Page 4-Thursday, January 10, 1980-The Michigan Daily
Ninety Years of Editorial Freedom
Vol. XC, No. 81 News Phone: 764-0552
Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan
American foreign policy
at the crossroads
Detroit-A segregate
integrates in under a
Detroit then .. .
1
d city
decade
N THE LAST month, American foreign
policy has ridden the crest of two
miajor crises in Iran and Afghanistan,
and has arrived, after a long and ar-
juous journey, at the crossroads.
President Jimmy Carter told a
reporter that the Soviets' invasion of
its soverign moslem neighbor-a
naked act of aggression unparallelled
Since the Czekoslovakian invasion a
decade earlier-has forced him to
reassess his opinions of the Soviets and
their motivations. The President's
candid admission of reappraisals
reveals the tragedy of the Soviets and
their motivations. The President's
%iandid admission of reappraisal
reveals the tragedy of the Afghan in-
vasion: erasing years of U.S./Soviet
cooperation with a regressive move to
cold war confrontation. This return of
the adverse relationship between the
superpowers has derailed cooperative
efforts in technological exchange and
Arms limitation that were decades in
coming.
To wholly blame the Soviets for set-
ting detente back 30 years is too sim-
ple; it ignores the political reality of a
myriad of past mistakes and conflic-
ting signals. But to use this new Afghan
crisis as vindication for the hardline
policies of Henry Kissinger and
Zbigniew Brzezinski would be just as
unfair to those who sincerely believed
that the United States could shape a
peaceful coexistence with the Soviet
Union.
The Carter administration is indeed
responsible for sending the Soviets the
wrong signals, and making them
believe that the Afghan invasion would
be tolerated in the same way the ad-
ininistration tolerated the Angolan
oray, the Soviet expansionism in the
horn of Africa, and the "discovery" of
troops in Cuba. Mr. Carter only
shrugged, and pressed on with his
commitment to cooperative arms
limitation and his pledge never to use
food as a weapon in foreign policy.
In a speech at Annapolis, Md. in 1978,
Mr. Carter defined his new American
foreign policy as one which would seek
cooperation and competition-
cooperation on arms control,
Qn cultural and technological ex-
change, and on food, with political,
economical, and ideological com-
petition for the hearts and minds of the
non-aligned. According to this new
definition, the cooperative aspects of
the dual relationship need not be
disturbed even while the two super-
powers competed on the same terms
by the same rules. One of those rules
forbade the use of direct military in-
tervention beyond either nation's own
borders.
It is not only Mr. Carter's naivity
that led him to believe that the Soviets
would play by the rules; it was, ac-
tually, the blind optimism expressed
by an entire nation tired of the ex-
cesses of Vietnam and ready, finally,
for cooperation over conflict. Vietnam
made us weary of the conflict, but the
Kremlin leaders have shown that they
still desire a fight. Our olive branch of-
fering has been shot down by Soviet
MIGs over the skies of Kabul.
So this brings American foreign
policy to a crossroads. The Carter ad-
ministration was making a break from-
the Nixon-Kissinger policies of the
past-by promoting human rights,
easing the spread of American
military arms to the third world,
showing restraint in response to Soviet
expansionism; and halting
proliferation. To that last end, the ad-
ministration even stopped military aid
to Pakistan, which was experimenting
with its own nuclear device.
Now that Kremlin leaders have
demonstrated that they are not content
with this new American world role and
that they will take advantage of this
country's restraint as a sign of
weakness. They will not cooperate.
Mr. Carter said he has come to
reassess his opinion of the Soviet
leaders. Sadly, such a reassessment is
in order. Cooperation, as one may
recall being told, is a two-way street.
The Soviets have broken the ground
rules and expanded their sphere of in-
fluence through direct military for-
ce-they have colonized a sovereign
state. They must pay a price.
The measures the Carter ad-
ministration has instituted for
retribution are both effective and
symbolic, and demonstrate to the
Soviets that the U.S. will not tolerate
another breech of the rules of
coexistence. The sad part-the
tragedy-is that for the retribution to
be effective, the cooperative measures
must also end. Cooperative measures
like SALT II, that were in the best in-
terests for all people.
The Soviet leadership must realize
that the U.S. will not continue to
cheerfully cooperate with smiling fac-
e on the one side, while getting kicked
squarely in the derriere on the other.
The administration optimistically
tried to break from the past American
practice of responding to every Soviet
adventure and linking cooperative
aspects of detente with global com-
petition. To that end, from the Horn of
Africa to Cuba, we turned the other
cheek, and the Soviets took advantage
to slap us on the other.
Cooperation, must end, at least
temporarily, even though that
means delaying badly-needed arms
limitation. And for forcing the ad-
ministration to do that, the Soviets are
guilty of a far greater crime than in-
vading Afghanistan.
... and now
0
By Frank Viviano
DETROIT-In the brief span of eight years,
one of the nation's segregated cities has
become what may be its most thoroughly in-
tegrated one.
For the half-century since black Americans
emigrated north to this industrial
metropolis, Detroit has been a divided com-
munity. Three distinct cities surrounded its
small downtown commerical center. The first
was almost entirely black, poor, and
deteriorating. The third was exclusively
white and relatively comfortable. Between
them was a "transitional neighborhood"
where For Sale signs outnumbered residents
as the expanding black population sent whites
fleeing to the suburbs.
