There was resistance in the police department. Some people are old enough to remember one picture in Newsweek of an off duty Detroit cop at white cops picket over affirmative action, squaring off with and pulling his gun at a black cop. There was one report of one black officer’s wife being sexually assaulted in a precinct. I was driving down Mack Avenue one night and on a black radio station there was an emergency bulletin put out from the Michigan Guardians, which was an organization of all-black police officers in the state for representation since the DPO was still white-dominated. I never found out what it was for, but you can see that people were listening to and watching the tension.

You had fascist involvement in all of this. You had a long history of racism in Michigan. Wallace carried the white working class vote when he ran. In 1919/1920 the Klan came just a few votes from winning office in Michigan and they weren’t even on the ballot in a write in campaign. You had the race riots in the 1940s with whites attacking blacks. A whole history of racial violence. You had the hate strike at Packard Motors in the 1940s against black upgrading. So none of these racist attitudes were surprising.

A number of Klan and Nazi were involved in the harassment and violence on the west and northwest side. In the Harper area a Catholic fascist group called Breakthrough were involved. They were a major force on the northeast side. They defended some of the cops in some of the police brutality cases. During the Central American solidarity period they would attack and smash up support group movie showings at Wayne State. That was all part of the transition.

On the economic side, I referred earlier to the closing of the Chrysler plants and the capital flight. There was also massive white flight. The city’s population peaked in the 1950s at 2 million; right now we are somewhere just below 900,000. This shows you what kind of decline has happened here. In the 1940s this city had a housing shortage, now there are just empty spaces. Trees and weeds are taking over. With this you had shrinkage of the tax base and pressure on city services for those left behind. The city has an income tax which a lot of cities don’t. Compared to cities that do, it’s one of the highest in the nation. For those who have stayed and have jobs, they are being taxed higher and higher to maintain declining services.

NB: Could you talk more about that emerging suburban and city divide? What was the liberal response to this crisis you were just talking about? What was the response of the black working class to this transition?

Ermler: I think the fact that a black government was in power for that period of time, carrying out a total transformation of city departments and the police, given how bad Detroit has been for such a long time from the 1974-1975 recession, a lot of unemployment, and another bad recession came in 1979-82, prevented more rebellions.

In the early 1990s there were a lot of police killings of people. Without the black police and city officials there would have been more of an explosion. There were some localized explosions. Over on Livernois and Fenkell the cops were protecting somebody who executed a young car burglar and the police defended him in his bar. That turned into a rebellion. Youth that were rounded up were put on trial for a death that happened during the riot. The Livernois Five they were called.

We helped build the Livernois Five defense. They weren’t convicted. No one else on the left wanted to touch it. They didn’t want to touch it because the guy who died was a white guy—a concentration camp survivor. A number of the Maoist groups were interested but they didn’t want to be in the same arena as us. The CLP threw their weight in, providing one of their best attorneys. But the point is that there is a thing here where one of the lessons of the 60s rebellion was “what did we get out of it.” Much of the black neighborhoods got burned down.

Younger generations though, with the police killings in the early 1990s are a little more rebellious. But the fact that they are confronted with a black power structure has made sure that nothing has been a major flash point. A lot of people may‘ve heard of the Malice Green murder. In that case the guy was killed by two white cops in an arrest that got brutally out of control. During that same period black cops had killed a number of young black youth. Sections of the city and the juridical apparatus came together. The focus was on that case and there wasn’t a lot of press coverage of the other cases. Of course, this started a counter white rightwing movement of police families, but it kept the black community’s attention on that one case and many were kept in the dark about these other killings. I did run into a angry community march coming from one of the funerals of those killed and a lot of youth stopped traffic on Michigan Avenue. There was that with the transition. It’s kept the lid on to a certain degree, but how much longer is a whole other thing.

The other thing that has shaped up in the city and suburban divide is the multi-racial suburbs, but you still have an overwhelming black city and suburban areas with whole sections of them doing rather well. Oakland county is one the most economically well-off counties in the nation. If you ride around out there a number of businesses were part of the white flight.

This divide is playing a factor in the issues around mass transit. The city has an abysmal record here and the whole region really does. But the system is under attack in the suburbs. Whole sections don’t want to foot the tax bill, even though it’s a small portion of their taxes. The whole attitude is I have a car why do I have to spend money on this. There is also racist reasons for this. There have been serious outbreaks and mass meetings for cutting mass transit because it brings black workers out there for retail jobs. The businesses want it though. The NAACP and unions want it as part of having a metro transit. But suburban politicians say we don’t use it so we don’t want it. The retailers aren’t listened to in this case.

It has also divided, in the broadest sense the left, union and religious groups. One of the main movers behind getting a decent transit system—on an anti-union basis—is a religious group called MOSES (Metropolitan Organizing Strategies) and they have grown in strength a multiracial coalition of various church bodies. They have been anti-war and played a role in organizing the recent major immigrant demonstrations. Even prior to it becoming a big national issue they organized in the suburbs defending immigrants. A lot of the immigration population is in the suburbs.

Stuff has come up here where the bus drivers union for the city are on two different sides of the issue. The bus mechanics have done things to sabotage plans moving to regional transit because they are worried about their own conditions in the plan. The drivers have been for it for their own reasons. We have this situation where forces that should be united on projects for economic well-being and services can’t even come up eye-to-eye on a plan. Some say that the forces that are involved in advocating this regional transit is part of a suburban plot but people don’t realize it’s multiracial.

Everyone has banked on a conservative strategy. The broader union and labor movement here hasn’t come together and in an aggressive fashion put together pro-worker and pro-poor programs and along with more liberal forces which, in these cases, are usually left to the Right or corporate forces to come up with the plans. The unions and the Left leave themselves to simply respond. It’s a demoralizing strategy. In the case of trying to regionalize the water department, it’s coming from the Right in the suburbs. Also in education the decentralization of it is a problem. Regionalizing the educational system would make it so that the wealthier suburbs and the poorer city would be tapping into the same sources. The whiter and wealthier suburbs don’t want that. No one is even touching this problem.

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