Colorlines Magazine: Race, Action, Culture: Forty acres, and a business district: plans for an Afric

The story of African Town is one of infant mortality. It was meant to be a black Detroit business enclave, but it died before it had a chance to live. And, like the death of any black child in a place like Detroit, the causes of African Town's demise were a combination of defects it was born with and the actions--or inaction--of those who might have nurtured it to health.

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The proposal to create a business district for entrepreneurs of African descent has divided officials, residents and activists in Detroit, Michigan, a city whose population is 82 percent African-American, according to the 2000 Census. Some call the plan racially divisive. Others say it will empower a largely disadvantaged population.

New Solutions

In June 2003, JoAnn Watson, a local activist and former executive director of the city's NAACP branch, created a task force to explore the possibility of a black business area. Newly sworn to a City Council seat she won in a special election, Watson was following up on a promise to help create more business opportunities for African Americans. Made up of local business owners, developers, investors and activists, the African Town Task Force met weekly to discuss economic growth and business development ideas for the city's residents.

Neighborhoods of black-owned businesses had existed before in the city. In the post-Black Migration, pre-Civil Rights movement days, segregation and racism left African-American Detroiters with little choice but to build and patronize local small businesses in the areas where they lived. This created places like Paradise Valley, a collection of entertainment-oriented businesses such as nightclubs, along with small shops, restaurants, hair salons, funeral homes, doctors' offices, law firms and other businesses on the near southeast side, home to several thriving African-American neighborhoods.

But then came a combination of changes, beginning in the late 1960s.

White residents left the city in dramatic numbers, as more black families moved in. The auto industry, which had put Detroit on the map, began moving factories and workers out of the city in the 1970s. Having once attracted black families from the South with the promise of jobs, the carmakers were now following whites out of Detroit. A series of freeway projects cut through old, established African-American neighborhoods. Paradise Valley fell victim to the Chrysler Freeway. Like the other freeways, the Chrysler allowed commuting by mostly white, suburban residents to and from jobs in downtown Detroit.

Meanwhile, in 1973, the city celebrated electing its first African-American mayor, hoping that the browning of Detroit would begin a new era of African-American political and economic power.

But by the 1980s, black prosperity was undermined by a dropping population and high unemployment. City leaders promised solutions, but many of them involved gentrifying poor neighborhoods. Some of the business development was actually City Hall helping large corporations open offices downtown. Meanwhile, retailers and others opened stores and other businesses on the outer edges of the city, taking advantage of cheap land and city tax breaks, while seeking to attract suburban customers and investors.

These changes did little for most residents. And by the 1990s, the population of the city was falling to below one million and was about 90 percent African-American.

Today, Detroit consists mostly of quiet residential areas with active block clubs and owner-occupied homes, and places that used to be like that. The worst of them are crumbling and home to poor families and high crime. New development, including sports stadiums, townhouses and office buildings, thrives downtown, which is also dotted with boarded-up high- and low-rise buildings.

By the new millennium, Detroit desperately needed new solutions.

A Majority Minority

Claud Anderson is what some might call a controversial figure. A businessman and native of Detroit, he's probably best known for his self-published books Black Labor, White Wealth and PowerNomics: The National Plan to Empower Black America. He's straightforward and engaging in his appeal: black America needs to invest money in black America. As he told one magazine, "You can now marry whites, attend their schools and be in their culture and community. So what they did is make you a guest in everything they own. But, you don't own anything. You didn't own anything when you were a slave, now you don't own anything when you're integrated." That might sound right on target, but where Anderson has sparked some fury is in spreading the blame from whites to immigrants.

The Detroit City Council should have known what it was paying for when it hired Anderson at the end of 2003 to create an economic development plan for Detroit. Even if it did not know, Anderson's position would soon become clear. Two months after he was hired, his Washington, D.C.-based think tank, Harvest Institute, issued a statement opposing any increase in immigration and President Bush's proposed guest worker program. Among other things, the statement read, "Immigration's impact on native Blacks and their communities is disproportionate, direct and devastating."

