No community in America is as polarized as Detroit, over race.  Americans may not realize the unique position Detroit has played in the history of this great nation.  From the American automobile culture to the first suburban shopping malls, the first stoplight, the first mile of paved concrete road, the list is extensive for the “firsts” Detroit has brought American.  A natural disaster happened in Detroit.  It did not come from a hurricane, like Katrina to New Orleans.  It came over time, generations, hitting Detroit hard as any hurricane.  Nowhere has urban decay earned such precedence, than in Detroit.  This is a unique story.  Unlike other cities rotating ethnic populations over time, the middle-class abandoned Detroit in a relatively short span, ten, perhaps fifteen years, from the mid-seventies to the end of the eighties.  Our “peculiar institution” of African-American slavery is America’s ‘original sin’, predating the pseudo-genocide of the native populations.  America’s great lie is its pledge of equality for all, as long as none of “them” lives next door.  Cities maintain themselves through tax revenue generated by residents, commerce, and industry of the city.  Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, or any city in this country, nowhere have people intentionally segregated themselves so dramatically, between colonies of white and black, than in Detroit.  That sacrificed on the cross of prejudice, was Detroit’s very life.  It is still dying a slow death.  There is hope for the future, promise showing in a few neighborhoods; mostly filled with younger generations, untarnished by the history of racism rampant in Detroit.  I challenge anybody that doubts this history to visit Detroit, look, see, and understand. 

                I grew up in Detroit, although I do not live there today.  Raised Catholic, we identified ourselves according to our parishes.  Our Lady of the Assumption was my parish located near 6-Mile Road and Gratiot.  To this day, I view those 5 acres of land on the East Side of Detroit, as sacred ground.  The Church, the fourth building located on that site, proudly faces Gratiot Avenue.  Gratiot is one of the spokes of Detroit’s road layout, along with Woodward, named for the man who laid out the current city center, Michigan Avenue and Fort Street.  Augustus Brevoort Woodward copied the plan from L’Enfant’s “baroque styled radial avenues” in Washington D.C.  He arrived in Detroit nineteen days after the Great Fire of 1805 that destroyed the city. 

Behind the Church of the Assumption, is the parish cemetery filled with the Belgian and German farmers that settled the area.  The first pastor built a grotto out of a devotion to our Lady of Lourdes.  To situate the church for Americans familiar with Eminem’s movie 8-MILE, that would be 2 miles deeper into the city, south of 8-Mile.  The reason 8-Mile is important to this story is because it truly is the proverbial line in the sand.  Many Americans may not realize that from 1950-1960, Detroit lost 9.7% of its population; from 1960-1970, Detroit lost 9.3% of its population; from 1970-1980 Detroit lost 20.5% of its population.  Detroit lost approximately 1 million residents of the city between its highest populations in 1950 to its present. 

The flip side of those statistics is that a hundred years ago, there was a labor shortage in Detroit, caused largely by the First World War.  Henry Ford was busy making Model T automobiles and needed bodies working in his factory on his innovative assembly line.  In the late teens and early twenties, Ford needed workers.  Those workers came largely from the South, white and black.  The Urban League in Detroit was very active and encouraged Blacks to take the train north to Detroit for jobs.  Many more whites flowed into Detroit.  In 1910, Detroit’s black population was 5,741; by 1920, the population was 40,838; by 1930, the black population was 120,066.  From 1920-1930, Detroit’s overall population exploded from 993,678 - 1,568,662 an increase of 57.9%.  By 1925 Ford was building up to 10,000 Model T’s a day and up to two million Model T’s a year.  From 1930-1940 Detroit’s population increase slowed to 3.5% and from 1940-1950 the increase was 13.9%, due largely to World War II.  The population of Detroit peaked at 1,849,568 in 1950.  Like so many people in the twenties, my grandparents came to Detroit, ¾ of them from Canada.  Nowhere in America could you make $5.00 a day, but in Detroit.

