The Paczki Principle
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The history of every great city requires a controversial, irrepressible mayor whose political survival skills seem to be equaled only by the admiration and loathing the pol incites among a polarized constituency, and Detroit's was Coleman A. Young. Like Richard Daly of Chicago and New York's Ed Koch, "Hizzoner," as Young was known during his 20-year reign, left an enduring political legacy on his city that lasted well past his tenure and 1997 death.
Born in Alabama in 1918, Young grew up in Detroit's Black Bottom neighborhood and served with the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. A labor organizer and civil rights activist in the 1950s, Young earned a small measure of fame in Detroit when summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee; he refused to answer most of the questions and then schooled his inquisitors on the proper pronunciation of the word "Negro." His political career began in earnest in the Michigan Senate in 1964, and by the time of the 1973 Detroit mayoral race, tensions were at an all-time high in the city. A largely white police force was under fire for, among other offenses, secreting an undercover squad whose raids resulted in the deaths of 17 black men under suspicious circumstances. Young bested his white opponent — coincidentally, the city's police commissioner — to become what was a political rarity at the time: one of the first African Americans elected to lead a major U.S. city.
Re-elected four times and in office for twenty years, Young left a legacy unmatched by any of his predecessors. Hart Plaza and the People Mover are just two of the major projects he saw through to completion, but his reputation as a combative champion of a beleaguered city, in a time of social flux, a declining auto industry, and scarce federal and state aid, remains his greatest accomplishment. As Hizzoner himself wrote in his 1994 autobiography, "the popular way to explain the decline of Detroit — that is, the one so ardently talked up within certain white circles and the media ... is to pin it all on me."
