Coleman Young and Detroit Politics

Coleman Young and Detroit Politics
Author: Wilbur C. Rich
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 1999-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780814320945

Coleman Young was elected Detroit's first black mayor in 1973, and was the city's longest-serving chief executive. This volume combines biography with political analysis to outline the basic strategy underlying Young's approach to policy making, and trace the economic changes in the city.

Hard Stuff

Hard Stuff
Author: Coleman A. Young
Publisher: Viking Adult
Total Pages: 394
Release: 1994
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

His life abounds in colorful anecdote and abrasive repartee. When he was harassed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, his response was: "I consider the activities of this Committee as un-American.

Redevelopment and Race

Redevelopment and Race
Author: June Manning Thomas
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814339085

In the decades following World War II, professional city planners in Detroit made a concerted effort to halt the city's physical and economic decline. Their successes included an award-winning master plan, a number of laudable redevelopment projects, and exemplary planning leadership in the city and the nation. Yet despite their efforts, Detroit was rapidly transforming into a notorious symbol of urban decay. In Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit, June Manning Thomas takes a look at what went wrong, demonstrating how and why government programs were ineffective and even destructive to community needs. In confronting issues like housing shortages, blight in older areas, and changing economic conditions, Detroit's city planners worked during the urban renewal era without much consideration for low-income and African American residents, and their efforts to stabilize racially mixed neighborhoods faltered as well. Steady declines in industrial prowess and the constant decentralization of white residents counteracted planners' efforts to rebuild the city. Among the issues Thomas discusses in this volume are the harmful impacts of Detroit's highways, the mixed record of urban renewal projects like Lafayette Park, the effects of the 1967 riots on Detroit's ability to plan, the city-building strategies of Coleman Young (the city's first black mayor) and his mayoral successors, and the evolution of Detroit's federally designated Empowerment Zone. Examining the city she knew first as an undergraduate student at Michigan State University and later as a scholar and planner, Thomas ultimately argues for a different approach to traditional planning that places social justice, equity, and community ahead of purely physical and economic objectives. Redevelopment and Race was originally published in 1997 and was given the Paul Davidoff Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in 1999. Students and teachers of urban planning will be grateful for this re-release. A new postscript offers insights into changes since 1997.

The Fifty-Year Rebellion

The Fifty-Year Rebellion
Author: Scott Kurashige
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2017-07-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520294912

"On July 23, 1967, the eyes of the nation fixed on Detroit as thousands took to the streets to vent their frustrations with white racism, police brutality, and vanishing job prospects in the place that gave rise to the American Dream. For mainstream observers, the "riot" brought about the ruin of a once-great city, and then in 2013, the city's municipal bankruptcy served as a bailout that paved the way for Detroit to finally be rebuilt. Challenging this prevailing view, Scott Kurashige portrays the past half-century as a long "rebellion" the underlying tensions of which continue to haunt the city and the U.S. nation-state. Michigan's scandal-ridden emergency-management regime represents the most concerted effort to quell this rebellion by disenfranchising the majority black citizenry and neutralizing the power of unions. The corporate architects of Detroit's restructuring have championed the creation of a "business-friendly" city where billionaire developers are subsidized to privatize and gentrify downtown while working-class residents are squeezed out by rampant housing evictions, school closures, water shutoffs, toxic pollution, and militarized policing. From the grassroots, however, Detroit has emerged as an international model for survival, resistance, and solidarity through the creation of urban farms, freedom schools, and self-governing communities. A quintessential American story of tragedy and hope, The Fifty-Year Rebellion forces us to look in the mirror and ask, Are we succumbing to authoritarian plutocracy, or can we create a new society rooted in social justice and participatory democracy?"--Provided by publisher.

African-American Mayors

African-American Mayors
Author: David R. Colburn
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780252026348

On November 7, 1967, the voters of Cleveland, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana, elected the nation's first African-American mayors to govern their cities. Ten years later more than two hundred black mayors held office, and by 1993 sixty-seven major urban centers, most with majority-white populations, were headed by African Americans.Once in office, African-American mayors faced vexing challenges. In large and small cities from the Sunbelt to the Rustbelt, black mayors assumed office during economic downturns and confronted the intractable problems of decaying inner cities, white flight, a dwindling tax base, violent crime, and diminishing federal support for social programs. Many encountered hostility from their own parties, city councils, and police departments; others worked against long-established power structures dominated by local business owners or politicians. Still others, while trying to respond to multiple demands from a diverse constituency, were viewed as traitors by blacks expecting special attention from a leader of their own race. All struggled with the contradictory mandate of meeting the increasing needs of poor inner-city residents while keeping white businesses from fleeing to the suburbs.This is the first comprehensive treatment of the complex phenomenon of African-American mayors in the nation's major urban centers. Offering a diverse portrait of leadership, conflict, and almost insurmountable obstacles, this volume assesses the political alliances that brought black mayors to office as well as their accomplishments--notably, increased minority hiring and funding for minority businesses--and the challenges that marked their careers. Mayors profiled include Carl B. Stokes (Cleveland), Richard G. Hatcher (Gary), "Dutch" Morial (New Orleans), Harold Washington (Chicago), Tom Bradley (Los Angeles), Marion Barry (Washington, D.C.), David Dinkins (New York City), Coleman Young (Detroit), and a succession of black mayors in Atlanta (Maynard Jackson, Andrew Young, and Bill Campbell).Probing the elusive economic dimension of black power, African-American Mayors demonstrates how the same circumstances that set the stage for the victories of black mayors exaggerated the obstacles they faced.

