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The late great Maryann Mahaffey "She BAD!" by Eric Jackson A Detroiter of African extraction and black nationalist persuasion once offered this approving opinion of the late Maryann Mahaffey, the diminutive white former social worker who time and again was re-elected to the city council in an overwhelmingly black city that has at-large elections. In fact she was frequently the top vote-getter, which made her the council's president under the Detroit system. (For those of you unfamiliar with African-American dialects of English, let me translate the headline into American Standard. It means "she is audacious" or "she is brave," but more than anything, "she is very good.") So why would a black militant say this about a white politician? It might have had something to do with her habit of descending upon crack houses whose vicious dealers had the neighbors cowering behind locked doors. She'd stand out front and taunt the armed hoodlums inside, and organize civic resistance to them. But let us flash back to events before her political career to set the proper contexts for this woman and the city she served. Let us go back to World War II, when Ms. Mahaffey, having recently earned her master's degree in social work from UCLA, got a job in a US concentration camp for Japanese nationals and American citizens of Japanese descent. She was the intermediary between a fearful government and the people whom it had interned because of their ancestry, the great majority of whom had been and remained loyal Americans. She never acquired any sympathy for the Empire of Japan or any sort of fascist cause, but she did side with the inmates and did acquire a habit of opposing racism even when it was unpopular to do so. Fast forward to the summer of 1967, when Detroit may have become a majority black city but certainly had a white power structure, when the Vietnam War was raging, when Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty was perceived as mostly a failure. A black GI had just returned from Vietnam and in an upstairs apartment near 12th and Claremont his friends were throwing a welcome home party for him, charging people $3 to defray the cost of the keg of beer that was flowing. The cops raided the place for illegal alcohol sales, in the process throwing the returned soldier down a flight of stairs. A man in the green suit out in the street began to holler, someone threw a bottle at the police and in short order enraged mobs had driven the police from the streets, set fire to much of the city and looted many businesses. The national guard and federal troops were sent in, and when the flames died down and the shooting stopped the official death toll stood at 48. If the city population wasn't mostly black beforehand, now whites fled to the suburbs in droves and the demographic shift became pronounced. In the numbing depression that set in after a rebellion that destroyed so much and accomplished so little, heroin flowed freely into the veins of so many disenchanted youth and now it wasn't the armed militant with a racial agenda but the junkie with an expensive habit to feed that both black and white Detroiters had to fear. As the number of people inside the limits of Eight Mile Road declined, the number of firearms skyrocketed. In the first post-rebellion elections, Detroiters turned to a white cop, one who promised both order and justice. He really wasn't one of these "law'n'order" fascists of that epoch, but he also pretty much left the white power structure in place. In the elections after that the blacks took over City Hall, electing Coleman Young as the mayor. That 1973 vote also put Maryann Mahaffey on the city council. Coleman left a legacy that I discussed in a column a while back. Maryann left a different one. Sometimes the two of them fought, and sometimes they were the closest of allies. When Coleman became an institution, Maryann reminded everybody that even the most beloved and powerful institutions need to be held accountable. When the occasional demagogue tried to play the race card against Maryann, the real militants discounted it. The woman never let race make a difference in her decisions and made a habit of setting personalities aside, and over many issues she built the most unexpected coalitions. When Ford Auditorium was slated for the wrecking ball in favor of some insipid commercial development, there was Maryann Mahaffey working with people who hated the prospect of a riverfront landmark giving way to something ugly, with black nationalists who revered the place because Malcolm X gave one of his most famous speeches there, and with generations of Detroiters who had received their high school diplomas on the auditorium's stage. They saved Ford Auditorium. Three times Maryann Mahaffey teamed up with religious leaders both black and white, including some who were on the opposite end of the political spectrum from her, to oppose Coleman Young and defeat ballot proposals to allow casino gambling. Later, however, the gambling industry tried another gambit and you can now play the slot machines in downtown Detroit. Despite her heavily armed constituency, and all of the lies that Hollywood culture tells us about men with guns and the beautiful women who supposedly swoon over them, and the threat of political oblivion that the powerful gun lobby holds over American elected officials, Maryann Mahaffey spoke a truth that I knew from my life's worst experience. So many bereaved Detroit families knew it, and the city's emergency room doctors knew it too: having a firearm in the house makes it a more dangerous place to live, not a safer one. She, and we, lost almost all of our battles for more stringent gun controls. They were rarely even close. But the gun lobby never put any appreciable dent in Maryann's appeal to voters. I was elected to the city council in Ypsilanti, a college and auto parts town about 40 miles west of downtown Detroit, some five months after Maryann Mahaffey won her seat on Detoit's council. After two terms the voters got tired of me and decided not to keep me for a third. I felt crushed at the time but in retrospect I know they did me a big favor. Maryann's time in office lasted for decades longer than mine did. But I still remained active in local affairs and in the mid-80s we found ourselves among those who think globally and act locally, in an amorphous movement to get Michigan cities to denounce the atrocious Central American wars that the Reagan administration was fomenting. She got the Detroit city government to take that stand, and I spearheaded a ballot proposal by which the voters of Ypsilanti took that stand. It's hard to say what effect it had, but I suspect that the cumulative effect of these and many more related efforts across the USA prompted negotiated truces in lieu of US invasions in several of those countries. I noticed when Maryann stepped down from public office for health reasons --- she was an octogenarian by then and it was to be expected that she wouldn't have the energy that she once did --- but I didn't immediately learn of her death of a rare and aggressive form of leukemia on July 27. Quite fittingly, Maryann Mahaffey passed quietly to the next world and then Detroit and Michigan gave her a loud, prolonged, widespread and heartfelt ovation. That I heard, and that I join. Vaya con Dios, Maryann.
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