Didn't Majority-Black Gary, Indiana Already Try This? Majority-Black Detroit Elects a White Mayor

A paltry 20 percent voter turnout gave the Motor City its first white mayor since the halcyon days of Coleman Young. Though Mayor-Elect Mike Duggan will have virtually no power – the 83 percent black city is still ruled by a black man, state-appointed Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr – he does re-integrate the executive branch of Detroit’s highest elected office. [Detroit elects first white mayor in years - and reasons go well beyond race, Detroit Free Press, 11-6-13]:

Mayor-elect of an 83 percent black city...

For the first time in 40 years, predominantly black Detroit elected a white person as mayor. 

Community leaders, political observers and voters provided a number of theories on how that happened. But among them was a theme: The election was about much more than skin color, even in a region where race has been a foremost issue for decades. 

They said Mike Duggan beat Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon in the city whose population is 82% African American because of a more organized, better-financed campaign. Others sensed desperation among voters — a thirst for change in a broken city that led to a measuring of the whole candidate against the other. 

“Voters tend to vote more out of pragmatism than symbolism,” said Kenneth Cooper, a Boston political journalist who has researched how black mayors are elected in cities of varying minority populations. “What will work best for the city? 

Who will work best for the city? There’s no guarantee that a black majority will elect a black candidate. Black voters do not reflexively vote for black candidates. It’s not automatic.” 

Frustrations in the city 

The Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit Branch NAACP and a Napoleon supporter, said he feels residents have been beaten down with negativity over the city’s bankruptcy petition, an emergency manager appointed by the governor to call most of the shots at city hall, and public fallout from the failed Kwame Kilpatrick administration. 

“It has made many people feel as though we, meaning the African-American population of this community, cannot lead, cannot do this,” he said. “I think people are frustrated with the way the city is. They are frustrated with the lack of services. They are frustrated with what they have been reading and hearing. ... They’re affected by it; they are responding to it.”

Actually, black voters do vote reflexively for black candidates.  A monolithic black vote in mayoral elections is one of the reasons the city of Atlanta still has a black mayor (the Black Leadership Forum memo), and was the primary reason Ray Nagin won re-election in 2006. Recall the infamous “Chocolate City,” which helped earn Nagin more than 80 percent of the black vote; appeals to racial loyalty are encouraged, welcomed in the black community, with individual blacks knowing collective black political power equates to dominance of public jobs and access to city-contracts.

Why Detroit still needs an organization to advance the interests of colored people is never explained, for the city’s condition in 2013 is a stunning experiment in what happens when individual black people collectively become responsible for a municipalities present and future.

Memo to Rev. Wendell Anthony: black people cannot lead; black people cannot do this. Individual black people are leaving Detroit, looking for white suburbs to move to where elected white individuals (strangely, never working to enrich and improve collective white interests) help administer and govern cities where services are successfully executed for taxpayers.

When Coleman Young took over as the mayor of Detroit, he sought to only enrich the lives of his black constituents; promoting black individuals to positions of power in the city government; and even used city funds to build the largest black museum in the nation (screwing over the ‘white-centric’ Detroit Institute of Arts in the process).

A city that was 86 percent white in the 1950s became the largest black metropolis in America after a mere 20 years of black political control (white people still living in Detroit, correctly, fled for the suburbs).

What’s funny is that another city - which was founded, matured, and properly governed by a white population, only to be supplanted when the black population grew to a demographically-united political entity – also tried to elect a white mayor to reverse its darkening fortunes.

Gary, Indiana.

Before the 'Great Migration' of blacks, Gary was the "City of the Century"; elected in 1995, Scott King couldn't save the city from its majority population (85 percent black)

And the black community was enraged at the idea of a white mayor [Gary, Ind., Confronts Idea Of A White Mayor It Was One Of The First Cities To Elect A Black Mayor. The Role Of Race Is Being Debated., Philly.com, 11-4-1995]:

This grim, gray steel town at the base of Lake Michigan made history in the racial firmament of the 1960s: It became one of the first major American cities to elect a black mayor. 

On Tuesday, Gary, whose population is more than 85 percent African American, may make history again. This time, the leading candidate in this heavily Democratic town, former prosecutor Scott King, is white. 

And several black officials are doing everything they can to make sure King doesn't become the first white mayor here in 27 years. 

In a letter that has raised the ire of both blacks and whites here and has become the latest chapter in the continuing national debate over race in politics, the outgoing mayor, Democrat Thomas V. Barnes, has urged his supporters to jump parties and vote for independent black candidate Marion Williams because King is white. 