Anderson ultimately included these types of comments in the report he produced for Detroit last summer, titled, "A Powernomics Economic Development Plan for Detroit's Under-Served Majority Population." In it, Anderson described the economic and political situation in Detroit and outlined the challenges to business growth in the city. He proposed an inner-city business district that would include a mix of restaurants, factories, retail shops, specialty stores and service-oriented businesses. The district would be on at least 40 acres, located near downtown, with good surface roads and access to the major expressways.

By most standards, it was an ordinary report: it outlined the issue, pointed out effects of the problem and specified a solution with descriptions of how it could be carried out. Where it diverged was in describing Latinos, who make up five percent of the city's population, as "legal and illegal Hispanics" that have benefitted from being thought of, and in some cases legally identified, as white. It also accuses Latinos of aggressively demanding local political appointments to "spacehold political power until their population numbers are large enough to directly elect representatives." Anderson also observes in the report that he and the City Council are not against any group, but that "for blacks, immigration has always had negative consequences."

In July 2004, the nine-member City Council discussed the plan and passed resolutions supporting two parts of it. One resolution agreed with Anderson's assessment that African Americans in Detroit were a "majority-minority" and underserved population. The second resolution called for the creation of a quasi-public development corporation. This corporation would administer a program of grants and low-interest loans to the city's African-American population who start or own existing manufacturing, industrial and retail businesses. The initial funding was proposed to come from the revenues of the city's three casinos.

"I see it as an economic tool for affirmative action," says Maryann Mahaffey, a white, long-time Detroit resident and president of the City Council, who voted for the funding plan. "We're a majority minority community, and there's no question that we're desperately in need of economic development capital for African Americans." Among the next steps were discussions of planning and zoning aspects of the plan. But it never got that far.

City Council member Sheila Cockrel, another white Detroiter, voted against the funding proposal. "There should be something that celebrates Detroit's African-American community," she says. "But I am against saying that one group of people should benefit at the expense of another."

Racial Spin-doctoring

The resolutions never became the real subject of the heated debate that ensued in Detroit. Much of the criticism was focused on Anderson and the Harvest Institute report itself. The city's daily newspapers describe him as a businessman bitter over his failure to get a contract to open a casino in Detroit several years earlier, when the city touted gambling halls as a means of revitalization. Detractors of his plan complained that the proposal blamed Asian, Middle Eastern and Latino immigrants for taking opportunities away from black residents, and that the report itself was divisive.

"The tone of the document is filled with anti-immigrant sentiment, which is dangerous to any economic development plan," says Sheila Cockrel.

Yet, at times, the report vacillates between blaming immigrants and placing them on a pedestal. Anderson writes that immigrant communities have a tendency to "aggregate with their own people within their own communities and promote their own group self-interest." This, he argues, has allowed them to sustain business enclaves like Chinatown and Mexicantown. Conversely, Anderson suggests, integration and the dispersing of African-American communities has kept blacks from doing the same as other communities of color.

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City Council members point out that they did not pass resolutions condoning or accepting anti-immigrant statements. "Anderson is anti-immigrant," admits Council member Maryann Mahaffey, "but we didn't put that part in [the resolution]. We didn't adopt his whole report."

That seemed to matter very little, as did having dialogue on economic development for black Detroit. Even City Council members, who presumably read the report and understood the resolutions on which they voted, seemed more invested in surface arguments about race rather than moving ahead with an economic plan. Kay Everett, a black City Council member who voted against the funding plan, took it as far as to call the proposal of a black business area "reverse racism." She wrote an editorial in one of the daily newspapers expressing concern for her grandson, writing that his Arab parent might disqualify him from projects like African Town. The local newspapers also had a field day, exploiting tensions among Detroit's communities of color. The Detroit Free Press, one of the city's two daily newspapers, ran several stories, including one headlined, "Detroit council OKs plan that touts racial separation." The Detroit News produced similar articles, including an editorial titled "Council Embraces Racism as a Development Strategy."

"The spin doctors got to it," says Bankole Thompson, a Nigerian immigrant and reporter for the Michigan Citizen. "Because of the stories that came out in the Free Press that said African Town was racist and all this kind of stuff, we took a different angle. After all, nobody goes to [the Detroit suburbs in] Oakland County and complains about all the businesses going to whites."

