COLEMAN A. YOUNG (1918 - 1997)
His focus was people, not race
by Desiree Cooper
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12/3/97A few racially charged comments do not make a racist. At least that's what several members of Detroit's art community -- all of them white -- thought when asked whether former Detroit Mayor Coleman A. Young was a racist.
"I don't think he was really racist personally," says Dave Roberts, curator of the Urban Park Gallery in Greektown's Trappers Alley. "But for show he projected some of that, just to level the playing field in the region. He was the mayor of the biggest city in the state, but he was the underdog."
"He wasn't going to sit down and be an Uncle Tom, I'll tell you that!" butts in painter Jerome Ferretti, a 45-year-old Downriver native. "Coleman was about class, not about race. He was for the unions, for the working man. He made sure all the small people got their fair share."
1515 Broadway's Chris Jaszczak agrees.
"Was Coleman Young racist? No. I can be emphatic about that," he says. "To say that he just didn't like the white race doesn't reflect his history or his friends. Young was less concerned about race and more concerned about people who wanted to set boundaries, lock a door or enforce customs which perpetuated segregation. That's not racist."
In fact, Jaszczak argues that it was a strategy of the white-dominated press to depict Young as a racist when the reverse was true.
"NBD and other banks are so quick to pat themselves on the back for what they're doing in Detroit now," he says, "but in the '70s and '80s they were busy turning their backs on local depositors. Coleman Young refused to applaud them for their racism. I once heard a quote that went: 'If you put a knife in my back 12 inches, don't expect me to thank you for pulling it out four.' Coleman Young wasn't racist, but he sure knew who the enemy was."
Playwright William Boyer says Young was notable because he was one of the few politicians who was vigilant about race.
"He constantly reinforced the notion that the color line is always an issue," says Boyer, who actively protested the mayor's establishment of Detroit's trash incinerator. "He kept asking, 'What is racism?' He kept it on the front burner. He could be accused of race baiting, but even that's better than erring in the other extreme."
Perhaps no other symbol is more closely associated with the racial overtones of the Young administration than the fist sculpture on Jefferson Avenue dedicated to heavyweight champion Joe Louis.
Sports Illustrated donated the monument to the Brown Bomber to the city in 1986. To everyone's amazement, the tribute turned out to be a lightning rod for debates about race.
"People said one of two things when the fist was unveiled," says Wayne State University assistant professor Richard Marback. "Some said it was disrespectful of Joe Louis, that it essentially disembodied him and reduced him to a fist.
"Others saw right away that it was a metaphor for black power; that it was a gesture of defiance and even hope."
For Marback, the latter meaning was the truer one. As an assistant professor of English, he has researched the symbolism of the fist versus the open hand in literature.
The fist has more often been associated with uncooperativeness, while the open hand symbolizes democracy, he says.
Yet in contemporary rhetoric, it's the fist that has been chosen by groups wishing to challenge the status quo, shed light on injustice and force society to be more inclusive.
"That's why the fist went along with Coleman Young-era politics," says Marback. "What Young and the fist did was say, 'We're not going to let you reduce us to your patsies. This is our assertion of power and authority to be a black city.' It has everything to do with Coleman Young."
In a 1987 address to the Detroit Strategic Planning Project's Conference on Race Relations, Young offered his views on racism:
"Some people get disturbed with me when I talk about racism. ... As a victim, I think I ought to have a degree of expertise on the matter. It's just like the patient on the operating table. The doctor has to ask you does it hurt, because he can't tell. The patient can.
"And so the person who is the victim can tell you about racism, and one of the things that a racist isn't is somebody who knows or believes themselves to be a racist. In fact, that's a pretty good start. If you believe you're not a racist, then you ought to examine things a whole lot more closely."
Desiree Cooper is the Metro Times editor-at-large.