"You know the story: African Americans who managed major American cities such as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles during the mass business and population abandonment of the '70s and '80s have now been replaced, one by one," Barnes wrote. 

"While African Americans have always been the first to acknowledge and reward the positive role and involvement of all people, regrettably in this instance, Mr. Williams' main challenger, who is a Caucasian, has no record of contribution to Gary." 

Barnes' letter was followed by an endorsement of Williams this week by the Calumet Township assessor, Booker Blumenberg Jr., who in a statement said: ''Race does matter . . . the history of the state of Indiana is a history of excluding African Americans from (public) office." 

In his office yesterday, Barnes said that race was an important consideration in the election. He said he backed Williams because he was the best qualified and because he was black; he dismissed King as unqualified and said the election had important symbolism in Indiana. 

"If you don't have an African American mayor in Gary, you wouldn't have one (anywhere else) . . . in this state," he said. 

Whether race should be a factor at all was being debated here all week. 

"His skin can be red, it can be blue. It doesn't matter as long as he can do the job," said Clifford Handspur, a retired welder who was stuffing envelopes at King's campaign headquarters yesterday. 

But former City Councilman Vernon Smith said he was concerned that King was ahead: "It sends a message to our young people that we can't lead our city."
Smith, the former city councilman here, said he senses that frustration among many African Americans in Gary. 

"I think some people felt if we changed to a different ethnic group, services would improve," he said.

Memo to City Councilman Vernon Smith: the message is correct; black people can’t lead ‘your’ city or any city, because no city in America was ever founded, built, and maintained by black people.

A ‘white’ savior in Scott King was elected, but Gary (boasting the same population that drove away the white middle-class) never stopped failing.

Through attrition (black crime, which was – is still – the ultimate catalyst for white flight), black people took over Detroit and Gary; such an act was the kiss-of-death for both cities.

Hilariously, the type of community (especially the type of ‘business’ community) black people collectively create was on display in a 1988 story from the Chicago Tribune, which showed Gary’s “thriving” downtown included only a Wendy’s and a Wal-Green’s [`Gary!` Rides The Tiger Of Steel Into The Future, 4-17-1988]:

This month 15,000 copies of a glamorous brochure entitled simply``Gary!`` will be mailed to companies across the nation and around the world. 

That these brochures describe Gary, Ind., may come as a surprise to those who have even an inkling of Gary`s distinctly unglamorous reputation. 

``We`re a city with a future, make no mistake,`` begins the brochure, part of an ambitious campaign by the city to lure new business. 

``. . . A city of rich diversity, from the natural beauty of the Lake Michigan shoreline to the downtown business district and the massive industrial complexes,`` proclaims a second brochure, to be mailed to those who express interest. 

The reality of downtown Gary fits uneasily with these claims. Its streets, eerily deserted and scattered with debris, paint a grim picture of urban blight. Its houses and stores are shuttered, abandoned and burned. The brochures boast just one photograph of the ``business district,`` carefully angled to show both the Wendy`s fast-food restaurant and Walgreens-Gary`s only famous-name retailers. 

But Gary is confident that its worst days are over and the best are yet to come. ``You have to look at Gary with the correct idea-that Gary is an easel on which is to be painted one of the great success stories of the 20th Century,`` explained Don Sullivan, spokesman for the Gary Business Development Commission.

Sure, Gary was once an easel; the fortunes of the city seemed limitless when they were drawn by white people; but once the city's fortunes were turned over to black political power, it became a dysfunctional Etch-A-Sketch.

Gary was one of the great success stories of the 20^th Century, until the “Great Migration” of blacks from the south overwhelmed the community and culture white people had cultivated there, enriching the city with a culture far different than that which birthed Gary’s success.

It was the harbinger of Gary’s death; just as the “Great Migration” of blacks to Detroit overwhelmed the community and culture white people had cultivated, culminating in the city being dubbed, ‘The Paris of the West’ and the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’.

Without white people, Detroit and Gary in 2013 (though they still exist physically on a map, with skyscrapers and an infrastructure – erected by white people – still standing) have settled into the type of world individual black people collectively create.

Good luck to Mike Duggan, mayor-elect of a city that long ago ceased to be a city, and instead became a great experiment seeking to answer the question “Does race matter?”

No one is actually interested in understanding how the scientific method has provided ample conclusions in the ruins of Detroit and Gary in answering the query “Does Race Matter?” Meaning, the implications of black-rule in cities across America (and subsequent white abandonment of them) will never, ever be seriously debated.

It’s not ‘Escape from Detroit’; it’s ‘Escape from America’.

Demography is destiny.