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Last Updated June 22, 2005
Detroit's early auto factories--Packard, Hudson, Ford Highland Park, Dodge Main, Briggs, Ford Rouge, Cadillac, Kelsey-Hayes, Chrysler, Plymouth, DeSoto--were built between 1905 and 1925 in an arc about five miles from the city's center, in green fields at what was then the edge of urban development. Almost instantly the flat farmlands all around were platted in grid streets and filled with wooden bungalows and brick prairie-style houses, often with a driveway at the side and a single elm in front. Commercial strips lined the mile-square and radial main streets, stretching straight as far as the eye could see. Detroit's neighborhoods filled up with factory workers and civil servants, professionals and maintenance men, corner store owners and management personnel, Catholics and Protestants and Jews: a middle-class melting pot. With one exception: Detroit in those days had few blacks; they did not begin their big migrations here from the South, especially Alabama, until around 1940, when defense plants began hiring in large numbers. The history of black Detroit is one of conflict and uplift, inspiration and tragedy. The wartime mixture of Appalachian mountain whites and Deep South blacks proved volatile: there was a violent race riot in June 1943. During the war years, blacks were pent up in a few severely overcrowded neighborhoods like the Black Bottom, which is now the Chrysler Freeway. After 1945, when blacks began moving outward, real estate agents played on racial fears, and in the 1950s whole square miles of Detroit changed racial composition in months. In the 1960s there was hope that the civil rights movement, encouraged by Walter Reuther's UAW, and antipoverty programs would improve blacks' fortunes, and in fact many black Detroiters found good jobs and made good incomes, bought their own homes and built community institutions. Then came the riot of July 1967, followed by extensive white flight and terrible increases in crime. Detroit's first black mayor, Coleman Young, elected in 1973, responded with policies that may have seemed appropriate in the 1960s but had disastrous results in the 1970s and 1980s: He pressured major employers like the Big Three auto companies to build facilities in Detroit, raised taxes to support a vast army of city employees, and attributed city problems to white racism. Violent crime became a part of everyday life and arson became common. Detroit took on a garrison atmosphere. Crime reduced the value of residential real estate to near zero, and the city's population dropped from 1.7 million in 1960 to 951,000 in 2000. In political dialogue, most black politicians called for, and most black voters seemed to support, an ever-increasing public sector. Yet the existing public sector, which took a larger share of residents' income than almost anywhere else in the country, served citizens very poorly. Turnaround came agonizingly late in the 1990s, as Mayor Dennis Archer, elected in 1993, worked to fight crime and encourage private-sector growth. Incomes rose and the median housing value doubled from $32,000 to $63,000. The 14th Congressional District of Michigan consists of nearly half of Detroit (though not the downtown) and some disparate suburbs. Its part of Detroit is north and west of where the old auto plants were built and is mostly residential--square mile after square mile of grid streets, some always working class, some middle class, a few--Palmer Woods, Sherwood Forest, Rosedale Park--upscale. In most of them, abandoned houses and empty lots are commonplace where houses once stood, and yet in many neighborhoods, residents struggle to maintain their houses and patrol their streets. Commercial frontage on Detroit's straight-line avenues is still patchy and often vacant. Politically, this is one of the most Democratic districts in the United States. The suburbs of the 14th are diverse. Highland Park is like much of Detroit; Hamtramck still retains the flavor of its original Polish immigrants (on Fat Tuesday, this is where to find the best paczki) who made it America's fastest-growing city in 1910-20; it had 56,000 people in 1930 but only 22,000 in 2000. Redistricting considerably altered the district, adding territory to the south from John Dingell's old 16th District. The 14th District now includes most of Dearborn, including the Ford headquarters, the Ford Rouge plant and Henry Ford's Greenfield Village. Dearborn was known from the 1940s to the 1970s as an adamantly all-white town under longtime Mayor Orville Hubbard. Today it still has few blacks, but it has America's largest Arab-American community with 30% claiming Arab ancestry; you can see signs in Arabic and can find mosques and Arab community centers. There was a parade in Dearborn when the statue of Saddam Hussein fell in April 2003 and Iraqis came there to vote in January 2005. From Dearborn, the district extends south, to take in working-class suburbs--Melvindale, Allen Park, Southgate, Riverview, Trenton and Gibraltar. The last three are on the Detroit River, and the district also includes the island of Grosse Ile, a high-income community that works to keep some of its space open. The congressman from the 14th District is John Conyers, the second most senior member of the House and one of its most liberal. First elected in 1964, he is a founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, and the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. The son of a left-wing UAW operative, he grew up in Detroit. He played cornet in Northwestern and Cass Technical High Schools and, underage, watched jazz greats at Baker's Keyboard Lounge; in 1987 he passed a resolution declaring "the sense of Congress that jazz is [a] rare and valuable American national treasure." He served in the Army in Korea, practiced law and worked as a staffer for a young congressman named John Dingell. Conyers was one of six blacks in the House when first elected to Congress in 1964 and the only one to take a militant approach to politics; he won his primary, in which 60,000 votes were cast, by 108 votes. The civil rights heroine Rosa Parks, who had moved to Detroit, worked in his 1964 campaign and then worked in his Detroit office until her retirement in 1988. His response to the 1967 riots was to introduce the first bill for a guaranteed annual income. He first sponsored a Martin Luther King holiday bill days after the civil rights leader was murdered in 1968, and persevered until it passed in 1983. Since 1989 he has sponsored bills to establish a commission to examine slavery and its lingering effects, and for consideration of whether reparations should be paid to descendants of slaves. He opposed most controversial parts of the crime bills of the past three decades and welfare changes in the 1990s and calls for single-payer health plans and massive public works projects. After September 11, Conyers worked together with the new Judiciary chairman, James Sensenbrenner, on terrorism legislation. In October 2001 they agreed that the government could detain immigrants suspected of terrorism without bringing charges, but only for seven days, and they introduced the antiterrorism bill together. Conyers also worked on tightening border security. In April 2002 Sensenbrenner got Conyers's support for splitting the INS into two agencies by agreeing to add counsel positions. Conyers has also weighed in on other legislation. Conyers is the only member of the House ever to have served on two committees handling presidential impeachment, in 1974 and 1998. In May 1972, a month before the Watergate burglary, he called for impeaching Richard Nixon because of his conduct of the Vietnam War. As the hearings on Bill Clinton's impeachment opened in 1998, some Democrats were queasy about Conyers, sharing the judgment of Judiciary Committee Republican George Gekas that he was ''predictably unpredictable.'' But Conyers, the ranking Democrat, performed ably. For all his criticisms of Clinton, Conyers rallied behind him; he managed to craft an alternative investigation resolution that Republicans wouldn't accept, the start of partisan divisions on the issue. Conyers opposed the Iraq war resolution. He called for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld after revelations of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses and voted against the resolution condemning them on the grounds it was not strong enough. He argued that Justice Department regulations required a special counsel to investigate the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name. He opposed the House version of the intelligence reorganization bill and called for an investigation of John Ashcroft's 32-city tour explaining the Patriot Act. He co-sponsored Charles Rangel's bill to reinstitute the military draft and then, along with Rangel, voted against it on the floor. He co-sponsored a constitutional amendment that would make immigrants eligible for the presidency 20 years after they became citizens; this would make Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm eligible to run. He supported the city of Detroit's August 2004 referendum to legalize medical marijuana. In December 2004 he asked for an FBI investigation of election procedures into "inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering" in Hocking County, Ohio, and also asked television networks to turn over raw exit poll data. In January 2005 he said there were "massive and unprecedented voter irregularities in Ohio" and voted to challenge the Ohio electoral votes. Over the years, Conyers has mostly been re-elected without difficulty. He made two runs for mayor of Detroit, in 1989 and 1993. But he ran a desultory campaign the first time and almost no campaign the second, and came in far behind. He had two serious primary opponents in 1994, but finished well ahead of both with 51% of the vote. He suffered some unfavorable publicity in 2003 and 2004. In November 2003 the Detroit Free Press after a two-month investigation reported that Conyers and his top staffers assigned congressional staff to work on political campaigns, including the city council campaign of former staffer JoAnn Watson and Conyers's wife's state Senate campaign. In May 2004 a former Conyers staffer was indicted for defrauding sponsors of a conference on the plight of black farmers, but prosecutors said Conyers was not involved. In 2003 he had one of the highest rates of absenteeism, 20%, in the House. In spring 2004 state Senator Samuel Thomas collected signatures to run in the Democratic primary, but in May he dropped out; if he had run that would have been Conyers's first serious challenge in 10 years.
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