Today's Free Press contains a great historical and beautifully written retelling of Coleman Young's election campaign by veteran reporter emeritus Bill McGraw as seen in the following snippets. It seem like yesterday.
The two candidates were streetwise Detroiters in their mid-50s who served in World War II. They both carried .38-caliber revolvers. Both grew up in modest circumstances; Young in Black Bottom, the son of a tailor and night watchman, and Nichols in southwest Detroit, the son of a Ford Motor worker. The mustachioed Young dressed fashionably and addressed people with the then-hip term “baby.” Nichols wore his hair in a military-style brush cut; his clothes were as conservative as his politics.
It was certainly a time of upheaval and of a city careening downward:
It would be a hard-fought contest in a contentious era. The campaign took place amid the city’s continuing attempts to recover from the 1967 rebellion, and the recovery was lagging.
Crime, arson, abandonment and paranoia were on the rise. The city’s 672 homicides in 1973 would be a record. [[It was surpassed in 1974.) In June, the papers reported that since the start of the year 12 Detroiters over 60 had been murdered in their homes by invading robbers. Twelve cops were under indictment for dealing heroin. A teachers’ strike kept 277,000 students out of school for six weeks. Wildcat walkouts led by radical activists crippled auto plants.
Detroit had more than twice as many residents in 1973 as today, and the population was virtually split 50-50 between Black and white. But the city was hyper-segregated, with Black residents unwelcome in many sections of town, especially where whites lived in monochromatic neighborhoods close to the borders. Suburban flight continued: Some 7,000 to 9,000 Detroit households were changing from white to Black each year, according to a Wayne State University study.
By 1973 the City of Detroit had already lost around 400,000 from its 1950 census count.
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