Race Against Liberalism

Race Against Liberalism
Author: David M. Lewis-Colman
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2008
Genre: African American automobile industry workers
ISBN: 0252075056

Race against Liberalism: Black Workers and the UAW in Detroit examines how black workers' activism in Detroit shaped the racial politics of the labor movement and the white working class. Tracing substantive, longstanding disagreements between liberals and black workers who embraced autonomous race-based action, David M. Lewis-Colman shows how black autoworkers placed themselves at the center of Detroit's working-class politics and sought to forge a kind of working-class unity that accommodated their interests as African Americans. This chronicle of the black labor movement in Detroit begins with the independent caucuses in the 1940s and the Trade Union Leadership Council in the 1950s, in which black workers' workplace activism crossed over into civic unionism, challenging the racial structure of the city's neighborhoods, leisure spaces, politics, and schools. By the mid-1960s, a full-blown black power movement had emerged in Detroit, and in 1968 black workers organized nationalist Revolutionary Union Movements inside the auto plants, advocating a complete break from the labor establishment. By the 1970s, the tradition of independent race-based activism among Detroit's autoworkers continued to shape the politics of the city as Coleman Young became the city's first black mayor in 1973.

Looking Beyond Race

Looking Beyond Race
Author: Otis Milton Smith
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2000
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780814329399

In Looking Beyond Race, Otis Milton Smith recounts his life as an African American who overcame poverty and prejudice to become a successful politician, and eventual president of General Motors. In Looking Beyond Race, Otis Milton Smith (1922-94) recounts his life as an African American who overcame poverty and prejudice to become a successful politician, going on to become the first black vice president and general counsel of General Motors. Born in the slums of Memphis, Tennessee, Smith was the illegitimate son of a black domestic worker and her prominent white employer. Although he identified with his mother's blackness, he inherited his father's white complexion. This left him open to racism from whites, who resented his African American heritage, and blacks, who resented his skin color. Throughout his life, Smith worked with and met many prominent Americans. He knew boxer Joe Louis, future general Daniel "Chappie" James, future Detroit mayor Coleman Young, and the nation's first African American general, B. O. Davis Jr. Through politics he knew Michigan's prominent politicians and was appointed by Governor John Swainson to the Michigan Supreme Court, making him the first black man since Reconstruction to sit on any supreme court in the nation. Smith also knew nationally known figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Estes Kevfauver, and presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Through his civil rights work, he met A. P. Tureaud, Roy Wilkins, and Benjamin Hooks, and he worked closely with Vernon Jordan. Looking Beyond Race provides a rare glimpse into the inner workings of America's largest corporation. Smith was an early advocate of the increased cooperation between business and government that was so necessary for business negotiating the complexities of a global economy. In 1983 he retired as general counsel for the corporation, having been the company's first black officer. This memoir, which Smith dictated during the three years before his death in 1994, is a compelling tale that ends with the inspirational story of Smith's reconciliation with his white relatives who still live in the South. In this highly readable memoir, Looking Beyond Race provides a moving tale that will appeal to readers interested in African American history, politics, labor relations, business, and Michigan history.

David Dinkins and New York City Politics

David Dinkins and New York City Politics
Author: Wilbur C. Rich
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0791480798

As the first African American elected mayor of New York City, David Dinkins underwent intense scrutiny—first from the black community, then from white liberal supporters, the media, and the city's electorate. Wilbur C. Rich focuses on the critical role played by the New York City media in the perception of mayoral leadership. Using interviews and words of journalists, Rich examines media coverage as both the architect and challenger of Dinkins' image. The making and unmaking of David Dinkins not only exposes much about the agency of African American politicians, but also reveals the fragility of electoral coalitions.

The End of Secularism

The End of Secularism
Author: Hunter Baker
Publisher: Crossway
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2009-08-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 143352323X

This ambitious work offers one of the most comprehensive attacks on secularism yet attempted. Hunter Baker argues that advocates of secularism misunderstand the borders between science, religion, and politics and cannot solve the problem of religious difference. University scholars have spent decades subjecting religion to critical scrutiny. But what would happen if they turned their focus on secularism? Hunter Baker seeks the answer to that question by putting secularism under the microscope and carefully examining its origins, its context, its claims, and the viability of those claims. The result of Baker's analysis is The End of Secularism. He reveals that secularism fails as an instrument designed to create superior social harmony and political rationality to that which is available with theistic alternatives. Baker also demonstrates that secularism is far from the best or only way to enjoy modernity's fruits of religious liberty, free speech, and democracy. The End of Secularism declares the demise of secularism as a useful social construct and upholds the value of a public square that welcomes all comers, religious and otherwise, into the discussion. The message of The End of Secularism is that the marketplace of ideas depends on open and honest discussion rather than on religious content or the lack thereof.