Hold your applause, hold your nose

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By Joel Thurtell

Beethoven was correct: Self-coronations are disgusting affairs, full of arrogance, deceit, cunning and unbridled ambition.

In 1803, the composer genius was ready to dedicate his 3rd Symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte when the First Consul of France placed a crown on his own head and declared himself Emperor.

Revolted, Beethoven named his symphony “Eroica,” or “Heroic.”

There was nothing heroic about the 20-page special section the Detroit Free Press published Friday, September 5, 2008 dedicated solely to skewering Detroit’s mayor over and over and trumpeting — using a chorus of like-minded columnists — the newspaper’s self-perceived victory in driving Kwame Kilpatrick from office.

Underlying those 20 pages of self-adulation was an editorial assumption that the newspaper’s vendetta against Kwame Kilpatrick was justified by the mayor’s pleas of guilty to felony charges in the text message scandal. Good work, Freepsters: Your efforts at corralling support for the mayor’s ouster paid off. Your 20-page screed of triumph will no doubt persuade the Pulitzer Prize judges that your journalism had a profound impact on the course of history in Detroit and Michigan.

It had an impact, but it’s less certain where the city and state will go from here. If you want to read a balanced and insightful report on the mayor’s downfall, take a look at the August 5, 2008 New York Times story, which delves into the racism and black-white tensions implicit in  the Kilpatrick demouement. You won’t read about that in the Free Press.

The Times article, by Susan Saulny and Nick Bunkley, noted something that seemed to fall between the lines printed on those 20 pages of Free Press coverage — that several Detroit City Council members may be indicted on bribery charges related to a city sludge contract.

The Free Press also has a hard time choking up any credit to Kwame for his accomplishments. On the other hand, the Times quoted a historian of Detroit, Michael Smith, remarking that Mayor Kilpatrick had done good things in Detroit: “If you drove over the city 10 years ago and now, you’d see many points of evidence that indeed there are good things going on in Detroit. The sad thing is, Kwame Kilpatrick was becoming a good mayor and making some progress. He had a brilliant future.”

A “good mayor”? “Making progress”? That would be news to Detroit-based newspapers and the white suburbanites who mainly read them.

The Times writers themselves add, “Much of the new enthusiasm in downtown Detroit is credited to Mr. Kilpatrick, a charismatic leader who brought a high level of energy and expectations to office when he was elected for the first time in 2001 at just 31 years old. With new attractions along a redeveloped riverfront, fresh business investment downtown and new housing in the city core, things seemed to be moving in the right direction.”

The Times writers mined perceptive insights from a University of Michigan political science professor who talked about the racial dimension of Kwamegate. That is a specter for the region, but it’s hard for local media to grasp. It’s especially hard for Free Press staffers to understand, even though the paper was knwon to many black Detroiters as “the racist Free Press” because of the paper’s antebellum support for slavery and its editorially racist approach to news in the early 20th century.

According to University of Michigan Prof. Vincent Hutchings, the politically-forced outcome “plays to some of the stereotypes about the city, that it is corrupt and has issues with crime and various social ills. The elephant in the room is the issue of race. There is an urban core-suburban conflict, which is also a black-white conflict.”

I watched Kwame plead guilty on a big-screen television behind the counter of a store in Plymouth. There were no black faces in the room. Well, hardly any black people live in Plymouth. The mood of the onlookers was jubilant, if muted. I was in another Plymouth shop last week, and the owner wasn’t muffling her view that Kwame deserved whatever he gets — look at those cuffs on his shirt — why, he’s got “MAYOR” embroidered on them!

If you’d been a black person in one of those Plymouth shops, I suspect you’d have been pretty uncomfortable. Detroiters may or may not be ambivalent about their mayor, but one thing is sure — they had no say in his ouster. That was stage-managed by the Michigan governor and attorney general, both of whom are white. Journalists are calling Kwame’s guilty pleas “historic,” and I believe part of that historical moment will be the race of the people who forced him to plead.

That is a historic fact that will not be forgotten.

Prof. Hutchings recognizes it, noting that Kwame’s “successor would still have to grapple with the endemic problems associated with living in such a segregated state.”

What does he mean by “segregated”? Well, take a look at the demographics of Detroit, a city that is 80-plus percent black surrounded with suburbs that are overwhelmingly white. The few that are not white have their own stories. Inkster is mixed, but in fact it is segregated with blacks living in the southwest corner because that was one of the few places blacks were allowed to buy property in the early 20th century when people of all races were migrating to Detroit for auto factory jobs. Ditto Royal Oak Township. Garden City — a white town — once upon a time had signs at its borders that warned black people to stay out. In Sumpter Township, also segregated by deed restrictions that excluded blacks, black people could buy land in teh swampy southern area. A black township official told me of how he installed fence posts around his property in the 1930s with an uncle — one man digging and the other standing nearby with a shotgun for fear of being attacked by angry white homeowners.