                The unique phenomenon that was Detroit allowed both white and black workers to earn their way into the middle-class, but deed restrictions controlled where the Catholics, Jews, and Blacks could live.  Black Detroiters had to find housing in a small section of the city referred to as Paradise Valley.  With the prosperity provided by Henry Ford, a black middle-class emerged, that could afford to live elsewhere than in Paradise Valley.  Not to belabor the point of Detroit “firsts”, but the late Thurgood Marshall, took a consolidated case from Detroit, McGee vs. Sipes, to the Supreme Court.  The High Court found the state action of enforcing restrictive covenants in court a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.  Eventually, Jews, and Blacks were free to live wherever they wanted to.  That was the theory, but not the practice.

Detroit is America’s fulcrum.  If the East Coast of American and the West Coast of America form the lever upon which our nation balances, then Detroit is the pivot point, or fulcrum.  In Detroit, relief from the “Peculiar Institution” combined with the “Noble Experiment” creating a peculiar American city.  In Detroit, you will find twin monuments, one in Detroit, the other in Windsor, Ontario, in Canada, commemorating the endpoint of the Underground Railroad.  The answer to the question of “what went wrong” with Detroit begins here.  After the Volstead Act ushered in Prohibition, Detroiters declared Detroit a “Volstead Act free zone”.  During the twenties, Detroit’s largest industry was automobiles.  Detroit’s second largest industry was importing alcohol from Canada.  Prohibition in Detroit was raucous with a well-paid lower class of Catholics, Eastern European immigrants and Blacks enjoying gambling, booze, and broads.  Detroit had the most “blind pigs” in America.  Sidney Fine writes in “Frank Murphy, The Detroit Years” that in 1926 over 700 houses of ill-repute existed within a mile radius of City Hall, twice as many as in New York City.  By the end of the decade, thirty thousand mobsters located in Detroit that had nothing to do with bootlegging. 

The White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Detroit’s middle-and upper classes controlled Detroit justice, which was overly harsh on Blacks.  In 1920, they tried to ban parochial schools to keep the Catholics out.  Blacks could not live north of Tireman Avenue.  Blacks poured into Detroit from the South, but so too did Southern Whites.  With the Southern Whites came the Ku Klux Klan, hating Catholics, Jews, and Blacks.  In 1925, the county prosecutor brought murder charges against the Dr. Ossian Sweet family and his nephew Henry Sweet, for killing a white man.  When Ossian Sweet moved into a white neighborhood, a mob of 500-700 white Detroiters pelted his home with bricks, breaking every window in the house.  Henry Sweet shot to disburse the crowd, killing a white man.  Clarence Darrow defended the Sweets.  He told the jury his clients, while charged with murder, were tried for being black.  Darrow got Henry Sweet acquitted, but only on the second trial. 

The tenor of race relations in Detroit was set in the twenties.  Black Detroiters had to fight for every political inch of land they could, just to survive.  After the Supreme Court struck down restrictive covenants in 1948, the slow progression of whites moving to suburban home-rule cities began.  Ostensibly, in fulfillment of the American Dream of homeownership, having 2.4 children and owning two cars.  There were many reasons why Detroit ended up being America’s natural disaster.  The national highway system ripped through the neighborhoods, killing public transportation in the 1950’s.  It also put I-75 straight through Paradise Valley.  According to Professor Reynolds Farley, Detroit Blacks viewed purported “urban renewal” as “Negro Removal”.  The threat of court ordered busing in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s was a reason.  However, for white Detroiters, few would argue electing Coleman A. Young was not a reason.  Regardless of the reason, Detroit witnessed the movement of one million mostly white residents to the suburbs.  They engaged in an orderly and systematic Diaspora, beyond the political borders of the city of Detroit.  It spread over 30 years, but a city that was in 1950 approximately 85% white, turned into a city of approximately 85% black by 1980.

