Hard Stuff: The Autobiography of Mayor Coleman Young

Growing up in the Detroit suburb of Troy, I was always told that Coleman Young is responsible for the downfall of the city. It was his fault that white families fled from the city. He hated whites and would do whatever he could to screw them over. Reading his autobiography gave me a complete 180 on Mayor Young. Young clearly and honestly lays out his pre-mayor days and his mayoral days. He spares no punches, including his disdain for "pansy ass liberals", Walter Ruether, the white suburban media, the FBI, and the federal government as a whole. This is more than just the story of a single man - this is the story of an entire city. Young was born in the "Black Bottom" neighborhood of Detroit. A neighborhood that was leveled to build I-75. He served in the civil rights movements of Pre and Post World War II. He served a role in building Detroit's union movement. He was one of the first people to fight against McCarthyism and the 1950s red scare - long before Murrow took the case on. Finally, he was elected the first black mayor of Detroit in 1974. He ran a city that had been falling apart long before 1974 because of industrial flight, white flight, and financial flight. He successfully kept city services running amidst these challenges and managed to "scale back" a city services for a city of 2,000,000 people to a city of under 1,000,000. Young's writing is easy to read and captivating. He lays out his case very systematically and clearly. I have read many books and studies about 20th century Detroit, and this book is one of the best. The first 9 or 10 chapters lays out his life. He spends the last two chapters making his case against the local media, racism, and making a case for affirmative action. Prior to reading this, I would have told you that naming the City Building in Detroit the Coleman A Young Building was a travesty. Now, I couldn't think of a more appropriate person to name it after.

I've had this book for a couple years now but only recently found the time to read it. Once I started, I couldn't put it down. Hard Stuff is great as a history of Detroit, a sociology of racism, and an analysis of tense urban/suburban relations. I think it is an extremely valuable resource for its honest look at the problems besetting Detroit and probably many other urban areas. Young's understandable rage with the Reagan/Bush adminstration's evisceration of urban policy comes through strongly, and is rather enlightening. If America is to truly rebuild its "Detroits", as Young notes, serious attention must be given to rapid transit, economic empowerment, and community policing. There are many great ideas in this book, and it should be required reading for urban planners, journalists, historians, and city officials everywhere. Young fought the establishment his whole life because he insisted that things could be better. Now gone from us, his book should help continue his efforts to force a reluctant system to address horrible problems which, in their continued existence, lower everyone's quality of life.