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That’s the American way—people have a right to move in, or move out. There’s evidence to point out that white people who moved had something to fear. Who wants to put their kids in a situation where they are likely to be crime victims? That’s as basic as life gets.
    â€œIf I were mayor, I’d declare Detroit a disaster area,” he said. “It desperately needs national assistance. But Coleman Young has no compassion. He says, ‘Things have never been better.’ What a goddamned lie! The bottom line is, Detroit is an orphaned city. There’s no sense that anyone cares. What’s happening here is the death of a city.”
    In the following months I heard this view repeated a hundred times. It is a constant refrain—blacks, especially black violence, drove people out of their homes and their city. This is the white way to look at it; but Arthur Johnson reminded me that there is another perspective as well.
    Johnson, president of the Detroit chapter of the NAACP and a vice-president of Wayne State University, is a scholarly-looking man with thick glasses and a white beard. He leads an organization that for many years symbolized moderation and interracial cooperation. But when we met in his office on the campus of Wayne State, he sounded anything but moderate on the subject of his white neighbors.
    â€œBlacks in Atlanta feel their city is loved,” he said. “Here, white people are proud to say, ‘I haven’t been downtown in ten years.’ We know we’re not loved. We know our city has been scarred by the media on an unprecedented scale. I attribute this to the fact that we have a black majority and black leadership. Detroit has unjustly come to represent the worst in America. If they make that stick, it’s possible to justify our neglect and separation.”
    Johnson, who serves as one of Detroit’s four police commissioners, is not naive about the city’s problems. But in his view, they spring not from black incompetence, or violence, but from white hostility.
    â€œWhites don’t know a goddamned thing about what’s gone wrong here. They say, ‘Detroit had this, Detroit had that.… But economic power is still in the hands of whites. It’s apartheid. They rape the city, and then they come and say, ‘Look what these niggers did to the city,’ as if they were guiltless. Then they go out and vote for Ronald Reagan. I look at white working-class people talking about taxes are too high and I don’t know them. I just don’t know them at all.”
    De Lisle spoke about the death of a city; but to Arthur Johnson and the rest of Detroit’s black intelligentsia, something is being born in Detroit—a new, black metropolis.
    â€œDetroit has helped nurture a new black mentality,” Johnson said, pounding his desk for emphasis. “More than any other city, blacks here make an issue of where you live. If you’re with us, you’ll find a place in the city.”
    Whites often say, in their own defense, that many middle-class blacks also leave the city at the first opportunity. I mentioned this to Johnson, but he waved it away. “The majority of the black middle class is here. We are engaged in the most determined, feverish effort to save Detroit. Why? Because Detroit is special. It’s the first major city in the United States to have taken on the symbols of a black city. It has elected a strong, powerful black mayor, powerful in both his personality and his office. Detroit, more than anywhere else, has gathered power and put it in black hands.”
    My own instincts and experience told me that each man was, in his own way, right. It was hard to deny the harsh portrait of the city painted by Tom De Lisle. Judged by the standards of the white middle class, Detroit is an urban nightmare, a place that offers neither safety nor prosperity to its citizens. The American part of me sympathized with