Коулман Янг: Детройт қаласының тұңғыш афроамерикалық мэрі

American politician (1918–1997)
the politician born in 1982

Coleman Alexander Young (May 24, 1918 – November 29, 1997) was an American politician who served as mayor of Detroit, Michigan from 1974 to 1994. Young was the first African American mayor of Detroit. Young had emerged from the far left element in Detroit, and moderated somewhat after his election as mayor. He called an ideological truce and gained widespread support from the city's business leaders. The new mayor was energetic in the construction of the Joe Louis Arena, and upgrading the city's mass transit system. He assisted General Motors in building its new "Poletown" plant at the site of the former Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck. Some opponents said that he pulled money out of the neighborhoods to rehabilitate the downtown business district, but he said "there were no other options." In 1981, Young received the Spingarn Medal for achievement from the NAACP.

Young built his political base in Detroit on the East Side in the 1940s and 1950s, which had become a center of the African American community. In 1960, he was elected as a delegate to help draft a new state constitution for Michigan. In 1964, Young won election to the Michigan State Senate. His most significant legislation was a law requiring arbitration in disputes between public sector unions and municipalities. During his senate career, he also pointed out inequities in Michigan state funding, "spending $20 million on rural bus service and a fat zero for the same thing in Detroit."

Coleman Young decided to run for mayor of Detroit in 1973. At the forefront of his campaign, he sought to address the increasing police violence suffered by black residents in the city. By 1972, the black population in Detroit was nearly half of the population – but was patrolled disproportionately by a white police department. Specifically, Young notified Police Commissioner John Nichols that the police decoy unit, STRESS (Stop the Robberies and Enjoy Safe Streets), was a major racially charged problem of the city. Officers deployed under STRESS had been accused of killing 22 people and arresting hundreds without cause during its 2 1/2 years of operation. Young's effect on integrating the Detroit Police Department was successful; the proportion of blacks rose to more than 50 percent in 1993 from less than 10 percent in 1974 and has remained at about that level. Both actions were credited with reducing the number of brutality complaints against the city's police to 825 in 1982 from 2,323 in 1975.

During his fourth term, Young continued to work on improving racial relations of the city and neighborhood standards. He worked on many successful projects to build more than 1,800 apartment units in the city, with “50 percent black and 50 percent white, half from within Detroit and half from outside”. Green's death on November 5, 1992, occurred only months after the Los Angeles riots of 1992, which protested the acquittal of police officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King. At the time, a writer for the Detroit News and Free Press said, "the foundation upon which Mayor Coleman Young built his career and his administration was rocked Thursday by the beating death of a Detroit man at the hands of Detroit police officers."

Young was twice married and divorced, and had a twelve year relationship with Joyce Finley Garrett from 1968 to 1980. He fathered a son with executive assistant director of public works Annivory Calvert and initially denied paternity until DNA tests proved that he was the child's biological father. He died from emphysema in 1997. Upon learning of Young's death, former President Jimmy Carter called Young "one of the greatest mayors our country has known." Republican Michigan Gov. John Engler called the former Democratic mayor "a man of his word who was willing to work with anyone, regardless of party or politics, to help Detroit – the city he loved and fought for all his life."

Six federal investigations of his administration resulted in trials and convictions for some of his associates, including Detroit Police Chief and Deputy Chief, William L. Hart and Kenneth Weiner, but none for Young. In 2000, a FOIA investigation showed that Young was under FBI surveillance beginning in the 1940s (because of his suspected link to communists) and continuing through the 1980s. The Detroit FBI office turned over 935 of its 1,357 pages of material, which included business records and wiretap transcripts. The FBI investigated Young for decades. They confronted him in random places; asked about his politics; wiretapped his condo; wired a convicted con man who was his business associate and scrutinized the mayor’s finances. But while relatives and people around Young went to prison for corruption, Young never was indicted or charged with a crime.

Though there were no civil disturbances as serious as the race riots of 1863, 1943, and 1967 during Young's terms as mayor, he has been blamed for failing to stem crime in the city. Several violent gangs controlled the region's drug trade in the 1970s and 1980s. Major criminal gangs that were founded in Detroit and dominated the drug trade at various times included The Errol Flynns (east side), Nasty Flynns (later the NF Bangers) and Black Killers and the drug consortiums of the 1980s such as Young Boys Inc., Pony Down, Best Friends, Black Mafia Family and the Chambers Brothers. From 1965 onward, Detroit had experienced an upwards trajectory of its homicide rate. In 1974, the year Young took office, the homicide rate in Detroit was slightly above 50 per 100,000 residents. Over the rest of the 1970s, Detroit's homicide rate trended downward, dropping below 40 homicides per 100,000 in 1977 and 1979. However, in the 1980s the homicide rate significantly increased, reaching a peak of 63.5 in 1987. In 1994, the year Young retired from office, the homicide rate was roughly 54 per 100,000.

Young himself expressed his belief that reform of the police department stood as one of his greatest accomplishments. He implemented broad affirmative action programs that lead to racial integration, and created a network of Neighborhood City Halls and Police Mini Stations. Young used the relationship established by community policing to mobilize large civilian patrols to address the incidents of Devil's Night arson that had come to plague the city each year. These patrols have been continued by succeeding administrations and have mobilized as many as 30,000 citizens in a single year in an effort to forestall seasonal arson.

A 1993 survey of historians, political scientists and urban experts conducted by Melvin G. Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago ranked Young as the twelfth worst American big city mayor to have served between the years 1820 and 1993.

Clemens, Paul. Made in Detroit, Anchor (2006); memoir of growing up in Detroit during Mayor Young era. Johnson, Arthur L. Race and Rembrance: A Memoir (African American Life Series), Wayne State University Press (2008)

Young, Coleman. The Quotations of Mayor Coleman A. Young, compiled by McGraw, Bill et al., (Wayne State University Press. 1991),