I saw a tank on Washington Boulevard recently, a prop for filming Red Dawn, redux, another nascent hope for the city and Michigan; a blossoming movie industry.  I commented to my colleagues as we walked by that I had not seen such a sight since 1967.  The reference challenged no one’s recollection, or even elicited a response.  Not only did I suddenly feel old, but also I realized the events of that summer, scarcely affected them.  Mostly adults who grew up in the suburbs, they were miles if not worlds away during the riot of 67.  However, I remember the tanks as they rolled down Gratiot Avenue.  I remember clouds of black smoke rising above the horizon from fires set by a people frustrated and disenfranchised.  My brothers and I drove downtown on Gratiot Avenue with my aunt and uncle to pick-up a dear Canadian cousin at the Greyhound Bus Terminal.  She had scheduled her vacation long before the riot started.  We saw what that week of violence had done to the city.  The National Guard ended up shooting one of their own.  President Johnson ordered the Army in to restore order to Detroit.  Ze’ev Chafets, in his book, Devil’s Night; And Other True Tales of Detroit notes another first for Detroit.  Detroit is the only American city occupied by the United States Army three times, 1863, 1943, and 1967.  A week after the riot started 43 Americans lay dead, the wounds were fresh, and the fires not yet out. 

I was five that summer.  At that age, I only knew what I heard the adults around me discuss.  The events transpiring that summer of riot, from the viewpoint of a white refugee was the catalyst that sped the Diaspora.  Essentially being Canadian immigrants to Detroit, I never considered my family particularly prejudiced.  My father blamed Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh because he “let the city burn for a week”, before Governor Romney ordered the National Guard to restore order.  The United States Army took over training of all state national guards due to the fiasco caused by the Michigan National Guard in the 1967 riot. 

It was terribly exciting for me, even if I did not fully understand what was going on.  In later years, I would read that the 67 riot began after Detroit Police Department raided a “blind pig” arresting many black Detroiters drinking after hours.  To white Detroiters police action was not wrong, as the police represented order.  They needed to do their job.  It was after the riots that my parents began looking for a new house in the suburbs.  However, their parents had lived in that neighborhood since the twenties.  They did not want to move.  We lived on a street behind the cemetery, grew up with the Grotto next door, attended the church our parents married in, went to the same school our mother attended and were Detroiters.  My father always said that houses in the city cost more and retained their value, more so than houses in the suburbs.  My parents would spend their weekends looking for larger homes in the suburbs to accommodate a larger family.  At the time, they were only speculating they would move, some day in the future.  That day was yet to come. 

Court ordered busing cut to the quick of many white Catholic Detroiters, in the late sixties and early seventies.  This was but one issue for the long march out of Detroit.  What caused the march to become a “flight”, according to what I remember, was the 1974 election of Coleman A. Young as mayor of Detroit.  When Coleman A. Young euphemistically told anybody who did not like the fact he was now mayor, to hit 8-Mile road, white Detroiters decided to take him up on his suggestion. 

The west side, where my father grew up, “went” first.  The Jews, freed from restrictive covenants, moved north and west.  Their exodus, mind you this is as I remember it, opened up many opportunities to Blacks to move into those neighborhoods.  This eventually caused an earlier West Side Diaspora to Livonia, Southfield, and the west side suburbs.  The East Side of the city (east of Woodward Avenue) held strong with white neighborhoods.  There was a Catholic parish every half mile or so.  My parish, Assumption Grotto, was, at one point in the late fifties and early sixties, the largest parish in the city with over 3,000 families.  Despite Mayor Young’s election, we stayed because my mother grew up in that neighborhood, and her mother lived four blocks away.

My father came home most days excoriating Chrysler and his bosses.  What irritated him greatly was a changing paradigm created by Affirmative Action.  My father trained his future boss, a black man, promoted instead of him, with less experience, less seniority, less entitlement to the job.  My father felt it unfair, having served in World War II that he bore the burden of Affirmative Action.  However, my father saved his richest expletives for Coleman Young.  While I am certain many view Coleman Young as a monolith of achievement, a hero to his race, in my household growing up, no politician evoked such a polarizing attitude.  I saw this not only in my father, but also in most people I knew.  Coleman Young’s name was a swearword.  Coleman Young did not just advance the interests of his race, but antagonized white Detroiters every chance he could.  We stayed in Detroit until the fall of 1976, when we moved to the suburbs.  That summer I remember the rows of for-sale signs mushrooming on the streets of the East Side.  The discussion was more about plummeting property values by staying, than about Blacks. 

