Devil's Night (20 page)

“1967?” said Bill. “I was over at the Stroh's Brewery when the riot broke out. Blacks and whites were shooting each other all over the place. They say that only forty-three were killed but that's a damned lie—I counted more'n a hundred in the hallway at Receiving Hospital.”

“Fuckin' blacks, man,” someone said, and the others shook their heads. “Fuckin' Coleman Young.”

Carl, the liberal, sensed he was losing his audience. “You're from Israel, right?” he said to me. “Did you hear the one about the Jewish Santa Claus? He asks the kids for presents.” The men laughed, happy to be back on familiar ground.

“I'll tell you one thing about Detroit,” said Mayor Coogan, snipping away at his customer's neck. “I don't know about this other stuff, but it's the best damn sports town in the world. I think we can all agree on that.”

Not every politician in suburban Detroit is as circumspect as the barber-mayor of Melvindale. Few, on the other hand, are as outspoken as Brooks Patterson, who served as prosecutor of Oakland County for sixteen years before stepping down in 1988, and made a career out of Detroit-bashing.

Patterson's headquarters was the Oakland County courthouse, a
modernistic building set down in the vacant land in the northern tip of Pontiac. On the day I visited him, the halls were quiet. A dorky-looking young couple wearing his-and-hers matching dental braces walked hand in hand, holding a marriage certificate. Outside a courtroom, a white lawyer and a black defendant were in conference, the lawyer saying, “I can't promise, I can't promise, I can't promise …” while his client peered off into the distance. But there was no tension in the air, none of the hurly-burly normally associated with places where people's fates are determined. Clearly, in Brooks Patterson's domain, things were under control.

Patterson himself appeared relaxed and jocular. He was only a few months away from voluntary retirement and there was an end-of-the-semester informality about him. Nearing fifty, he was wearing a sport shirt, a boating jacket and moccasins without socks. A boyish-looking man with a round face and a dry “heh, heh, heh” kind of laugh, he had the air of shrewd efficiency normally associated with the security chief of a medium-sized corporation.

Patterson, like his nemesis, Coleman Young, is known to local journalists as “good copy.” One reporter who came to interview him found a miniature electric chair, complete with a battery-charged shock, on display. To another, who asked him if he would be defending felons in private practice, he replied that he wouldn't “unless they're members of the family.” But, despite his sense of humor, Brooks Patterson is a highly unpopular man in the city of Detroit, where he is regarded as the symbol of suburban racism.

Patterson considers the charge unfair. “I'm color-blind,” he said. “But out here we don't plea-bargain on breaking and entering cases, assault and other violent crimes, and black defendants don't like it. Oakland County is less than ten percent black but eighty five percent of the jail population is black.”

I wrote down the statistic, but the prosecutor suddenly seemed unsure. He picked up a phone and asked an assistant for the racial breakdown of the county's prisoners. “Actually, that number is
about fifty percent,” he corrected himself in a same-difference tone of voice.

It is rare for a suburban politician to talk so specifically about blacks. In the established code, they are “Detroiters,” and whites are “suburbanites.” A few years ago, when Patterson became embroiled in one of his epic battles with Coleman Young, these terms came into wide public use.

That was back in 1984, when the Detroit Tigers won the World Series. Following the final game, gangs of drunken revelers celebrated by attacking passersby and burning a car. The incident, which drew national attention, was a major embarrassment to the city, and Young blamed it on his neighbors.

“When Coleman Young talked about marauding gangs coming in from the suburbs, I checked the figures,” said Patterson. “It turned out that on that same day, thirty of the last thirty arrests in Southfield [an Oakland County city that abuts Detroit] were of Detroiters. Now, is that racial? Bullshit. The fact is, Detroiters present a serious law enforcement problem to Oakland County.”

Although he denies being a racist, Patterson began his public career as the attorney for NAG (the National Action Group), a Pontiac-based organization dedicated to fighting school busing. His high profile in that struggle won him election as prosecutor in 1972. Twice he led unsuccessful state-wide petition drives to institute capital punishment, and he established a policy of refusing to plea-bargain in cases involving serious crimes.