If you don’t believe this area is segregated, check the demographics of towns like Northville, Plymouth, Birmingham, Bloomfield Township, Farmington Hills, Livonia and on and on. Note that the governor is from Northville Township and the attorney general from Livonia.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Attorney General Mike Cox will be long out of office when the memory of how two white elected officials pincered a black Detroit mayor out of office lives on. Five years from now, when Kwame Kilpatrick is allowed to run again for public office, that memory will be ripe for stoking. But it may not take that long. There may be other black Detroiters ready soon to ignite that image.

The best thing the Free Press published in its 20-page monument to self-congratulation was a short essay by Wayne State University law Prof. Robert Sedler, who along with attorney Godfrey Dillard tried to defend Kilpatrick from being removed by the Detroit City Council and the governor.

I’d like to link my site to that Sedler essay, but I can’t find it on freep.com. Instead, I’ll quote in part from what Sedler wrote:

“In our constitutional system, we elect our officials, and Kwame Kilpatrick was elected mayor of Detroit by the citizens of Detroit. The Detroit city charter and state law provide for recall of elected officials by the voters. It takes only 57,000 signatures of Detroit citizens to get a recall petition on the ballot. Despite the intensity of the pressure to remove the mayor, his opponents were unable to gather those signatures.

“I am a constitutional lawyer, not a pollster. Kilpatrick may or may not have continued to retain the support of Detroit citizens. But in constitutional theory, the absence of a recall petition means that the citizens of Detroit did not want to remove him as mayor. It is their choice, not the choice of the media or the residents of the suburbs.”

Sedler remarks that he and Dillard persuaded Wayne County Circuit Judge Robert Ziolkowski that the City Council’s plan to hold a “forfeiture” hearing to dump the mayor was a violation of the city charter. Council then turned to Granholm, asking the governor to remove Kwame under what Sedler called a “very old and little-used provision of state law giving the governor power to remove local officials for ‘official misconduct.’ ”

Cox meanwhile charged Kilpatrick with assault, accusing him of attacking a process server. Cox and Granholm were the hammers and Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy was the anvil with her charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in the text message saga. And the Free Press was right in the middle, beating its drum about the city’s mayoral crisis.

Prof. Sedler writes that having pleaded guilty to felonies, Kwame “cannot be the mayor, because he has pleaded guilty to felony crimes and thus is disqualified.”

I disagree with his conclusion that “the legal process, working in its slow and deliberate way, has succeeded in removing Kwame Kilpatrick as mayor. We should see this result as a tribute to the strength of the legal process.”

Frankly, I see the result as a tribute to the power of a newspaper whose daily attacks made a fair trial for Kilpatrick unlikely. Powerful politicians, emboldened, used an archaic law to get rid of an inconvenient mayor without having to risk having him being acquitted by a Wayne County jury.

It is a victory for those institutions and politicians who sought his removal. We’ll see how long it takes for the racial undercurrents to rise to the surface of Michigan politics.

But here is something for the Pulitzer judges to ponder: The Free Press is not well-read in Detroit. It’s not because Detroiters are holding their noses, either. It’s because there are vast areas of Detroit where the Free Press simply is not delivered. The decision to cut Detroit was made by the newspaper’s owner, Gannett, not the readers.

For years, long before Gannett bought the Free Press from Knight-Ridder, the paper has been turning its back on Detroiters.

Wonder why? Don’t Detroiters buy newspapers?

To the Detroit dailies, Detroit is a poor city with few businesses that spend money on advertising. Detroit isn’t the only place that is red-lined by the newspaper. I remember in the 1990s when the Free Press was making a big drive for circulation in Oakland County, Michigan’s wealthiest. The Free Press city editor instructed me, as a reporter, to cover the Bloomfields — Bloomfield Hills, Bloomfield Township and West Bloomfield Township — which he called “the money belt.”

What about Pontiac? I asked. Pontiac is poor and largely black.

No to Pontiac, the editor said. No money there.

I used to cover Downriver for the Free Press. “Downriver” is an expression originally referring to communities south of Detroit and facing the Detroit River. It’s taken a broader meaning over time, but it’s certain that the first Downriver community heading south from Detroit is River Rouge and the second one is Ecorse, both poor, racially-mixed towns just south of Detroit. They’re the home of a sprawling, grit-spewing steel mill. I was not allowed to write about River Rouge and Ecorse for our Downriver suburban sections. Not enough advertisers, I was told. The list of economically downscale communities excluded from Free Press coverage is long, and though the biggest ones are in Detroit, not all are black or racially mixed:  Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, Inkster, Westland and several other communities were scratched from editorial coverage in the suburban editions because their businesses failed to spend enough on advertising.

Keep in mind, though, that no matter how downtrodden your community, if it has an ax murder, the Free Press will cover it.

Prof. Hutchings is correct — segregation is deeply engraved in Michigan culture.

By excluding some communities from coverage and refusing to deliver papers to them, the newspapers create their own form of segregation.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com