The name "Coleman Young" may not resonate in Western North Carolina. He was the first black mayor of Detroit, elected to five four-year terms to that powerful office, beginning in 1973. He was the uncrowned king of Detroit. He was my boss for two years in 1981-1983. He died November 29, 1997.

Congress believes that Foreign Service Officers or "FSOs" (and I was an FSO from 1963 - 1991) see too much of the world and too little of the USA. So by law the State Department may loan out FSOs to work for charities in San Antonio, for Governors in Michigan or for a mayor of Detroit.

In 1981 I went from Commercial Attache of the American Embassy in
Bonn, Germany to Coleman Young's Special Assistant for International
Economic Development. People close to  His Honor told me that three things persuaded him to add me to his list of 140 Mayoral Appointees:

(1) Michigan's Governor already had his own FSO;

(2) the price was right: the U.S. State Department would pay my
salary and moving expenses; and

(3) Mr. Young had tried everything else to halt the downward spiral of Detroit, so why not me? I turned down Cincinnati and other cities in favor of the metropolitan area where my wife had grown up.

Anyone looking for reasons to dislike Coleman finds them: his
salty language, his failure to keep scheduled appointments, his
amours, his shouting "racist" at  critics, his ultra-partisan politics, his
antagonizing most of the rest of the State of Michigan. Like many of the Mayor's admirers, I saw all this and wished that it were otherwise. But my father used to tell me: "Son there is only one difference between a man we call our friend and a man we call our enemy. We are willing to overlook or make allowances for the faults of the one but not the other." And Coleman Young could never be my enemy.

Coleman Alexander Young was born in Tuscaloosa,  Alabama the oldest of five children in a black Catholic family whose father "could pass for white." With that family Coleman came to Detroit when he was four. He worked for Ford Motor Company. He rose through the ranks of the United Auto Workers. In the 1930s some say he became a communist. He was shunned. A marriage broke up. He was desperately poor, often hungry. One set of Jewish friends stayed true to him and he never forgot them. Some were my colleagues and told me the story. In World War II he was commissioned a military officer. In 1945 he was one of the black "Tuskegee Airmen" who illegally  integrated an Officers Club in Indiana. He was elected State Senator. He became Detroit's mayor.

During my first one-on-one meeting with Mayor Young, I asked about some of the photos on the wall behind his desk. One was of Vice President Walter Mondale genuflecting to the Mayor at the Detroit airport. Another was of a small group of some very young children at a Catholic grade school in Greek Town on Detroit's near east side. The Mayor explained to me that this evoked the year when he won a prize for academic excellence and a scholarship to attend a local, highly esteemed Christian Brothers school. Enter racial bigotry. The teaching brothers at this Catholic institution, many straight from Ireland, would not admit a black student, no matter how light-skinned. Coleman immediately stopped being a Catholic and became  and remained a Baptist.

He was  tough mayor of a tough town. My having grown up in the genteel deep south of Alabama, Louisiana and Texas was not the best way to prepare me for a macho town where many friendships had to be preceded by a ritual trial of strength, a kind of psychological arm wrestling. But that was the game played in blue collar Detroit. And I learned to play it. One of the other dozen professional appointees on the mayor's immediate staff, a high achieving white woman, told me "watch our for ...X... He likes to intimidate the white appointees by introducing himself: 'My name is ...X.... and I hate all white people!'" Forewarned I read up on him and approached him as one Southern boy to another Southern boy.  "X" and I became great chums.
Mayoral appointees were almost exactly balanced in numbers between black and white, though the city in 1981 was already 2/3 black.

Race was always in the background if not the foreground. The Mayor once told me, "Pat, I have met very few white people who did anything good to black people because they thought it would get them into heaven." He believed (not entirely correctly, in my opinion) that black people had to fight and fight hard for every single right grudgingly conceded to them by the white power structure. Fight hard. Prove your strength. Win respect. Take no sass. Then you will be equals and therefore can be friends. That was the Detroit way, and not just among blacks.

I showed the Mayor how to start shipping locally manufactured
armored  vehicles to Israel and Egypt via the port of Detroit and out the
St. Lawrence Seaway. This was my test of strength. For I had helped with his highest priority: revitalizing the Detroit riverfront. As a result  he gave me my head in attracting overseas investors and tourists, in bringing small businesses into exporting and several other areas, not all economic.

He told me, "Pat, America is rich but not rich enough to afford throw-away cities." He convinced me. I still try to assure that cities like Detroit and Cleveland and Charlotte and Asheville do not wither and die because of bad economic policies.

Being on the Mayor's immediate staff felt a lot like being in Democratic
Party Headquarters. But the city government of Detroit is officially non-partisan. Hence there was little that  State Department lawyers forbade me to do. Still, I was at pains to do some things only after office hours or while taking annual leave. Thus my wife and our two sons joined me in the area around Tiger Stadium where we tacked up posters bearing the mayor's photo and his exhortation to register to vote in a coming nonpartisan election to raise city income taxes. One day all 141 of us mayoral appointees  (including the chief of police) went to the Detroit Zoo for an open-air briefing on what to do to win that election. Malcolm Dade, the amiable, low-key, highly effective top aide to the Mayor, laid out for us the rules of engagement.

Mayor Young thought that Detroit and I were good for each other.  When my tour of duty in Detroit was cut short by a  few months because of a crisis in Surinam, His Honor issued a warmly worded proclamation saluting me for fighting hard and well for his and my beloved Detroit.

When people ask what is my favorite Foreign Service assignment, I reply: Detroit, USA! I reveled in my work. I loved my boss. If my prayers make a difference, then this great man rests in peace. I wish that I could have been a fly on the wall of the Pearly Gates when Coleman Young knocked for admission. I suspect he courteously but inevitably challenged Saint Peter to arm wrestle. He probably won. Perhaps he was diplomatic and lost. But Saint Peter has a new friend: Detroit style.

-000-

for Asheville TRIBUNE

Revisited 11/29/2006