Coleman A. Young, the most legendary and controversial mayor in Detroit’s history, has now been out of office a quarter of a century, and dead longer than the twenty years he was in power. That seems impossible to those of us who remember him.
How could anyone forget his legendary battles with everyone from columnists to Oakland County’s L. Brooks Patterson? Who could forget his addressing reporters from Hawaii with a cheerful, “Aloha, motherfuckers” back when that word was much more shocking than now?
Coleman battling to get the Joe Louis Arena and the People Mover built; swearing at Brooks Patterson and his odd-couple close friendship with Republican Gov. Bill Milliken.
Coleman here, there, and everywhere. They are still arguing about him in assisted living centers in the suburbs where many see him as the man who destroyed Detroit. But for many older people in Detroit, when they say “the mayor,” they mean only one man, and it isn’t Mike Duggan.
They mean the one who made them proud to be Detroiters, who changed a nearly all-white police force into an integrated one and stopped it from terrorizing them.
Last night I gave a speech about Coleman Young’s first terms in office at Macomb Community College in Clinton Township. I wondered, frankly, how many people would come.
I needn’t have worried. The auditorium was full of mainly older, thoughtful people. When I asked how many had been born in Detroit, most raised their hands. When I asked how many lived there now, it was only a tiny smattering, which is what I had expected.
They, and maybe their parents, were part of the more than a million people who fled Detroit as it became first a city with a significant African-American minority, then a majority black city, then a virtually all black one.
There were more than a million and a half white folks living in Detroit in 1950. There were barely 55,000 left 60 years later, as the city teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. There are still many who blame Coleman Young.
Older white people will swear to you that they heard the new black mayor tell all the whites to leave, and then he and his pals ran their once-beautiful city into the ground, bankrupting it.
But I was there to tell them that in fact, the truth was very different. Coleman Young did have a chip on his shoulder, the legacy of years of persecution and blacklisting as an African-American and a leftist.
He had a sometimes irrational hatred of the FBI. But his goal was always a fully integrated Detroit. The city he became mayor of was almost exactly half black and half white and he wanted to keep it that way.
That, sadly, is not the way it turned out. Whites left, although the mass exodus started long before anyone had heard of Coleman Young.
But while he worked for equality, most of his energy as mayor was spent trying to lure jobs or keep jobs in Detroit. That’s why the Joe Louis Arena and the Poletown plant were built. His agenda was the redevelopment of Detroit.
Largely, he failed, because that would have taken the sort of regional cooperation we are just seeing now. But it should be remembered that he tried, and the city might have been worse off without his efforts.
When an independent team looked at the books a few years ago, they found he had been the most financially responsible of any mayor since 1950.
Coleman Young once 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.”
I think it’s time we reassessed his legacy. I do know he deserves to be remembered.
