Posted on 04/08/2002 6:30:18 PM PDT by gohabsgo
Having watched Detroit self-destruct, I reflected this weekend about how it happened, making sure to retain positive memories, while being concise in my summary. In the spring of 1966, I was eight years old, attending Anthony Wayne Elementary, a public school with a 90% white and 10% black population. Detroit couldn´t have been a better place to be for a kid. The Motor City and the Big 3 (GM, Ford and Chrysler) were still on a roll, but there were warning signs on the horizon.
AM radio station CKLW belted out the Supremes, the Monkees, and the Beatles. We could walk two miles to school safely, piles of leaves were burned curbside in autumn, and everyone knew everyone else in the neighborhood. Devil´s Night (the night before Halloween), involved knocking over alley garbage cans and tossing toilet paper over neighbors trees. Now granted an eight year old kid is largely ignorant, but we were starting to overhear an increasingly prevalent parental observation that "things were going to hell."
Before my reluctant slide into class warfare, I had the privilege of trusted, color-blind companionship with two black classmates, Karen Brown and Melvin Traylor. Karen was the first girl I ever had a crush on. Straight A´s, a meticulous dresser, a unique personality with her horn-rimmed glasses, enthusiasm, and love for baseball. I could care less that Karen was black, she was a neat person, and that´s all that mattered. Melvin was one of the guys we´d tumble around with at lunch break. Lunch consisted of eating as quickly as possible, then rolling up a milk carton to be tossed in the middle of the field, where 20 boys would then battle over who could pick up the milk carton and stay on their feet long enough to be gang tackled by everyone else.
Melvin was bigger than the rest of us white boys, but we looked up to him because he laughed so hard when we tried to tackle him. I can sincerely say that never once did race affect my relationship with Karen and Melvin. All of us competed with each other to learn multiplication tables, to excel in spelling, reading, and penmanship. We helped each other, there were no socially invented obstacles. Brotherhood, not civil rights, was how teachers described our ethnic differences. And our grades in Citizenship were of utmost importance to our parents.
Our gym teacher was Mr. Grant, a tough, no-nonsense black man who when he caught us with forbidden gum balls would make us empty our pockets, crush each gum ball with our heels, then throw them in the wastebasket. He was fair, respected, and required that we play by the rules; no exceptions, no favorites. I liked Mr. Grant a lot and wanted to be like him, cut and athletic. He may or may not have known that when the gym was empty, we´d come back and take the prized gum balls out of the wastebasket.
In 1966, Look Magazine named Detroit an "All American City." The positive national attribution was short-lived. On July 23, 1967, police raided a blind pig at 12th St. and Clairmount, for dispensing liquor after 2:00 a.m. 82 were arrested. Then someone threw a brick through the back window of a squad car, and crowds gathered. The episode set off riots that eventually would claim 43 lives. Social commentators called the chaos and mayhem "race riots." But according to the Detroit Almanac (Detroit Free Press, 2001): "A deep polarization between races grew out of that riot, even though it was not a race riot. In fact, the first person killed was a white looter, Walter Grzanka, 45."
For us kids it was pretty cool to see National Guard jeeps cruising main roads headed downtown. But on the day we saw an Army tank, things weren´t funny anymore. There were curfews, distrust, and there was black, and there was white. Apartheid had arrived in Detroit. The near monopoly Detroit held in the automobile industry was changing too. Unions, foreign competition, and racial divisions on the assembly line, all impacted the decline in product quality.
The media wove a controlled and sanitized translation of reality, and any discussion that departed from this version was suicidal. We didn´t need to look further than the backyard for the consequences of opinions that deviated from orthodoxy. In September 67´, Michigan Governor George W. Romney, a leading contender for the 68´ Republican presidential nomination, ended his political career by saying he´d been "brainwashed" by American generals in Vietnam.
Unhappiness and gloom enveloped the city, almost overnight. Having a white perspective about the eroding social dynamic became heresy. My parents had had enough. It was time to get out, and in retrospect, the move five miles to Grosse Pointe would forever change our lives. Now, some 32 years later, I wonder: what happened to this once great city? And why, while the economic and social catastrophe unfolded in the 70´s, was nobody permitted to talk about it. It´s as if everyone knew about a loved one being diagnosed with cancer, but nobody was authorized to reflect on the patient´s diagnosis for fear of the truth.
Unlike Chicago, Boston, and New York, all certainly with their own unique racial challenges, no city has been so completely obliterated and divided along racial lines as Detroit. So the question is, did this have to happen the way it did? And did exploitation and exacerbation of mild racial divisions into a full scale separation serve anyone other than the politicians who have turned victimhood into an industry? The question is valid. And the one political figure who gained the most from this metropolitan nightmare was Coleman Young, who served as Detroit Mayor from 1974-1993.
What Young taught me, my parents, and my friends is that we were all in the class of people christened "racists in the suburbs." It is still disheartening to comprehend the magnitude and reckless divisiveness that statement caused the majority of whites who lived and worked in Detroit. The riots, according to Young were not riots, but "rebellion."
