I didn’t know Mayor Coleman Young very well, though I had a couple fascinating interviews with him after he left office. After one of them, he called me and in the course of our discussion, was trying to think of someone. “Who is that blankety-blank you have out there in Oakland County?” he asked. I couldn’t resist saying, “We’ve got a lot of them, sir.”
He laughed. “No, I mean that Chief Executive blankety-blank.”
“Brooks Patterson?” I said. “Yeah, that’s the you-know what,” the mayor answered.
By that time, Dennis Archer was mayor, but I found it impossible to think of Coleman Young as anything other than “the mayor.”
Coleman Alexander Young would have been 100 years old this year. Forty-five years ago, when Barack Obama was a skinny 12-year-old in Indonesia, Young was elected Detroit’s first black mayor. There were, and are, a lot of myths about him, the biggest of which was that he was a black racist. He had his faults and his biases, but he was as close to a white Jewish couple, Esther and Harold Shapiro, as he was to anyone.
Young appointed another white man who was a friend of both mine and his to an executive position in a city department, and later heard through the grapevine that a black supervisor was giving him grief. Coleman showed up one day, stuck his finger in the tormentor’s stomach, and said a version of “Stop messing with my man.”
The messing stopped, all right. Coleman Young was scarred by the legacy of racism so pervasive and toxic it is hard to imagine now, and was persecuted by the FBI for years and hounded out of jobs because of his left-wing politics. That left emotional scars on him – how could it not? I think he later had a hard time recognizing that the FBI sometimes did have a legitimate and useful role, as when they investigated his corrupt police chief, William Hart.
But Coleman Young’s goal was not an all-black Detroit, but one where blacks and whites would be on an equal footing. When he took office, the Detroit Police Department was 90 percent white and rife with murderous racism. His goal was to have it split 50-50 racially, and he eventually achieved that, though it is about two-thirds black today.
If you want to understand the world Coleman Young came from, read two books: Thomas Sugrue’s The Origin of the Urban Crisis, about what happened to Detroit and the racism blacks faced, and Coleman’s own autobiography, Hard Stuff.
When you think of what he endured, the wonder is that he didn’t hate all whites. What you need to know about the mayor is that he was brilliant. He could talk jive with the guys in the barbershop, and sound like a banker when he was with the bankers.
He probably stayed one term too long, and might have been willing to turn things over to a man like Ken Cockrel. But he wasn’t going to give the city up to Tom Barrow.
In his autobiography, written with Lonnie Wheeler late in life, Young said, “I suppose I’d like to be remembered as the mayor who served in a period of ongoing crisis and took some important steps to keep the city together, but left office with his work incomplete.”
That description isn’t nearly complete. But I think it’s fair.