He also developed an appetite for political advancement. A hard-line Republican in a basically Democratic state, three times he ran for higher office—governor, senator and attorney general—and three times he lost. In each race, his base of support was conservative suburbanites, many of them former liberals, who applauded his law-and-order attacks on Detroit.

“In this county, robbery is a crime,” said Patterson. “In Detroit, it's an occupation. It's warfare in the city, it absolutely is. A baby born in Detroit has a bigger statistical chance of being killed than a
soldier in World War Two. If I was the mayor, I'd call in the National Guard.”

I mentioned that, in their defense, Detroiters often say that there is crime in the suburbs, too, but Patterson wasn't having any. “We've got a crime problem? Bullshit! We have crime, sure; there's more than a million people here. But by percentage, we're light-years ahead of Detroit when it comes to protecting the public.”

Hundreds of speeches to Kiwanis Clubs and Rotaries have given Patterson a ready command of the statistics. “In Wayne County in 1987, out of a population of two-point-two million, there were close to one thousand homicides,” he said. “Here, in Oakland County, with one-point-one million, there were between forty-five and fifty.”

The great suburban nightmare is that the violence of Detroit will spill out beyond Eight Mile Road. In the mid-eighties, Grosse Pointe, which abuts the city, tried to build a “flood-control wall” along the border, and the town of Dearborn passed an ordinance forbidding the use of its parks to nonresidents.

“The walls will be up for a long time,” he said. “Is there hatred between us and them? Okay, I don't deny it. We see ourselves as a target. In this situation you see the evidence of one man's hatred for the honkies. He's the racist. Things will quiet down when Coleman leaves.”

This is the predominant suburban feeling—that whites are the victims, not the perpetrators, of racism. People like Brooks Patterson, who was born and raised in Detroit, view themselves as innocent refugees and regard their native city with a mixture of contempt and anger. They do not accept the notion that Detroit is still the big city; to them, it is an irrelevancy.

“Coleman calls the suburbs ‘cornfields,' ” Patterson said angrily. “But in fact, in no sense are we dependent on Detroit. They are dependent on us. The truth is, Detroit has had its day. I don't give a damn about Detroit. It has no direct bearing on the quality of my life. If I never crossed Eight Mile again I wouldn't be bereft of anything.”

“What about the quality of life for Detroiters?” I wondered. Patterson looked at me as if I were simpleminded. “It's like the Indians on the reservation,” he said. “Those who can will leave Detroit. Those who can't will get blankets and food from the government men in the city.”

Brooks Patterson sees the post-Coleman era as a time of potential rapprochement between the cornfield and the battlefield. “But they've got to see that crime is the bottom line,” said the prosecutor of Oakland County. “They have to kick ass and take names. Without getting crime under control you have no solution. All the city's problems have their origin in a lack of safety.”

“And until they do?”

Patterson smiled bleakly and rubbed his hands together. “Until they do, you move to the suburbs and defend yourself,” he said.

Moving to the suburbs isn't so simple though, even for blacks who want to. Open housing statutes make it legally impossible to select your neighbors and make sure they stay selected, but there are ways. Detroit's suburbs did not get to be the most segregated in the country by accident.

A generation ago, residential separation was simpler. When I was growing up in Detroit, Grosse Pointe had a “point system” to keep out undesirables. Prospective buyers were rated by skin color, accent, religion and other criteria, including a “typically American way of life.” Under the system, blacks, Mexicans and Orientals were automatically given a failing grade, as were virtually all Jews and southern Europeans.

In Dearborn, the seat of the Ford empire, racism was less scientific, but equally virulent. Mayor Orville Hubbard, a vocal segregationist, was kept in office for more than thirty years by an admiring populace composed of ethnic Italians, Poles and southern whites, who subscribed to his antiblack attitude. “I just don't believe in integration,” he said in 1967. “When that happens, along comes socializing with the whites, intermarriage and then mongrelization.”