Author Tamar Jacoby said in the book Someone Else´s House: America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration (1998), "Detroit was governed by a black demagogue from the moment Coleman Young was elected Mayor. The damage to integration was biracial in nature, for Young, in his campaign to destroy Detroit in the name of saving it for black people, had plenty of help from myopic whites." Automobile executives were, Jacoby writes, willing to fork over millions "in thinly disguised riot insurance." The contemporary parallel to Jesse Jackson´s shake-down tactics is numbing.
According to Jacoby, the "most irresponsible white leader in Detroit — and perhaps in the whole country — was a relatively obscure district court judge named Stephen Roth. Roth was responsible for the decision to order busing between inner-city Detroit and the surrounding suburbs. His ambitious plan would touch on the lives of 780,000 children living in 53 suburbs. Many would be bused for as much as an hour and a half each day. "The most intimate personal routines seemed to be hanging on one man's whimsy," Jacoby writes. With Coleman Young doing everything in his power to encourage whites to leave Detroit, and with Roth's decision forcing them to move to the outermost suburbs, it was not long before Detroit became one of the blackest cities in the United States — and its suburbs among the whitest.
And, what does this once great city have to show for it´s failed experiment in forced integration? It appears that disintegration is the clear winner. Today if a white man speaks his mind about meriting one´s rewards, it constitutes "hate," and when a black man does the same thing, he´s an "Uncle Tom." Young himself argued that only white people can be racist. It was a confusing time for everyone in the city, and places previously safe became what police called "no-man´s land." And it all happened so fast.
I sometimes wonder what happened to Karen Brown, Melvin Traylor and Mr. Grant, my friends; people dislodged from my life when the first jeeps and tanks patrolled Detroit on that hot summer night in 1967. Perhaps we´re just browsing though time, so it´s important we choose the things we´re proud of. But it is frustrating to know that these relationships based on character, honesty and mutual respect are somehow now diminished by the diabolical work of self-professed civil rights "activists" who see only skin color. If I were to ever meet Karen, Melvin or Mr. Grant again, I´d treat them the same way they treated me in 1966. And that´s the truth.
Out of curiosity, I looked up Anthony Wayne Elementary School on the web. 2000: Grade 4, percentage of students at grade level: Reading 35%, Math 36%, Science 35%. The majority of kids are failing! In 1967, it was rare that anyone failed to be scholastically prepared to advance. It wasn´t perfect, but teachers were focused on academic excellence, unlike today where the educational environment centers on self esteem and a simplified curricula of lowered expectations. I´m convinced the division isn't between black and white, or even rich and poor. The division is between the prepared and unprepared, the educated and uneducated, those who possess a positive attitude and those who do not. The next generation of kids will be angry if they are unprepared to compete.
It´s funny how much closer kids come to defining equality, not of being uniform and conformist, but of treating each other righteously, as trusted friends. At the same time, isn´t it ironic how much closer an honored "civil rights activist" like Coleman Young came to creating the "separate but equal" atmosphere he purported to abhor. Perhaps it was his own perverse form of revenge, having unfairly been denied scholarships because of his race, and having been fired from Ford Motor for union organizing, that caused his intense bitterness.
As kids, we elementary lads were inseparable, then we were separated. We were individuals, then became unwitting members of groups. Young´s legacy is that he redefined integrity and called it integration, while seizing vast political power, all in the name of "progress." Maybe that was his real objective all along, we were just were too naive and innocent to see it coming.
Sanders
And, you (ex?)Detroiter's, I don't want to diminish your fond memories of your birthplace ... but, having grown up just down the road I feel compelled to share my own perspective.
I grew up in Toledo, and we felt in many ways like a Detroit suburb ... my Dad named me after two Detroit Tigers, we rooted for the Lions, I had cousins in Detroit, etc.
But I have always felt that Detroit (for whatever reasons) was always one of America's meaner cities. One of my earliest memories was of a Saturday in July, 1949. I was a member of a kid baseball team and we had a coach whose best quality was his ability to line up "road games" for us. We were only 12-13 years old so we got a tremendous kick out of "traveling" all over northwest Ohio and S.E. Michigan. We had a full agenda planned for that day's trip. A bus was chartered and we boarded it fairly early morning, planning to play our scheduled game about mid-morning and then proceed over to Briggs Stadium to watch our beloved Tigers that afternoon.
As we rolled into town that morning our young jaws dropped open and we began to buzz about the stores we were passing, all covered over with movable iron grating. We "small city" boys had never seen anything like it. But we soon forgot it and proceeded to Belle Isle to play our game and then onto the highlight of our day ... a real big league ballgame.
We had gotten our butts kicked real good in the morning (the coach had inadvertently scheduled a game with a top-flight American Legion team (average age 16-17) and then, to add to our misery, our Tigers got beat almost as bad as we did.
Then came the real crusher. We got back to the bus only to discover that it had been broken into and all our equipment stolen.