The Michigan Citizen featured interviews with African Americans, African immigrants, Arabs, and Latinos who were in favor of the plan, along with legal and economic experts who proposed ways to overcome legal and other challenges to creating African Town. Letters to the editor in response were largely positive.

Mahaffey says that supporting ethnic business districts in Detroit with tax abatements, inexpensive property and other assistance is not without precedents. City government, she notes, has "poured money into Chinatown in the past, and we've put money into Greektown and Mexicantown. We're in desperate need of economic development capital for African Americans. This was an effort to do that."

Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese American and longtime Detroit community activist, is working with a group to restart Chinatown. But she also supports African Town. Boggs, who has a column in the Michigan Citizen, wrote, "I believe that Detroiters who oppose the plan for favoring blacks are stuck in a kind of racial thinking which keeps them from recognizing that a more productive and entrepreneurial role for the black majority population of Detroit would make the city better for everybody."

But at the end of September, a group of Asians, Arabs and Latinos protested the plan's anti-immigrant words at the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center, where city and county government offices are housed. Meanwhile, others went to City Council chambers in October to support the creation of African Town and urged supporters on the City Council not to back down.

Anderson, who declined to be interviewed for this article, defended his plan at the time. "The biggest problem in the city of Detroit," he told the Detroit Free Press, "is black leaders and white leaders who continue to use and hide behind the myth of a color-blind and race-neutral society and use it as an excuse not to deal with this dilemma. There are special problems unique to black folks, and the city needs to address their problems."

After the two resolutions were passed by the City Council, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick vetoed the one on loans and grants. He believed that it would establish a city-funded institution that would lend or grant money only to African Americans. "As such," Kilpatrick wrote in his veto statement, "individuals would be treated differently based on racial classification." He added that since this would be in violation of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the new corporation would not withstand inevitable federal scrutiny.

Lost in a Tangle

African Town's supporters went back to the drawing board. On October 18, 2004, the City Council approved, in a 5-4 vote, a new resolution to research the legalities and others challenges of implementing such a plan, such as the potential for discrimination. It also cancelled the creation of the loan and grant program outlined in the previous proposal. In addition, the new resolution acknowledges the contributions of other minorities and immigrants.

"There's a way to do this that would be legal, but it all gets tangled up in the politics of race," says Mahaffey. "I don't think anybody anticipated this kind of reaction."

All agree that any new plan is up against problems inherent to a city that, despite some new development, remains devastated by decades of economic decline. The 2000 Census showed 26 percent of Detroit residents to be living below the poverty line, over twice the national rate of 12 percent. And unemployment rates in Detroit have averaged about 14 percent this year.

Ultimately, after all the nasty headlines and editorials, the city's attention has been diverted. Councilmember Kay Everett, dogged by a scandal involving financial improprieties and facing indictment, died of diabetes complications in December. Mayor Kilpatrick has been involved in financial scandals of his own, the most recent involving the city-funded lease of an SUV for his wife. And Detroit's city government now faces a deficit in the hundreds of millions of dollars, which may result in layoffs of city workers and cuts in services such as public transportation. And as the city's population falls back to 1950s numbers, it must grapple with possibly losing state and federal funding even as it maintains high rates of poverty and unemployment.

This puts African Town on the back burner. Rather than leading to a meaningful discussion on economic development for black Detroiters, the most adamant supporters of the plan have taken a different course. The African American Task Force has now met with the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, a group of business owners, corporations and political leaders that grassroots activists charge with gentrifying Detroit.

Anderson, meanwhile, declined an interview request, saying through a spokesperson that certain issues have to be resolved before he will go on the record. Immigrant groups including La Sed, a Latino social service organization, and the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services also did not return phone calls for this article. Watson, who first called for the African Town Task Force, declined a direct interview. Her director of cultural affairs, Mutope Al-Kebulan, responded to written questions about African Town with a statement blaming the lack of support on "elements of self-hatred and ... behaviors that create a tragic trade deficit in the City of Detroit."

Leah Samuel is a Detroit native and journalist now living in Pittsburgh.