That was still the picture as recently as
1972, and many of the social problems which
generated hostilities between Detroit's two,
racial communities continue to plague the
city. The economy is undiversified and
unhealthy, with the number of jobs falling at
nearly twice the rate of a population decline
which has been underway for thirty years.
Unemployment among black teenagers is
estimated at 40 per cent. If the failing
Chrysler Corporation is not revived, the
economic prospects will be bleaker yet.
Municipal services have been severely cut
back. The schools are in rough shape and the
mass transit system barely limps along.
NEVERTHELESS, DETROITERS' spirits
are fairly upbeat, in no small measure
because the physical boundaries between
black and white citizens have crum-
bled-peacefully-almost overnight. Today,
says one prominent local official, "You would
be hard pressed to find a solidly white or
black neighborhood inside the corporate
limits of the city."
How has it happened-and how has it hap-
pened so quickly?
The story may surprise many observers of
the racial scene in the United States, for it has
nothing much to do with federal intervention
or bureaucratic fiat. In effect, Detroit has
changed itself, thorugh a combination of
economic and social processes, the election of
a black majority government to bi-racial
rule, and a fundamental transformation of its
police and criminal court systems.
The most striking sign of change has been a
vast reduction in the number of white
Detroiters abandoning the city, along with a
notable increase in those deciding to return.
Generally speaking, this is not the process of
"gentrification" in which an affluent middle
class has reclaimed picturesque neigh-
borhoods from poor blacks in such cities as
Q4in Prnekn a~~ndi'l adge1nhia TDetroit's
haven't regretted it for a moment."
Staying in the city, according to FHA ex-
pert Tom Carey, meant "being able to buy a
solid, three-bedroom brich home in a pleasant
neighborhood for $15,000." In short, the logic
of the marketplace helped bring white flight
to a halt.
What makes that development even more
noteworthy is the long, grim history which
preceded it. Race relations in this city had
been tense alomst incessently since 1943,
when a disastrous riot left 34 dead and
brought U.S. combat troops away from the
war zones to quell racial conflict at home. The
basic issue then, as it was to be over the
following three decades, was housing: blacks
moving into a largely Slavic neighborhood on
the north side.
And when fighting broke out between the
new residents and whites- organized to prevent
their move, the response also became p
precedent: white police-and later, white
soldiers-were sent in by white officials to
protect white property. It was a pattern
which would govern a great deal of the Motor
City's subsequent evolution.
OVER THE NEXT 20 years, black
Detroit continued to expand, and white
Detroit to flee that expansion, in such num-
bers that the city lost 650,000 citizens, a
population the size of San Francisco's, bet-
ween 1950 and 1970. But like the police,
soldiers, and politicians who first confronted
intense black resentment in 1943, official
Detroit remained white.
The late Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh made
belated efforts to integrate city ad-
ministration after 1965, but his efforts were
too little, too late. In July, 1967, Detroit erup-
ted again. More than 1,200 homes were
destroyed, 43 people died, thousands were
arrested. The center of the city was a
smoking ruin.
The pace of white flight increased
dramatically. Everyone seemed to be moving
in 1970: white Detroiters to the suburbs,
blacks into the neighborhoods they aban-
doned, and out of an inner city where
deterioration had become even more
pronounced)hanks to a bungled federal urban
renewal program which left 30,000 houses
vacant and boarded up.
But 1970 marked the nadir in Detroit's
racial history, and in the very midst of its
ntt fl r f , 0en , nifirnn+now., ...a. n A .uns n e
"The state has one bite at the apple,"
Crockett argued, "and if the police see fit to
impose a punishment, that's all the punish-
ment there will be."
The court also saw to it that reasonable
bails were established, and that rights to legal
counsel and quick trial were ensured in a city
where extended pre-trail detention had long
served as a means for defusing trouble.
In 1973, State Senator Coleman Young was
elected the city's first black mayor, partly on
the strength of a pledge to increase the num-
ber of police officers and to disband the
department's elite STRESS unit, which had
the dubious distinction of killing more citizens
in action than any other police force in the
United States.
Moreover, Young observed a deliberately
bi-racial hiring policy; for every important
black appointment in his government, there
was a corresponding white appointment.,
The whites that stayed on were also
discovering that fears of social chaos under
black government were unfounded. Under
Young, crime fell for the first time in years.
and the mayor demonstrated a marvelous
ability to win federal dollars for the finan-
cially-beleaguered city. He also initiated a
system of tax abatements to encourage cor-
porate investment which resulted in cordial
relations between the black political leader-
ship and such influential business figures as
Henry Ford II and Marathon Oil chairman
Max Fisher. Ford money helped build the
gleaming downtown Renaissance Center, the
first symbol of renewal in many years to
seize the imagination of both racial com-
munities.
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DESPITE THE IMPACT of these
achievements on the city's spirits, the
mayor's approach has its critics. Influential
Common Councilman Ken Cockrel leads the
growing challenge to a tax abatement
strategy which may bring short term gains at
the expense of long term bankruptcy. And
some officials worry openly about the city's 42
per cent budgetary dependency on the federal
government. So far, the impact of private and
public investment has been felt primarily in
the river front area immediately surrounding
the Renaissance Center. A few blocks north
on Woodward Avenue stands one of the
nation's worst slums.
But an important corner has been turned by
this city. For the first time in its history,
Detroit is a place where people can experien-
ce life in stable, integrated neighborhoods.
Local associations now stand guard against
the block-busting real estate speculators who
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