The riots were scary for us, too. Sporadic looting broke out (the participants rumored to be folks who had motored down from the north). But, because the rioters were few and the reaction from local police was swift, it didn't amount to much.
But golly, you're right, Coleman showed us all what a REAL mean city can be like. About thirty years later I made another trip to Detroit, this time to buy a used computer room air conditioning system. I made arrangements with the broker to meet his salesman on a downtown/eastside corner at a gas station, from there to proceed to a warehouse. Once more, my entrance into town was accompanied by a gaping jaw and bugged eyes as I passed through block after block of boarded-up, crumbling buildings separated only by the occasional liquor store with its' cadre of men surrounding the doors with their bag-covered bottles (at 9:30 A.M.).
When I got to the appointed corner I discovered that the gas station was just a pile of Coleman's "urban renewal?" rubble. So, I sat there for about fifteen minutes cursing the salesman under my breath. This being before the advent of cell phones, I finally screwed up my courage and parted my way through the bunch of Coleman voters surrounding the door to the block's liquor store. I went in and, believe it or not, found myself in the first store interior entirely separating customer from clerk by bullet proof glass that I had ever seen. I asked the man on the other side of the glass if there was a phone. He said "yes, but it's in here!". Where can I call from?, I said. "Well, there was on that pole outside but our rambunctious customers tore it off a while back ... you shouldn't be in this neighborhood, anyhow, he said, go down that way about six blocks, turn left and go six more and you'll find a payphone.
"Thanks", I said, and I scooted. I called the salesman, got the address of the warehouse, and met him there. He was waiting outside a sealed up warehouse, and as I walked up he rang a large industrial strength bell. A few moments later a man peeked out through a peephole and then opened the door .... drawn gun in his hand.
That was not the last piece of equipment I bought from that broker ... but is was my last "inspection trip" to the motor city.
"Remember when you were kid, well part of you still is. And that's why we drink Faygo!"
I don't know who/what this is.
How about White Castle hamburgers? Got those on Grand River somewhere......
No...no fraud there.
The unemployment rates that are considered normal today are almost double what used to be considered normal in pre-1965 America. It really used to be that a young man with nothing but a high school diploma could actually get a job that would support a family. The statistics actually show that people in a wide range of job categories were better compensated back then. The minimum wage today is lower after adjusting for inflatin than it was in 1965. Larger numbers of Americans every year now can't afford medical insurance. The government last year uni-laterally and without public debate cut by 5% the payments to doctors for all medical procedures through medicaire. Our president's recent commission says that in 2016 we're going to have to cut social security payments to low income elderly and yet nobody is trying to make changes to avoid this. In many ways our country is in serious decline.
This decline is to a large extent self-imposed. We have many regulations now that mean destruction of good industries. Many of the regulations make no sense and give no benefit to the environment, there are many examples of this. We know that the runaway government growth is bad for our nation's economic health and yet even under a Republican administration we still keep doing it and there is no real debate to try to turn things around.
LOL. No doubt. These posts are a nostalgia trip. I went to 1 Red Wings game(Olympia)it seemed everyone was drunk. There was a guy swinging a Curious George stuffed monkey from the upper tier and some other idiot grabbed it and tore it to pieces. Next thing I remember is fights everywhere. Same with opening day at Tiger Stadium...always an interesting experience(breast's and brawl's).
Don't forget Bob Allison's(?)"ask your neighbor"(thought he'd be in a home by now, but still broadcasting), Jerry Booth's "Fun House"(Was this a local show?), Top Hat's, Layfette(sp?) Coney Island, A&W mama\pappa burgers, Little Caesar's pizza(the original, not the newer frozen pizza type), Dino's Pizza(Warren), Eastland shopping mall(before being enclosed), Twin Pines milk.
As far as Coleman Young...his legacy is as corrupt as BillyC's....can you say Krugerands?
“Devil’s Night: And other True Tales of Detroit” by Ze’Ev Chafets
Here’s what Publisher’s Weekly had to say in its review:
Written by a native son of ``Murder Capital, U.S.A.,'' who, like the majority of white Detroiters, high-tailed it out of town after the 1967 race riot (in Chafets's case, to Israel), this tour of ``the first major Third World city'' in America is an enormously unsettling read and a tragically accurate picture of a dying metropolis. Through personal observation and interviews with local citizens and officials, Chafets ( Members of the Tribe ) captures the social and emotional hopelessness that has taken hold in the Motor City, best evidenced by ``Devil's Night''--an unofficial, regional holiday (on the night before Halloween) that has evolved from an evening of childish pranks (i.e. soaping windows) into a psychotic festival of burning down houses. Equally unnerving is the author's penchant for sweeping generalizations (``the redneck suburbs'') and his tendancy to shy away from tougher issues such as the root causes of the city's problems. Granted an extremely rare interview with Detroit's controversial mayor, Coleman Young, Chafets fails to ask hard-hitting questions, leaving this work fairly sensationalistic.
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