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Detroit:
An Urban Tragedy

by

Ralph Massey
Nassau, Bahamas

August 4, 2015

!
The Author
Ralph Massey was born in 1929 in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a
police officer.

Education
John Marshall High School, Cleveland, Ohio,1947.
Case-Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, B.A.
Economics, 1952, magna cum laude/Phi Beta Kappa.
University of Chicago, M.A. Economics, 1954. Harry A Millis
Fellow in the Industrial Relations and Research Associate in the
Department of Economics.

Employment
Ford Motor 1956, Kimberly Clark 1971, Johns Manville 1976,
Chemical Bank 1981, Business analyst and international
funding specialist.

Retirement, 1991 to Present

Co-founder of the Nassau Institute, Nassau, Bahamas, a
conservative think-tank.
Consultant to Atlantis , Paradise Island, The Bahamas and the
Coalition for Education Reform.
Author of 20 major articles on public education published in the
Nassau Tribune.
Author of What Happened to America?: From Karl Marx to the
National Socialism of President Obama, Austin Macauley
Publishers Ltd., London, July 2014 and listed on amazon.com.

The Detroit Tragedy

Its Population from 1900 to 2010

Number of people

2,000,000

1,500,000

1,000,000

500,000

1,900

1,950

The tragic story of Detroit covers

the entire 20th century. Its
population, as drawn above, was
285,000 in 1900. It grew explosively
to 1.9 million by 1950; and then it
fell $1.2 million to 0.7 million
today. The engine of both that
growth and decline was the
altogether new automobile
industry located initially in Detroit
and the societal changes it
triggered.

2,010

The most prosperous city in the

nation was brought to its knees. It
had endless miles of owneroccupied bungalows that were the
respectable legacy of five decades
of auto industry prosperity.
Today it does have a new glistening
downtown; but that center is
surrounded by what appears to be a
post-apocalyptic nightmare of
ruined buildings and empty space.
This is an Urban Tragedy.

The Automobile
The driving force behind Detroits economic
growth was the automobile. In 1901, the Winton
Motor Carriage Company sold the nations first
horseless carriage. The company, however, ended
automobile production in 1921.
Henry Ford in 1903 founded the Ford Motor
Company; and he created the auto assembly line
built 17 million Model Tsand constructed the
massive River Rouge complex just south of Detroit.
There Ford eventually employed 60,000 workers in
all phases of manufacturingeven steel and glass
makingall on one gigantic site. Today the River
Rouge plant has 6,000 workers.
The Chevrolet Motor Company, introduced its
490 model to compete with the Model T. It
provided a choice of color and features such as the
electric starter. Chevrolet chose a less centralized
manufacturing and supply system and surpassed
Ford in sales in 3 years.
Over time Ford expandedespecially after Henry
Fords death in 1947. If one looks at its vehicle
assembly plants today, one notes that it now has
seven in the U.S.in Kansas, Kentucky, Illinois,
Indiana, Ohio and Michigan and seventeen outside
the U.S..
Congress mandated collective bargaining in 1937.
It eventually produced the Big Three/UAW laborrelations tango and a durable but at times
rocky relationship. Eventually it led to wage and
fringe benefits that could not be sustained in the
face of foreign competition and factories in the
right to work states of the South.
Except for two small GMC and Chrysler assembly
plants, the auto industry moved out of Detroit.

Economics and Race

White & Non-White Populations
1,600,000

1,200,000

White

NonWhite

800,000

400,000

1900

1950

2000

Workers came to Detroit in

wavesinitially from Europe and
Americas Mid-West.
And then there was the Great
Migration between 1916 and 1970
of 6 million African Americans
from the rural south to the
industrial North. The lure was
auto-worker pay scales that could
triple ones income.
In Detroit immigrants tended to
cluster in ethnic neighborhoods in
individually owned homes.
However, in the case of African
Americans, they were compressed
into two neighborhoods, the
Bottom and Paradiseas a
result of discriminatory housing
practices buffered by a hostile
municipal government and public.
Race Riots
This clash of cultures produced
real racial friction that erupted in
violent riots in 1919, 1943 and
1967.