This sort of blatant race-baiting has all but disappeared from the public discourse of metropolitan Detroit. The fact is, civil rights legislation and black political activism have chipped away at many of the institutionalized forms of overt racism. In the summer of 1988, for example, Dearborn was forced to accept its first black police recruit. A smattering of blacks now live there and in Detroit's other working-class suburbs. Even Grosse Pointe has a handful of wealthy black residents.

The main obstacles to integration are economic and social. Realtors say that there is no place in the Detroit area today where a black can't buy a home, but the cost is often prohibitive. The most modest white neighborhoods in the suburbs are more than twice as expensive as comparable areas in the city—precisely because they are white. And those blacks who can afford to move often feel unwelcome.

Nowhere is this truer than in Warren, a small city just to the north of Detroit, inhabited largely by Poles and Italians. Twenty years ago, a mixed couple tried to move in, and police had to be called to protect them from outraged mobs. A few years later, the city fathers turned down badly needed HUD money because it meant building integrated housing. The only important black institution there is the Detroit Memorial Park Cemetery, the Metro area's largest black burial grounds, and most Warrenites want to keep it that way.

“The attitude isn't as much racist as one of fear,” said Richard Sabaugh, a county commissioner and public relations executive who as a Warren city councilman helped lead the HUD fight. “People don't see every black as bad. But the image of Detroit is of a decaying, crime-ridden city headed by a mayor who makes racist remarks. We view the values of people in Detroit as completely foreign. To us it's like a foreign country and culture. The language is different and the way people think there is different. We just want to live in peace. And we feel that anybody coming from Detroit is going to cause problems.”

Sabaugh, who ran unopposed in his last contest, faithfully mirrors the views of many of his constituents. “It's all one complex—blacks,
Coleman Young, crime, drugs, Detroit. People feel they've been driven out once, and it could occur again.”

Considering the conditions in the city, I wondered if anyone felt compassion for its residents. Sabaugh seemed amazed at the notion.

“Any sentiment to help Detroiters? Not at all. I've never heard that. If you ever asked to raise taxes to help Detroit, it would go down fifteen to one. Guilt to help people who won't help themselves? That's a thought that's not even tolerated. If they saw a young kid in a destitute situation, there might be some compassion. But otherwise, no. There is no feeling of pity for Detroit in the suburbs. Maybe the bottom line is they've given up on Detroit. You want to hear what people think, the best place is the senior citizen picnic. Most of those people used to live in the city. Ask them how they feel about Detroit,” Sabaugh suggested.

The Warren perspective was on display at the annual outing, held in a wood pavilion in one of the city's verdant parks. The seniors were bland, mild-eyed veterans of the auto factories and their equally bland wives. The men wore polyester sportsclothes, the ladies sported Lurleen Wallace bouffants. They played cards at long wooden tables, or lined up for free eye examinations and blood pressure checks at booths along the sides. Mayor Ronald Bonkowski moved among the old people shaking hands and exchanging family gossip. Among the thousand or so picnickers, there wasn't a single black.

At a table in the center of the room, two old men, who turned out to be brothers, sat in stoic silence while their wives chatted happily. They were glad to divert themselves by talking about their old hometown.

“It's a war zone across Eight Mile rode,” said one, a grizzled former toolmaker named Steve. “They should put up a big wall, like in Berlin. I'm afraid to go back there—it's like going into some Russian-held city. You don't know if you're coming back alive.” The women, who had fallen silent, nodded in agreement, but Joseph, Steve's brother, shook his head.

“I'm an old union man,” he said, “and one thing I learned is that you have to get along with blacks. It's worse to be a bigot than a black. It's against the law to be a bigot, and it's not against the law to be black. I think we're better off in this country because we got blacks, Chinese, Japanese …”

Steve cut him off impatiently. “What's wrong with the colored? I'll tell you what's wrong. No one ever taught them how to live. They destroy their own houses. They should live in a tent, like a Boy Scout, until they learn to live in a house. They can't get it into their head that a house should last more than five years.”