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341 “Rebuilding Detroit: An Alternative to Casino Gambling” is the text of remarks made during a public speakout concerning a ballot proposal to allow casino gambling in the city of Detroit. The event took place at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in Detroit on June 24, 1988. Rebuilding Detroit:An Alternative to Casino Gambling Monday night I went to the graduation for one of my grandsons in Ford Auditorium at which Mayor Young was the main speaker. The student who introduced Young said, with a smile, that he was the only mayor she had ever known. Young then said in the same joking vein that maybe some students should come back in ten years and run for mayor because by then he would probably have retired. Everyone laughed, but it is no joking matter. The sad truth is that his honor has been mayor for so long he thinks he owns the town and seems to have forgotten that the people elected him and may one day retire him before his vision of Detroit leads us into even deeper chaos. Coleman Young was elected mayor of Detroit fifteen years ago because the city was majority black and the time had come for a black mayor. Also, blacks were furious with STRESS,* the decoy system that the Gribbs administration had created to catch street criminals. When he was elected, Young had no program for stopping crime. All he could propose in his inaugural speech was that the criminals should hit Eight Mile Road. But he did have a dream, the dream that he could get the corporations to stay in Detroit by bribing them with tax abatements. Today Young’s dream has turned into a nightmare. Crime has not hit Eight Mile Road,† but industry has. Parke-Davis, Stroh’s, the Mack Ave. Chrysler plant are all gone. Young promised us 6,000 jobs if we allowed him to bulldoze 1,500 homes, 600 businesses, and 6 churches for a new GM plant in Poletown. Today our taxes are still going to pay for Poletown, but there have never been more than 2,500 workers at the Poletown plant and most of those are from GM plants that have been closed down in other parts of the city, creating a wasteland in once thriving communities, especially on the southwest side of the city. At the same time the east side around the Chrysler Jefferson plant has been bulldozed so that it looks like a moonscape. Despite protests small businesses have been forced to leave, as in Poletown. *The acronym for Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets, a police unit begun in 1971 as a secretive, elite section of the Detroit Police Department’s undercover assault squads. In its first thirty months, STRESS officers conducted five hundred raids without search warrants and killed twenty people. —Ed. † Eight Mile Road serves as one of the city’s borders, separating Detroit from its northern suburbs. During his inaugural address,Young declared: “I issue a warning to all those pushers, to all rip-off artists, to all muggers: It’s time to leave Detroit; hit Eight Mile Road!”—Ed. Ward.indb 341 12/21/10 9:28 AM Part IV 342 The reason Coleman Young’s dream has turned into a nightmare is that it was based on the illusion that we can bring back the good old days when Detroit was the auto capital of the world and hundreds of thousands of workers came to the city to do manufacturing jobs at the decent pay that had been won through the organization of the union. But today cars are being built all over the world, not only in Japan and West Germany but in South Korea and Yugoslavia, and multinational corporations have exported manufacturing jobs to the third world where they can make more profit through cheaper labor. Coleman Young knows, as we all do, that large-scale industry is not coming back to Detroit. That’s why he is now calling casino gambling an “industry ” and trying to force it down our throats, promising us it will bring 50,000 to 80,000 jobs, as the auto industry once did. The workers, who came to Detroit during World War II, particularly from the South, had a lot of hope. They also brought with them a sense of family and a sense of community or of people living in harmony with one another. Working in the plant, they developed a sense of solidarity, at...

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