Devil's Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

large—an alien, threatening wreck, a place to drive through, if at all, with the windows rolled up and the doors securely locked. Whites not only left the city physically, they abandoned it emotionally as well.
    When I told suburban friends that I planned to live and work in Detroit they reacted with disbelief and alarm. Some suggested a bodyguard, others a pistol. Most, however, simply warned me that I would probably not survive six months as a white man in the Murder Capital of America.
    I was not unaffected by their warnings. I had no Charles to vouch for me, and in the preceding twenty years I had lost whatever street smarts I once had. My first trips into the city were jumpy affairs, spent mostly looking out the window of my car; in a way, I was back in my parents’ Chevy, watching the action, afraid to come too close.
    This was not simple paranoia—Detroit today is genuinely a fearsome-looking place. Many of its neighborhoods appear to be the victims of a sadistic aerial bombardment—houses burned and vacant, buildings twisted and crumbling, whole city blocks overrun withweeds and the carcasses of discarded automobiles. Shopping streets are depressing avenues—banks converted into Fundamentalist churches, party stores with bars and boards on their windows and, here and there, a barbecue joint or saloon. The decay is everywhere, but it is especially noticeable on the east side, which has lost roughly half its residents in the past thirty years—the most extreme depopulation of any urban area in America.
    Worst of all is downtown. Several of the landmarks on Woodward Ave. remain, and in the past few years there have been several grandiose building projects, but they can’t obscure the fact that downtown Detroit is now pretty much empty. Hudson’s stands deserted, and there isn’t a single department store left in town. Entire skyscrapers—hotels, office buildings and apartment houses—are vacant and decaying.
    During what should be rush hour, reporters from the
Free Press
play a macabre game, called King of the Corner. The object is to stand at a downtown intersection and look all four ways. If you can’t see a single human being in any direction, you are King of the Corner. Every morning anoints its own royalty. Detroit, America’s sixth largest city, is the only metropolis in the country where you can walk a downtown block during business hours without passing a living soul.
    Suburban whites are dismayed by the physical degeneration of what was once their city, but they are truly terrified by its racial composition and the physical threat they associate with blacks, who constitute between 70 and 80 percent of the population. Some whites, mostly elderly, still live in the extremities of the city, and municipal employees are required to reside there by law (although a good many have fictitious addresses). But in most parts of town, most of the time, Detroit is as black as Nairobi.
    The white abandonment of Detroit, coupled with the collapse of the auto economy, has left the city with a diminished tax base and a set of horrific social problems. Among the nation’s major cities, Detroit was at or near the top in unemployment, per capita poverty, and infant mortality throughout the eighties.
    The city is an impoverished island surrounded by prosperous suburbs, and almost nothing connects them. The Detroit area has virtually no mass transport, due mainly to the unwillingness of suburbanites to make their communities accessible to blacks. A few cultural institutions, such as the symphony and the art museum, have remained in town, but they are patronized mostly by whites. So are the Detroit Tigers and Red Wings (the Pistons and Lions play in the suburbs). Detroit and its satellite towns share a water system, two newspapers, and broadcasting facilities. The place where black and white Detroit come most intimately together is on the airwaves, where radio talk shows offer a