COLEMAN A. YOUNG (1918 - 1997)
Young the racist? The myth wasn't reality
by Jack Lessenberry
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12/3/97The popular way to explain the decline of Detroit -- that is, the one so ardently talked up within certain white circles and the media ... is to pin it all on me.
Hard Stuff: The Autobiography of Coleman Young, 1994
Everyone "knew" that Coleman Young was a bitter racist who hated all whites. He wanted to drive them out of Detroit, something many of them today give him credit for doing. After all, he had, everyone also "knew," told the palefaces to "hit Eight Mile Road," and said blacks needed guns to "defend" themselves against them.
You can find people, even today, at coffee shops from Clarkston to Clawson, who will swear they heard him say those things with their own ears. Coleman Young was invoked as the bogeyman countless times by white suburbanites, especially politicians.
Naturally, he, in turn, could give it right back; as he once told me, "My mission in life was not to make Brooks Patterson feel comfortable."
Yet the myth was vastly different from the man.
His closest allies in the political big leagues, men he thought of as friends, were Jimmy Carter, a product of segregated white Georgia, and Michigan Gov. William Milliken, an aristocratic Republican from Traverse City, who was first elected to a state Senate seat that, as Young aptly noted, didn't have a single black voter in its district.
"I've never had a more productive relationship with a public servant," Young later said. Milliken helped him gain entrée to Henry Ford II. Coleman Young had long had an understandable grudge against Ford Motor Co; he had been fired twice, once after being roughed up by one of Harry Bennett's goons in 1937 for being a union sympathizer.
But the mayor later was able to put that behind him enough to say, "When I gained Henry Ford II as a friend, I gained a good and worthy one"; their partnership helped complete the Renaissance Center in 1977. Bob Berg, his longtime press secretary, was so close to the mayor that he continued representing him -- gratis -- after he left office.
Nor were Coleman Young's white friendships only political.
For years, union activists Harold and Esther Shapiro were perhaps his closest personal friends; Esther served as the city's director of consumer affairs throughout his 20 years as mayor.
Margaret and Al Fishman got to know Young during Henry Wallace's 1948 Progressive Party presidential campaign. Asked if Coleman was racist, Margaret Fishman laughed. "No way!"
Indeed, after he was elected mayor, he took great delight in appointing Al Fishman a deputy police chief in charge of the department's computer and information systems. "Some of the uniformed officers started giving Al a hard time," Margaret said recently. "So Coleman went right down there and confronted his own black police chief."
"Don't fuck with my man," the mayor ordered.
"I think he was someone who fought racism his whole life," Fishman said. "If you were white and he saw you as on his side in the struggle, you were his friend."
What Young never did was mince words. "I will not cease to make noise about racism, whether anyone likes it or not." But even his most shocking remarks, which by now have become legends in their own right, look quite different in print than in legend.
What he actually said, in his first inaugural address back in 1974, was this: "To all those 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, or if they wear Superfly suits or blue windows with silver badges. Hit the road!"
Later, bewildered by the intensity of the reaction, he said, "I thought that was innocent enough; I was the new marshal telling the bad guys to get out of Dodge."
What about his other most famous quote, that about arming the brothers to defend themselves against the pink sweater crowd. Young did, indeed, say this, in explaining why he wasn't in favor of an anti-firearms ordinance which would apply to the city alone: "I'll be damned if I'm going to let them collect guns in the city of Detroit while we're surrounded by hostile suburbs and the whole rest of the state who have guns, and where you have vigilantes ... in the wilderness with automatic weapons."
Not, by any means, his finest hour. But what seldom gets remembered was what he said in the next breath, that he would happily back a statewide law outlawing handguns. "What I'd like to do in this, as in all things, is even the playing field ... and there are objections even to that!" he told me two years ago.
The truth is that Coleman Alexander Young really was a man deeply marked by racism -- but one who, as his too-little-appreciated autobiography shows, was shaped as much by the economic radicalism of the 1930s. Whether Young ever was some sort of communist in the 1930s is now purely academic. But it should be remembered that Marxists were then essentially the only political force committed to ending segregation and discrimination.
That -- and economic progress -- was always his real ideology. "I refuse to accept responsibility for racism, because I am, in fact -- as both a citizen and mayor -- its sworn enemy and a lifelong victim. I've done my damnedest to carry forward the pursuit of unity. ... I prefer to think of it as playing the equality card," he said. None of us are able to completely rise above our origins; and Coleman Young often said he was "a black man first and a Democrat second."
Yet at this time, for once, the final word on the subject should be his.
When it came to race, "I only wish my fellow public servants in the suburbs were held to the same standards."
How many could measure up -- or compare in importance to -- Coleman Young?
The day after his heart attack last month, I sat with a group of Wayne State University students, black and white, who exchanged opinions and myths about the legend.
Finally, I slyly asked one young man to name the last white mayor of Detroit.
He didn't know. Nor did anyone else in the room, black or white. What's more, not one even remembered hearing the name Roman Gribbs -- though he is still a practicing judge. But none of them is likely to ever forget Coleman Young.
Jack Lessenberry teaches journalism at Wayne State University and writes a weekly column for the Metro Times.