At this point, the only complaints about people I heard were about the quality of the white people moving into the neighborhood.  They came from the lower East Side where housing prices had already declined.  We moved to the suburbs in the fall of 1976, my grandmother, in the summer of 1978.  Thereafter, I lost touch with everyone and everything I once held dear, my paper route, my home, my church, my parish, my city.  I was no longer a Detroiter. 

Flash forward thirty-five years, Detroit is now a city of 713,777 people.  Government revenue is down across the board.  Detroit is teetering on the brink of financial ruin.  City government is insolvent.  The Detroit Public School system is insolvent.  The current mayor is trying to consolidate the city to solve its problems, which is more than the former jailed mayor did.  No other community of this nation has imploded like Detroit. 

I doubt most Americans, if they have heard of Detroit’s "Devil’s Night", know why the fires started.  Before the Diaspora, on Devil’s Night, my father would pull the car up in the drive, closer to the house, as we did not have a garage.  The night before Halloween kids would prowl the neighborhoods creating mischief.  My father kept vigil to make sure no one soaped his car windows, egged the house, or worse, broke a window.  Toilet paper in the front tree was common.  That was Devil’s Night as I remember. 

By the late seventies and early eighties, those who had not moved faced the full force of the storm.  Cultures collided and neighborhood streets that were safe for nuns to walk down, turned to neighborhoods where the women street-walking were far from nuns.  Those families who wanted to get out and away from crime and violence faced a new problem.  No one would pay fair value for homes in Detroit.  Housing values plummeted, not because of overvalued financing as is today’s crisis, but because everyone wanted to move at the same time.  Those that did not get out early, later abandoned their homes, hence the aegis of Devil’s Night. 

By 1983, many families fleeing the city with only their belongings secreted themselves back to their old neighborhoods, setting fire to their homes on Devil’s Night.  They hoped to salvage some value from their hard-earned investment through an insurance settlement.  In the city, Devil’s Night turned into a macabre event for many Detroiters.  The sad “tradition” continued until community action stemmed the tide in the late nineties.  In the wake of moving such a large population, not seen outside war or catastrophic natural disaster, Detroit became a throwaway city.  No city in America endured the full force of “white flight” like Detroit.  The housing stock of the city continued to deteriorate until the present day, when Detroit’s mayor announced his plan to consolidate neighborhoods, just to provide city services efficiently.  Detroit is 138 square miles of land, 143 square miles if you count the waterways.  Detroit’s borders would encompass Manhattan, Boston, and San Francisco. 

It would be too easy to call it racism and blame the unique problems of Detroit on “white flight” or “black blight”.  Racism may play the central role in this tragedy.  However, like insurance risk, everyone must share in apportioned blame.  It rests in federal policy supporting the creation of the national highway system and removal of the public transit infrastructure.  It rests with the post-war recovery, America and Detroit’s love affair with cars, larger homes and lots in the suburbs, regional malls, the American Dream.  The federal government has no power to legislate feelings about living next to one another.  There is not enough money in the federal budget, to resurrect the city of Detroit.  No matter how many enterprise zones the government creates, no matter how many taxes the government cuts, if people do not want to live together, they will not.  The salvation of Detroit cannot come from above, from the government.  Detroit’s salvation must come through renewal and rebirth of the neighborhoods and investment in the housing stock.  Detroit has some of the greatest examples of Art Deco architecture in the world.  Once posh housing, the rotting apartment buildings, homes sitting burned and empty, are poor tribute to the former "Paris of the Midwest”.  

