Devil's Night (30 page)

The loser in the early stages of Conyers's campaign was Tom Barrow. A poll taken a few days after the congressman announced his candidacy showed him fourteen points ahead of Barrow, and within shouting distance of Young. Conyers's smooth, elegant style and Washington credentials were cutting into the black middle-class support that Barrow needed to finish in the running. A Young-Conyers face-off appeared to be a certainty.

But then, Conyers's campaign began to unravel. An aide, Sam Riddle, resigned, claiming that people around the congressman were using drugs. Conyers himself refused on principle to take a drug test, stirring up inevitable speculation. When he finally bowed to public pressure and took the test, he came up “clean as the Board of Health,” but the affair made him look indecisive and a bit suspicious.

There were other problems. Conyers, a bachelor, became the focus of a nasty whispering campaign about his personal life. There were also snide comments about his less than distinguished legislative record. “The only thing John did this term was get a resolution creating National Tap Dance Day,” a Young supporter said.

Conyers told reporters that Jesse Jackson was coming to the city
to campaign for him, but Jackson never made it, and waited until three days before the primary to release a letter endorsing him. He began missing meetings, or showing up hours late, and it became apparent that he couldn't even run his own schedule. John Conyers might once have been a heavyweight, but after twenty-five years of running almost unopposed in a safe district, he was in no shape for a championship fight. On primary night, Tom Barrow held his white vote and got enough black support to beat Conyers, 24 percent to 17 percent. Henderson and Costa, the Maltese chameleon, each got about 4 percent. Coleman A. Young came in first with just over half the votes.

Five days after the primary, the
Free Press
published a poll on the issues that most interested voters. It showed their most pressing concerns to be crime (21 percent); drugs (16 percent); conditions in the neighborhoods (16 percent); and schools (14 percent). The same survey revealed that, if the election were held the next day, 45 percent would vote for Young and 36 percent for Barrow; 19 percent were undecided. The
Free Press
concluded that the poll “lends credence to the notion that Young may have slipped to his most vulnerable point in four terms as mayor.”

Barrow, adrenaline pumping from his primary showing, was encouraged by the numbers. He intended to campaign on two basic issues—quality of life and competent management—and to charge the mayor with responsibility for the disastrous shape of the city after sixteen years of inept government.

The Barrow approach elicited support where he least needed it—in the white community. A week after the primary, Chuck Moss, a columnist for the conservative
Detroit News
, compared the Young era with the pre-
glasnost
U.S.S.R., and heralded Barrow as an example of the new generation of black leaders that would bring about a change:

Moss saw Barrow—and Barrow saw himself—as one of the new, savvy brokers, who could reach out to white people, talk their language and aspire to mainstream American values. “… we as black people are going to have to stop blaming and pointing the finger at the white folks,” Barrow said in a
News
interview. “We are running the police department, the fire department … We have a black City Council, a black mayor, a black school board, a black superintendent. But look at our quality of life. We are not demanding from them what we would demand from a white person doing the same job.…”

Barrow was doing something daring: He was running in the black polis as an American politician who happened to be black. He was a liberal yuppie, a product, not of the civil rights movement or the unions, but of higher education, affirmative action and his own hard work. It was difficult to imagine him unemployed, “driving a little taxi, handling a little beef,” as Young had; harder still to picture him defiantly facing down the suburbs. Cooperation and accountability were his issues; he was offering the city American-style good government.

Young had no intention of going along. This was Detroit, not America, and in the black polis, all politics are ultimately about race. The mayor did not object to competence (a good case could be made that he is a far better manager than Barrow), but it was beside the
point. To him, the issue was, as always, protecting Detroit's black integrity and independence from the suburbs.

In previous campaigns, the mayor had received unwitting help in this strategy from his angry neighbors on the other side of Eight Mile Road. But by 1989, the white abandonment of Detroit—emotional as well as physical—was so complete that the suburbanites barely noticed that an election was taking place. Young's favorite nemesis, Brooks Patterson, was practicing law and keeping quiet. The other Coleman-bashers held their peace. There was an eerie silence from across the border.

The mayor had to create his own targets, and he chose two: Tom Barrow himself and the news media. He portrayed his opponent as a stalking horse for suburban interests, and cast the press, especially the two daily newspapers, as Trojan horses within the gates of the city.

Young made a policy of not mentioning his opponent by name, but the accusation against Barrow was plain enough. During an interview with the editorial board of the
Detroit News
, he called the challenger a fifth columnist.

Q: You have sided with those of your supporters who have charged your opponent, Tom Barrow, as representing the interests of white suburbanites who want to reclaim control of the city …

A: You are putting words in my mouth now, but okay.”

Q: But you did not refute …

A: It's up to me to refute it? I think that the words speak for themselves and the numbers speak for themselves.

The numbers that Young refered to were dollars—52 percent of the $211,000 that Barrow had raised for his primary came from suburban donors or from other, presumably white, outsiders. This was meant to constitute proof that the challenger was actually a tool of the hostile foreign power beyond Eight Mile Road.

Coming from Young, this was a bold accusation. The mayor went into the campaign with a multi-million dollar war chest, and he
kept raising money up to election day. Some of these funds came from celebrity admirers such as the Four Tops, who gave him $300 in 1987 ($75 per Top), but most was donated by less disinterested sources. In 1988, for example, 22 percent was given by city employees, such as Police Chief Hart ($1,200), who did the right thing; and 37 percent more came from people or companies who had done business with the city in the previous three years.

Interestingly, almost 45 percent of the mayor's cash flowed in from out of town, most of it from the suburbs. This irony did not escape the
News
editorial board.

