Stephen A. Jones
March 1, 2009

Euphoria over the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first African American president prompted at least a few observers to suggest — quite fatuously — that we might be entering a “post-racial” era in American history.

That’s a little like saying that when I step out my front door in Detroit and turn east on the sidewalk, I might be entering the halls of Congress. I may be headed in the right direction, but it is going to be a long, long walk.

We don’t have to look far to see this nation’s troubled racial history at work. We can see it in the recent decision of the Detroit City Council to reject a $288-million plan to expand and renovate Cobo Center.

The plan, produced by five years of negotiations between the city, surrounding counties and the state, is considered by nearly everyone to be essential to the economic health of southeastern Michigan. At stake, most notably, is the estimated $500 million injected into the region’s economy each year by the North American International Auto Show. Without the Cobo expansion, Detroit may lose the Auto Show. The show generates about 16,000 jobs, and officials say another 8,000 construction jobs would be created by the expansion and renovation of the center. Seems like a no-brainer.

But the plan would also transfer ownership of Cobo from the City of Detroit to a regional authority — and there’s the rub. The central issue is control, which is always thorny. But in this case the thorns are dramatically multiplied — and sharpened — by more than five decades of racial hostility and resentment over the decline and decay of the central city.

Suburban leaders, who are predominantly white and represent predominantly white constituencies, understandably take the position that if their communities are to contribute tax dollars to the Cobo project they should have an important say in how the center is run. On the surface, that seems to be a simple matter of economic justice.

But if history teaches us anything, it is that justice is seldom simple.

For many Detroiters, the move toward regional ownership of Cobo is simply the latest in a long series of suburban efforts to divest the city of its most significant assets — the water system, the bus system, the zoo — under the banner of regional cooperation.

The suburbs’ very existence is due, in large part, to governmental policies in the 1940s and 1950s that subsidized the growth of white suburbs at the expense of increasingly black central cities. FHA home loans, for example, were more available to whites than to blacks, and many of the communities where new housing was booming worked very hard to keep blacks from moving in. Dearborn and its longtime mayor, Orville Hubbard, are merely the most blatant and famous example of that.

State and federal governments also poured billions of dollars into the construction and expansion of expressways that fueled the vast suburban sprawl we now see in southeastern Michigan. That transportation system made the flight from the central city of white residents and businesses – and the tax base they represent – much easier.

A lot of things have changed in the last half century, but many Detroiters are troubled by the nagging knowledge that Detroit wasn’t faced by such a challenge to its prerogatives when the city’s power structure was controlled by whites.

That is the emotional truth that Detroit must face while confronting the economic realities presented by the Cobo expansion. But it is a truth that suburban communities must face as well — unless we think more evidence is necessary to prove the essential validity of Attorney General Eric Holder’s remark that when it comes to racial issues, we are, sadly, “a nation of cowards.”

Over the years, I have heard more than a few white suburbanites ridicule Detroit officials with allegations of incompetence and corruption, and the assertion that blacks simply want to blame everything on race. It can be a difficult point to rebut in the face of such recent experience as the political meltdown of Kwame Kilpatrick.

But it also must be recognized that such popular white officials as Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson and former State Rep. David Jaye built their political careers as solidly on a foundation of racial resentments as former Detroit Mayor Coleman Young — the Great Satan of many white suburbanites — ever did.

Some of us are old enough to remember that Patterson rose to political prominence as a leader of white suburban opposition to cross-district busing for the purpose of school desegregation. I’ll leave it to the lawyers to parse the legal issues of Milliken v. Bradley, but one thing seems clear to me: that court ruling allowed suburban communities to wash their hands of a huge problem that we are still dealing with 35 years later — a problem they helped to create.

The point is, there is plenty of blame to go around. But blame solves nothing. We need to take responsibility for solving the problems that have been delivered to us by our history.

Those of us in Detroit need to do our part by electing public officials who are more willing to take necessary and responsible risks for the long-term economic health of the city and not cling so tenaciously to the resentments of the past.

Those in the suburbs need to abandon their own resentments and recognize that the pain Detroiters feel at their continuing economic disenfranchisement is a real and understandable reaction to the recent history of southeastern Michigan.

It is only by confronting and acknowledging that history that we will be able to write a new one, to get beyond the emotional barriers that have undermined real cooperation for so long and build a brighter economic future for everyone.

Stephen A. Jones is a Detroit resident and assistant professor of History at Central Michigan University. He is co-editor with Eric Freedman of African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press).