Detroit is not a throwaway city.  If we as a people fail, in our efforts to return Detroit to stability and future growth, then America fails to honor its stated ideals.  The dead of the Civil War would turn in their graves if they knew what happened to Detroit.  The pursuit of the American Dream ironically, participated in Detroit’s demise.  One issue is clear, race problems in Detroit began long before Coleman A. Young, wrenched political control away from the white majority.  In 1926, after the second trial of Henry Sweet, Clarence Darrow told the jury in his summation: 

Let us be honest about it.  There are people who buy themselves a little home and think the value of it would go down if colored people come.  Perhaps it would.  I don’t know.  I am not going to testify in this case.  It may go down and it may go up.  It will probably go down for some purposes and go up for others.  I don’t know.  Suppose it does?  What of it?  I am sorry for anybody whose home depreciates in value.  Still, you cannot keep up a government for the purpose of making people’s homes valuable.  Noise will depreciate the value of a house, and sometimes a streetcar line will do it.  A public school will do it.  People do not like a lot of children around their house.  That is one reason why they send them to school.  You cannot get as much for your property.  Livery stables used to do it; garages do it now.  Any kind of noise will do it.  No man can buy a house and be sure that somebody will not depreciate its value.  Something may enhance its value, of course.  We are always willing to take the profit, but not willing to take the loss.  Those are incidents of civilization.  We get that because we refuse to live with our fellow-man that is all.  

The time has come to end the delusory problems of the past.  We must turn away from the "haters" in society, and turn towards doing the right thing.  Abandoning the erstwhile fourth largest city in America is wrong.  To ignore its problems today is myopic.  Change must come to Detroit.  From employment of city residents to education of the poor, Detroit needs to re-establish a middle-class tax base if it hopes to survive.  Opening a few new factories in the city would not hurt.  No city in America today has a higher unemployment rate.  This current recession has fallen hardest on the city of Detroit.  The federal government’s statistics bear this out.  Go to the Census Department’s website, www.census.gov; Michigan is the only state in red, noting its population loss. 

Rescue Detroit is a not-for-profit Michigan corporation.  Its purpose is to repopulate, rehabilitate, and renovate the city of Detroit.  Proceeds from the sale of this book will help fund Rescue Detroit.  If people need incentivization to move into the city of Detroit, en mass, then Rescue Detroit hopes to found a university to provide a free college education to residents of Detroit.  As Michigan builds “cool cities” and “green” technology to generate a diversified industrial base, Detroit needs people who want to live in the city.  Many who live in the suburbs consider themselves generally as “Detroiters”.  However, just saying you are a Detroiter does not add to the benefice of the commonweal.  Rescue Detroit offers a modest proposal.  The Zaddik, a Story of James and Paul, is an important book.  Not because it is a good read, which I hope you find it is, but because it explains many of the inconsistencies patent in the Gospels.  Awareness builds in academic circles, that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain some early to mid-first century writings.  Understanding that four books of the Dead Sea Scrolls are first century writings illuminates the history of the first century and the birth of Christianity.  The Zaddik needs to sell a hundred million copies or greater, to fund Rescue Detroit properly.  As the Da Vince Code sold eighty million copies worldwide, it would not hurt if you tell everyone you know it is better than the Da Vince Code.  My apologies to Dan Brown, but the historic cause proposed through Rescue Detroit needs all the help it can get.  Renovating the Michigan Central Station alone is going to take 300 million dollars.

Rescue Detroit asks all Americans to consider helping Detroit return to stability.  To ensure its future Detroit must expand its tax base.  To incentivize the middle-class to live in the city, Rescue Detroit will found a university dedicated to the nondenominational, nonsectarian, nondogmatic study of God.  It should be an oasis of learning, dedicated to a multicultural understanding of God.  Rescue Detroit proposes Zaddik University.  A third of Detroit lives below the federal poverty line.  Violence may be an economic issue, but without hope, violence becomes a choice.  Education gives people hope for the future.  Think of the effect Zaddik University will have on people who had no hope of affording college.  The institution will provide undergraduate and graduate college degrees without cost to all citizens who live within the borders of the cities of Detroit, Hamtramck, and Highland Park.  The other two cities, surrounded by Detroit, are in the same shape and should be included.  If you want your child to have a college education without tuition costs, move to Detroit.  If you want your child to receive a quality education at a university dedicated to multi-culturalism, move to Detroit.  Rescue Detroit will found Zaddik University to study how we as Americans may overcome our prejudices.  In doing so the world will see in Detroit, in the most polarized community of America, we can make it work.  If you want to be part of the solution, contribute to the cause.  Rescue Detroit needs one hundred million of you to buy a copy of this book. 

