Devil's Night (21 page)

“Well, I built a house on Waldo, and it's still there, paying taxes,” said Joseph.

“Yeah, well maybe you should go back there and live with them,” said Steve, and the women giggled at the absurdity of the suggestion.

“I don't mind living next to them,” said Joseph. “In time, people will recognize that the black fella is just like them.”

“Maybe they're just like you, but they sure as hell ain't just like me,” said Steve. “And I don't want any out here in Warren. You want to live with 'em, go right ahead. You know what you are?” He hesitated before continuing; this was his brother, after all. But anger overcame family sentiment. “I hate to say it, Joseph, but you're nothing but a damn liberal.”

Twenty-five years ago, Detroit prided itself on being in the vanguard of American liberalism; today, the term has become an epithet. One of the few places where it is still respectable, if not exactly fashionable, is Southfield, often considered to be the “Jewish” suburb just north of Detroit.

When I left for Israel in the summer of 1967, the majority of Detroit's eighty thousand Jews were clustered in the northwest corner of the city. Dozens of synagogues, religious schools, community centers and delis dotted the areas's main commercial avenues, and families lived in spacious brick homes built along quiet, tree-lined streets. But the riot touched off a mass exodus; six months later,
when I came home for a visit, I literally didn't recognize the place. Not a single one of my friends' families was still there.

Most of them had moved to Southfield or even farther north, to the WASP suburbs of Birmingham and West Bloomfield. Only a few years before Jews felt unwelcome in such places, but in the racially charged atmosphere they now had the primary qualification for acceptance: if blacks considered Jews “almost white,” WASPs seemed to feel that they were “white enough.” Seemingly overnight, synagogues and day schools sprouted in the cornfields of suburbia, while, in northwest Detroit, abandoned temples became AME churches and pastrami parlors were transformed into barbecue joints.

In the eighties, Southfield became the new downtown of white Detroit. Glittering gold-painted business towers and massive shopping centers tipped the commercial balance away from the city. In the fall of 1988, there were 23 million square feet of office space in Southfield and another 1.5 million were under construction—more than in the entire city of Detroit, whose population is ten times larger.

For three generations, blacks have followed Jews northward, and the pattern is now being repeated in Southfield. In 1970, there were less than one hundred blacks in the town. By 1980, the number had grown to about eight thousand. Today, the city administration estimates that there are twenty thousand—about 20 percent of the population—making Southfield the most integrated city in the area.

Ironically, it is also the least popular with Detroiters. They see it as their primary competition for the black middle class and many regard the black yuppies who live there as defectors. Moreover, the huge Northland shopping center, whose stores are white-owned and patronized largely by blacks, has become a symbol of suburban commercial exploitation. It is a mark of social consciousness not to shop there. Arthur Johnson told me proudly that he hasn't bought more than a pair of shoes north of Eight Mile Road in years. Federal circuit judge Damon Keith, who lives in Detroit and whose court is in
Cincinnati, prefers to shop in Ohio rather than drive a mile or two to Northland.

This antipathy has little to do with the Jews; Detroit has been remarkably free of the acrimony that has often characterized black-Jewish relations in Chicago and New York. Partly this is because Arab store owners in the city have become the main focus of black resentment; partly because the Jewish community, especially its leader, multimillionaire Max Fisher, has been active in supporting Detroit projects. And a good deal of credit goes to Coleman Young, who is something of a philo-Semite.

During the 1940s and 50s, when Young was involved in radical union politics, many of his associates were Jews who supported him in battles with the UAW establishment. In office, he has reciprocated by appointing several to key city positions. From them Young learned to appreciate Jewish cooking and Jewish humor. Throughout his incumbency, he has gone out of his way to encourage Jews—even those who now live in the suburbs—to remain involved in the life of the city.

There is, in fact, more intimacy and complexity in the Jewish-black relationship than in any other. “We were always closer to Jews than to the others,” said Arthur Johnson, “and we miss them more.” Indeed, for generations, Jews were the only community willing to sell homes to blacks, and to contemplate living next to them. But each time, as poor blacks arrived in the wake of the middle class, contemplation gave way to flight.