The last, for instance, happened

following an early Sunday arrest of
82 African Americans at an
unlicensed club where the patrons
were celebrating two Vietnam War
veterans. It lasted three days and
resulted in 43 deaths, 467 injured,
over 7,000 arrests and more than
2,000 buildings burned. An
estimated 10,000 participated and
100,000 gathered to watch.
White Flight
A flight of Whites from northern
cities in response to the Great
Migration began in the 1950s.
BUTDetroits Flight was twice
as great as that of Chicago,
Philadelphia, Baltimore,
Cleveland, Buffalo, Milwaukee,
Pittsburgh and St. Louis.
In 1950 it was the fourth largest
city with the largest economy1/6
of the countrys workers. Today its
the 18th largest and has been deindustrialized.

No other city in America, no other city in the

Western world has lost the population at that
rate. And whats at the root of that loss?
Economics and race. Or, should I say, race and
economics.

Coleman A Young, Mayor of Detroit,

1974-1994

C o l e m a n Yo u n g w a s a m a j o r
politician in his life-time.
He was an African-American born in
Alabama in 1918 who migrated with
his family in 1923 to Detroit. They
settled in the Bottom; and there he
attended public schools and was an
outstanding student. But he was
frustrated in his plans to go to
college.
There he acquired the notoriously
provocative rhetoric of the ghetto
principally the F word.
First he became a labor activist. Then
in 1959 he was elected to the state
senate where his mission was to help
his constituents get what every other
American could expect under the
Constitution.
He was confrontational and lectured
his audiences on race relations.
Never-theless, he was elected mayor
in 1974 and served five terms.
His critics contended that he cared
more about retribution than about
resurrection. BUT..the Mayor was not
an ideologue when it came to job
creation.
For instance, on assuming office he -

. Allied himself with Henry Ford II

in the construction of the
Renaissance Center
. Induced GMC to build a new
assembly plant using the states
power of eminent domain to acquire
and level a Polish community lying
mostly within the city limits, and
. Induced Chrysler to build the
Jefferson North assembly plant.
But economic recovery was difficult
as GMC filed for bankruptcy in 2009
and Chrysler in 2013.
Although his record on school
construction was good, he failed to
address the quality of public school
education.
In 2009 the U.S. Department of
Education made its first assessment
of public education in Detroit. It
concluded
There is no jurisdiction of any
kind, at any level, at any time, that
has ever registered such low
numbers. They are barely above
what one would expect simply by
chance, as if the kids simply
guessed at the answers.
Five years after Mayor Coleman left
office, the Michigan Legislature
intervened and removed the locally
elected board of education.

A Perspective
The Detroit Tragedy is the result of
two momentous events 1. The automobile industry began
manufacturing there. This business
had a really big growth affect on the
nations economy. Its very size and
complexity caused the industry to
move beyond the geographic confines
of Detroit.
2. And the industry needed workers.
Initially they migrated from other
mid-western states, Canada and
England. But after 1950 they came
from the rural south as part of the
Great Migration of 6 million African
Americans to the north.
This migration produced racial
friction so severe that after 1950
there was a large scale flight of white
residents and middle-income African
Americans from the city.
What was left in Detroit was a much
smaller dysfunctional city with a
smaller tax base. This raises the
troubling question, Can Detroit
recover in the near future?
There are two big hurdles on its Road
to Recovery.
.1. The failure of the Public schools to
educate is the first. According to one
source 47 percent of the city's
residents are Not able to fill out
basic forms, for getting a job those
types of basic everyday things.

Reading a prescription; whats on the

bottle, how many you should take
just your basic everyday tasks.
Yet the system reportedly spends
between $12,800 and $15,600 per
pupilwell above the reported
national average of $10,600. This
suggests that Detroits education
spending is not focused on teaching
effectiveness. One must note that few
mayors address the misuse of funds
labeled for teaching.
.2. The Rule of Law is the other really
big hurdle because it is essential for
the growth of private enterprise in a
political democracy. Lets take violent
crime alone.
In 2012 Detroit had the highest rate
of violent crime of any U.S. city with a
population over 200,000. The
murder Clearance Rate is the
percent of murders that result in an
arrest where a perpetuator is formally
charged by the police. Detroits was
just 11.3 percent. For comparison,
the clearance rates for Cleveland and
St. Louis were 35.1 percent and 66.4
percent, respectively.
At the present time the city does not
have the law enforcement resources
that it needs.
This suggests that at best Detroits
recovery will be long and difficult.

The Tragedy
White/Non-White

Mayor Coleman A Young!

Detroit was headed swiftly and inevitably
toward a numerically preponderant,
politically dominant, and economically
isolated black population, and Coleman
Young put the pedal to the process.!
From Hard Stuff, the Mayors
autobiography published in 1994.