Q: The fact is, you have accepted five times as much money [as Barrow] from people who live outside the city.

A: That's because I have raised five times as much money.

Q: Does that suggest that you also have …

A: It means I'm five times as effective, that's what it suggests.

Young had no ready explanation for why so many hostile white suburbanites gave him money. Cynics said that it might have something to do with the fact that many of them did business with the city, but June Roselle, the mayor's chief fund-raiser, had a different theory. “People know that the mayor enjoys getting contributions,” she told me one night at a donor's affair. “And they like to make him happy.”

During Young's session at the
News
, he exchanged heated words with a young black reporter, Yolanda Woodlee, who, the mayor thought, was questioning him too aggressively about a report that his ally, Councilman Nicholas Hood, had been guilty of financial improprieties. “I know what you're trying to do,” snapped Young. He turned angrily to Woodlee's boss, editor-in-chief Robert Giles. “You ought to give her a raise,” he said with heavy sarcasm.

A few days later, in an interview with the black-owned
Michigan Chronicle
, the mayor publicly labeled Woodlee an Aunt Jemimah, the female equivalent of an Uncle Tom. His implication was clear: the reporter had sold out to her white, anti-Detroit bosses. The slur,
which hurt Woodlee deeply, wasn't personal, however; it was simply part of the broad Young strategy to paint the press as a subversive enemy of the black polis.

The antimedia theme emerged early in the campaign. Before the primary, the Black Slate, political arm of the Shrine of the Black Madonna, published a warning to black voters: “The powerful white news media is [
sic
] fighting to reestablish white control of Detroit. Only the reelection of Coleman Young and incumbent black councilmen will enable us to save our city!”

The Young camp heartily seconded the warning. “I think there's an element of self-determination [in the Slate's statement], and I think that self-determination is a legitimate factor of American politics,” said David Lewis, the mayor's reelection chairman.

In the primary, the
News
endorsed Barrow, and the
Free Press
, a traditional Young supporter, went for Conyers. During the general election, both papers came out for Barrow. This played right into the mayor's hands. He offered the endorsements as proof that the white-owned-and-operated press was trying to brainwash Detroiters into voting against their own interests.

“They can't see for us, they can't think for us,” he told a black audience at a fund-raiser at Steve's Soul Food Restaurant. “They don't tell it like it is, they tell it the way they would like it to be. It's too late in my life to start dancing—I don't dance. And I ain't got no rhythm anyhow.” The crowd laughed and cheered, and Young grinned, shoulders shaking. “This election should be a declaration of independence,” he said. “We took our freedom in 1973, and they're trying to take it back from us in 1989.”

The mayor repeated this message in every stump speech and interview throughout the campaign. Indeed, it often appeared that he was running for reelection against the
Free Press
and the
News.
When the papers counterattacked by condemning Young's antipress message as reverse racism, he was ready for them. “I've always fought for unity between black and white,” he told J. P. McCarthy,
a popular radio talk show host. “I think my record on that is a little better than the
Detroit News.
Fifty percent of my appointees are white. I don't think the
News
can say that.”

The antipress fever of the Young campaign ran so high that it even infected the Barrow camp. One Saturday morning in mid-October I dropped in at his headquarters, a large storefront next to the towering General Motors Building on Grand Boulevard. The large main room was decorated like a child's birthday party, with balloons and streamers. Donuts and coffee were set out on a long table. The walls were plastered with pictures of the candidate, district voting charts and handmade homilies, such as
GOD DON
'
T CARE IF YOU
'
RE BLACK OR WHITE
;
THERE
'
S SOMEBODY TRYING TO PULL US APART
.

Campaign workers, about half of them white, sat on folding chairs and waited for Geoffrey Garfield, Barrow's consultant, to call the assembly to order. As usual, the meeting began with a gospel song—“The things I used to do, I don't do no more, since Jesus came into my life”—and a benediction. Most of the ministers in town were supporting Young, but Barrow had a few clerical dissidents, and one of them offered a long, special anti-Coleman prayer.

After the last amen, Garfield opened the session to general discussion. Several people reported progress in their districts and were rewarded with applause. Then, without warning, a man arose and turned toward the back of the room, in the direction of a young black reporter named Dori Maynard.

“There's a woman back there, works for the
Free Press
,” he said, pointing her out. “Last week, Coleman called her ‘a stupid fool,' and she didn't report it. Now she turns around and blasts us, yes she does!” An angry murmur rose from the crowd. Maynard, uncomfortable at having become the center of attention, shifted her weight from foot to foot.

Another man stood up smiling, and for a moment I thought he was going to defend the reporter. “We welcome you,” he said in a gracious voice. There were protests from the crowd, but he held up
his hand for silence. “Yes we do, we welcome you. But we pray for your soul.”

The question of black control not only dominated the race for mayor, it became an issue in the Common Council election as well. In the primary, a white incumbent with impeccable liberal credentials named Maryanne Mahaffey led the field. A similar showing in the general election would make her president of council. In Detroit's strong mayor system, the body is little more than a debating society, but there was symbolic importance in keeping the office in black hands, and Young came out for Reverend Nicholas Hood.

The mayor didn't want to expressly say that he favored a black candidate, but he didn't need to. Shortly after the primary, Reverend Jim Holley, now officially neutral despite his Joshua-time rhetoric of the previous year, reminded voters that if Mahaffey were elected president of the council, she would automatically be next in line in case something happened to Young. He called on black Detroiters to prevent such an eventuality by supporting Hood.