The cost of these repeated exoduses—in new homes, synagogues and institutions—has been crippling. This time, the Jewish community is trying to make a stand. Its Federation offers grants to young Jewish couples who buy homes in Southfield and neighboring Oak Park. “It's not so much that Jews still believe in integration,” a Federation activist said. “We just don't want to run again.”

Southfield officials are extremely concerned that the efforts to maintain a stable white population will fail. “The media say that we will be a throw-away city in ten to twenty years,” said Southfield
mayor Donald Fracassi. “I'm frightened, I admit it. But I'm not about to let the city fall without a fight. We understand the cost of a city becoming all black, and we're ready to take on the threat of resegregation. If we lose, at least they'll have to say we tried.”

The Southfield strategy is based on another irony—the only important city in the Metro area that has declared integration to be a policy goal wants to maintain it by recuiting whites and steering blacks away. “Our approach to racial problems is unorthodox,” admitted city manager Robert Block. “Since we're naturally attractive to blacks because of our quality of life and the fact that they feel welcome here, our target market is the white community.”

The man in charge of implementing this strategy is Nimrod Rosenthal, a transplanted Israeli who chain-smokes Winstons and mixes business jargon with liberal platitudes in fast, Hebrew-accented English. He was hired to use the expertise he acquired as a marketing whiz for the Hudson's Department Store chain to help sell the city to white people.

Part of Rosenthal's plan is based on the Shaker Heights model. The Cleveland suburb has fought resegregation by actively directing urban blacks to other suburbs, and Nimrod Rosenthal admitted that Southfield is considering doing the same. The idea is to set up a nonprofit office in Detroit that would help those who want to leave find housing elsewhere in Oakland County. In late 1988, the notion was still under discussion, and Southfield made little effort to publicize it; it is not the kind of program likely to be popular among its less liberal neighbors. Its officials were unmoved, however, by possible negative reactions. “They can't hurt us,” said one. “Fair housing is the law of the land.”

Southfield's leaders were counting on blacks to go along. “The minorities here understand that if we can't maintain a racial balance, they will be the losers,” said the mayor. “Their kids will go to poor schools and live in filthy neighborhoods. So the minorities will have to get out of the comfort zone, and move to other suburbs.”

If the Shaker Heights plan represents push, Southfield has also
mounted an impressive advertising campaign to pull in young whites. Its centerpiece is a series of thirty-second television spots that Nimrod Rosenthal screened for me on his office VCR.

The ads depict aspects of life in Southfield—young couples dining in fine restaurants, relaxed businessmen able to drive to their offices within minutes, happy children frolicking in a safe schoolyard, youthful families walking hand in hand across well-tended lawns with brick ranch houses in the background. After watching half a dozen of the commercials it became clear that they had a common denominator—the only blacks visible were little girls and light-skinned women.

When I pointed this out, Rosenthal seemed a bit defensive. He continued to run the ads, and after a few minutes he shouted, “Hey, there's a black guy,” in an excited tone. He rewound the tape and played it over, so I could see a fleeting frame of young black executive sitting in a plush office.

On and on went the commericals. Handsome yuppies playing tennis, shopping, clinking glasses of shining crystal, all against a background of glossy neo-rock. No one who saw the ads could possibly have guessed that nearly half the students in the Southfield schools are black, or that elderly people make up a large part of the city's population, or that there are more than twenty thousand blacks (not to mention ten thousand Chaldeans and Arabs) already living in the suburb.

“I have to overcome the perception of what whites think of as an integrated city,” Rosenthal explained. “People are interested in quality of life.” This, of course, means a quantity of whites. Southfield's marketing director has a product to sell—and who can blame him if he doesn't want to hurt sales by giving prospective buyers the idea that there are blacks living in Detroit's most integrated suburb.

Nobody will ever do a commercial like that about Hamtramck, although there are probably more blond-haired, blue-eyed people there than Nimrod Rosenthal ever dreamed of. The little city is, like
Highland Park, an island, surrounded on all sides by Detroit, which expanded around it. Its diverse population includes blacks, Albanians, Ukrainians and other Slays—but Hamtramck is, first and foremost, a Polish town.

