations. "The first problem that we must face as citizens of this great city--the first fact that we must look squarely in the eye--is that this city has too long been polarized," the Mayor declared, addressing the city for the first time since his election.
"We can no longer afford that luxury of hatred and racial division. What is good for the Black people of this city is good for the white people of this city. What is good for the rich people of this city is good for the poor people in this city. What is good for those who live in the suburbs is good for those of us who live in the central city.
It is clear that we have a community of interest. The suburbs cannot live without the city. The white population of this city cannot live while its Black people suffer discrimination and poverty.
"And so I dedicate myself, with the help of the City Council, and more basically with your help, toward beginning now to attack the economic deterioration of our city--to move forward.
There is also a problem with crime, which is not unrelated to poverty and unemployment, and so I say we must attack both of these problems vigorously at the same time.
"I issue open warning now to all dope pushers, to all rip-off artists, to all muggers: it's time to leave Detroit. Hit Eight Mile Road. And I don't give a damn if they are black or white, if they wear super fly suits or blue uniforms with silver badges. HIT THE ROAD.
"Ladles and Gentlemen," the mayor concluded his inaugural remarks, "the time for rhetoric is past. The time for working is here. The time for moving ahead is upon us. Let's move forward together."
Detroit
1978
(c) 1978, 1997, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
Continued: Part III: Moving Detroit Forward
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