Help create a university dedicated to a multicultural understanding of God and the free education of Detroiters.  Dedicated to all faiths, Zaddik University, shall seek participation from all Children of the Book.  Christians, Jews, and Muslims, have not learned to live together.  However, they are praying to the same God.  How will we relate to our Asian brothers and sisters who do not believe in our God?  Understanding will not come without consensus and knowledge.  The perfect storm has consumed Detroit.  Being America’s fulcrum, overcoming racial issues must happen in Detroit first.  From there it will spread to both coasts.  Americans may not know next to Detroit, in Dearborn, lives the largest Arab population outside the Middle East.  My friends, if we cannot make race relations work in Detroit, we will never be able to overcome the animosities currently governing policy amongst the nations of the world. 

As sentient beings, God will always judge our species based on the minimal level of human dignity we accord to the poorest, most forsaken of our brothers and sisters.  It is when the peoples of the world agree on what that minimal level of human dignity is that humanity will finally understand the teachings of Jesus and Mohamed.  If we leave anyone behind, we leave all behind.  God gives the prize, not to the winner of the race, but to the last person who hobbles across the line. 

For my part, I am willing to dedicate my efforts to build a university to educate the citizens of Detroit and to study the nature of God.  To that end, I have written and published this story.  The Zaddik, a Story of James and Paul, is a history of the first century.  The story interprets some of the books of the Dead Sea Scrolls as first century documents.  The community of the Apostles, who followed Jesus during his lifetime, established the Jerusalem Assembly after his death.  This group, acclaimed James, the brother of Jesus, leader of the faithful.  He was their Zaddik, the Righteous One, a “pillar” of the church, as Paul writes.  The Jerusalem Assembly existed long before Paul created the Christianity, we know today.  Interest in this topic and the radical views suggested herein may not interest everyone, but the story needs telling, for those who seek a greater understanding of the first century.  I have no advanced degree in theology or religion.  I am an attorney by trade.  However, I have studied and, at the risk of being an academic interloper, I have written a history faithful to the story found in four books of the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

With sales from the book, Rescue Detroit hopes to purchase the Michigan Central Railway Station for the home of Zaddik University.  Rescue Detroit will preserve and rehabilitate this historic, beautiful building.  If you want to help the city of Detroit, contribute to this worthy cause and buy a copy of, The Zaddik.  Your purchase will aid establishing Zaddik University to revitalize the city of Detroit.  Detroit will become a destination for families who want a good college education for their kids, without burdening their future with debt. 

When Danny Thomas was a young comedian starting out, he lived in Detroit.  Broke with a family to support he stopped to pray at church.  St. James was on the East Side of Detroit.  Fire took the church long ago.  My grandparents declared their marriage vows in the same church.  Danny Thomas made a prayer to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, and selfsame brother of Jesus.  The next week Danny Thomas got a job in Chicago and went on to his fame.  In payment of his debt to St Jude, he founded a children’s hospital dedicated to helping those who did not have the money to help themselves.  I know it possible, because Danny Thomas did it.  All I ask from you is to buy this book to help the citizens of Detroit.  Detroit must establish a tax base for the city to survive. 

A hurricane nearly wiped New Orleans off the map and people from around the world sent money to rebuild that city.  Racism, prejudice, misunderstanding, and bad federal policy have almost destroyed the city of Detroit through generations of polarization and neglect.  Please consider the mission of Rescue Detroit.  Please consider buying this book to help found Zaddik University.  Help the citizens of Detroit rebuild their community.  We can make it happen in Detroit.  If we can stare racism in the face and declare no more, not here, not anywhere, then there is hope for every community on the planet struggling with race issues today.  Thank you for your consideration.