Unlike Chicago and other large northern cities that have experienced suburban flight, Detroit has not retained strong ethnic enclaves. The city is, as Chief Hart observed, one big ghetto all the way to its borders. Aside from a small barrio on the southwest side and a few areas on the riverfront and the outer extremities, all its neighborhoods are heavily black. Only Hamtramck, in the city but not a part of it, remains to remind people what Detroit was like thirty years age.

In those day, the city was dotted with corner shot-and-a-beer joints—ethnic taverns like Lillie's. A summer storm was raging outside when I walked in, and the patrons at the bar were in the midst of giving the weather a Hamtramck spin. When thunder rolled overhead, the young bartender said, “When I was little, my ma used to tell me that thunder is Jesus bowling.”

“Yeah,” said a man in a blue work shirt, seated at the bar. “I heard that. And the lightning is the scoreboard lighting up.”

“God, you guys,” a young woman in narrow, dark-rimmed glasses and a beehive hairdo said in mock disgust. “Jeez, bowling!”

“Hey,” the bartender said, “I'm a Polack. Whaddaya want?”

“Yeah, well waddaya think I am, Japanese?” quipped the woman, and the guys at the bar, dressed in factory clothes and baseball hats, laughed and raised their glasses in a toast to ethnic solidarity.

Dave Uchalik walked in during the banter, sat down at the bar and chugged a Budweiser. He is a pale man in his early thirties and he was dressed according to local custom, in a work shirt and Tigers baseball cap. But unlike his father, who worked at the nearby (and now defunct) Dodge Main for forty-one years, or Lillie's other patrons, who are still on the line at the GM plant that took its place, Uchalik is no auto worker. He is the leader of a rock band called the
Polish Muslims, the founder of what he calls, facetiously, the Hamtramck sound.

“Hamtramck is the Liverpool of Detroit,” Uchalik said, draining his Bud. “This is heavy-duty industrial territory. When I was a kid, my father and I both wanted me to escape the factories. He said, ‘Get an education.' But I figured I'd just play the guitar instead.”

Uchalik is a pretty good guitar player, and the Polish Muslims do their share of straightforward rock, but his real forte is as a lyricist and commentator on his native city and its folkways. “We do a kind of Polish rock 'n' roll,” he said, wiping his granny glasses on his blue work shirt. “For example, we've got a song called ‘Love Polka Number 9' which we sing to the tune of ‘Love Potion Number 9.' That's one of our big numbers.”

Dave Uchalik's version sounds nothing like the Clovers':

Uchalik's lyric vision of his hometown comes from his days at St. Florian's school and his nights in the bars along Joseph Campau Avenue, the city's main strip, where Polka bands and Polish dancing are as natural as country music in Nashville. Growing up in the Motown era, he gravitated to r&b as well, and the result is a unique fusion, possible only in the Warsaw of Wayne County.

“I use the things that go with this place,” he said. “Polish foods, bowling, overweight people, the polka,
bobcias
—that's Polish for ‘old women.' ” Although his parents speak Polish fluently, Uchalik admits that he knows only a smattering of the language—just enough to get by in a town of less than twenty-five thousand that still has a Polish language newspaper.

“As far as the name—the Polish Muslims—is concerned, we were just sitting around a bar a few years ago having some cocktails when
we came up with it. There was nothing racial about it. A few older people were offended and once a guy jumped on the stage and tried to take the microphone away from me, but most people think the name and the songs are funny. After all, if you can laugh at yourself, you can laugh at anybody.”

Uchalik's sense of humor is nothing if not irreverent. When Pope John Paul came to town a few years ago, he composed a tune for the Pontiff, “Traveling Pope,” to the tune of Ricky Nelson's “Traveling Man.” “I like to think of the pope listening to that one in the Vatican,” Uchalik said, popping the top on another Bud. (Uchalik was not the only one inspired by the pope's visit. A local car dealer, Woodrow W. Woody, caught a video shot of His Holiness waving to the crowds in front of his Pontiac dealership. In the picture, the pope's arms are extended in what appears to be a benediction of the auto showroom, and it has become a fixture of Woody's advertising.)