New Men for Detroit and Atlanta

Both are the first blacks to be elected to run their cities. Both take office with solid assurances of aid and support from not only the black but the white leadership of their communities. And both confront first and foremost the problem of street crime: their cities rank among the highest in the U.S. in homicide rates. A tale of two cities and their new mayors, Coleman Young of Detroit and Maynard Jackson of Atlanta:

DETROIT. Coleman Alexander Young's first speech as mayor was blunt and to the point. Squinting into the bright glare of TV lights in the Henry and Edsel Ford Auditorium, he declared: "I issue an open warning right now to all dope pushers, to all rip-off artists, to all muggers: It's time to leave Detroit. I don't give a damn if they are black or white, or if they wear Super Fly suits or blue uniforms with silver badges: Hit the road."

The harsh words brought the mostly black audience of 2,000 cheering to its feet. What seemed most welcome was Young's conviction that one of the deteriorating city's chief problems was solvable and that the city was governable. Only recently, former Mayor Jerome Cavanagh had suggested that the best any mayor could do was "buy time until things get better."

Detroiters have done just that for years with no result. Their schools are going broke. At night, the city's residents avoid going out for fear of violence; that violence included a record 750 homicides last year. Race relations have scarcely improved since the 1967 riot in which 43 people were killed. So many whites have fled to the suburbs that the city's population dropped 8% in the past three years alone, to 1.4 million. Now, more than half of Detroit's residents are black, and many are poor.

Crime headed the litany of ills dominating the election issues. Young's opponent was pistol-packing John Nichols, 54, a former police commissioner.

One of his innovations had been a controversial unit within the police force called STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets) to deal with street crime.

But blacks complained that they were too often the targets of the unit's quick-on-the-trigger whites; in their first four months in action, STRESS officers killed eight blacks. Young promised to disband STRESS, put more cops on the beat, and decentralize the 5,500-member force by setting up 50 neighborhood police stations. In the end, the election was decided chiefly along racial lines: 92% of the blacks voted for Young; 91% of the whites for Nichols. In a city now more than 50% black, Young won with a 14,000-vote margin out of 450,000 ballots cast.

Last week Detroiters put aside traditional enmities--poor v. rich, labor v.

management, black v. white--for three days of inaugural celebration. The theme was reconciliation. U.S. District Court Judge Damon Keith, who is black, and State Supreme Court Justice John Swainson, who is white, administered the oath of office to Young in unison.

At a sellout luncheon for 3,500 in Cobo Hall the next day, Young received fervent promises of support from Henry Ford II and United Automobile Workers President Leonard Woodcock. The festivities culminated in an inaugural ball Friday night in the flower-festooned hall, where more than 8,000 people danced the night away.

To Young, 55, the son of a tailor raised in Detroit's Black Bottom ghetto, the celebration seemed "more like a coronation than an inauguration." It capped a lifetime of fighting for black rights, first as a union organizer at the Ford Motor Co. in the late 1930s, later as a leader of the leftist National Negro Labor Council in the '50s and as a politician in the '60s. A state senator since 1964, he fought for passage of an open-housing law and against a ban on busing children to integrate schools. In both cases, whites from the Detroit area were among his leading opponents. But no one knows better than Young that Detroit is governable only with the cooperation of the city's white power bro kers in industry and labor. Thus he declared: "We can no longer afford the luxury of bigotry and hatred. What is good for the black people of this city is good for the white people of this city."

ATLANTA. The inauguration of Maynard Holbrook Jackson, 35, as the first black and youngest mayor in the city's history inspired at least one departure from custom. In days gone by, mem bers of the tightly organized Atlanta power structure and their families and friends could comfortably accommodate themselves in the 200-seat aldermanic chamber. This week more than 6,000 people from all parts of the city were due to fill the 4,600-seat Civic Center auditorium and adjacent rooms to see Jackson, white City Council President Wyche Fowler and 18 city councilmen (nine white, nine black) sworn in.

It promised a lively beginning for an administration that confronts a host of problems. Atlanta last year had a record 271 murders, and Jackson talks about crime as a problem much the way that Coleman Young does. "This city has never seen the kind of offensive we are going to mount against drugs, criminality and homicide," he pledged last week. "Those who are in dope in this city had better pack their bags."

Jackson must also deal with the city's other major troubled areas: mass transportation, high black unemployment, a barely integrated school system (currently 80% black), and a continuing white flight to the suburbs (Atlanta is now 52% black, and some estimates indicate it will be 61% black by 1980).

To grapple with such problems, and keep the booming business center of the city thriving, the portly (275 Ibs.), personable Jackson will have to deal shrewdly with Atlanta's white establishment. As a tangible earnest of its willingness to cooperate, Coca-Cola Board Chairman J. Paul Austin gathered 30 business colleagues together last week and helped offset the remaining $30,000 debt of the Jackson campaign. In his defeat of Mayor Sam Massell last October, Jackson polled 21% of the white vote. That was a considerable achievement. Massell gave the contest an appallingly racist tinge by branding Jackson a do-nothing and a potential black firebrand in a last-ditch effort to scare up white support. The Massell strategy backfired with the voters and many whites quietly switched their allegiance to Jackson.

The son of a minister who urged all six of his children on to advance degrees, Maynard Jackson raced through the Atlanta school system, graduated from high school at age 14, garnered a bachelor's degree from Morehouse College at 18. After earning his law degree cum laude from North Carolina Central University in 1964, he returned to Atlanta to practice law, but eventually decided to enter politics. Explains one white associate: "Being black and raised in the South, he was always told that if he lived by certain standards, all the things he wanted would eventually come. But the things he wanted didn't come."

"Big M." He became an activist, highly visible vice mayor in 1970, pushing for tough, bread-and-butter reforms, particularly in the areas of housing and construction. He promoted black employment in construction, backed a community rent strike and conducted grievance hearings at a public housing project.

He and his wife Burnella live with their three children in a comfortable ten-room home in southwest Atlanta. Jackson avoids drinking in public, gave up smoking several years ago, and is affectionately called "Big M" by his friends.

Maynard Jackson's election represents a carefully prepared, some would say inevitable, flowering of Atlanta's black middle class. Still, he will have to walk a careful line between black demands for increased social justice and white insistence on solidifying Atlanta's place as the South's commercial capital. While Jackson wants to eliminate police brutality and job discrimination, there is no evidence that he will automatically think black in a crisis. Yet as one associate observes: "He feels he must rectify injustices suffered by his people. He's no militant, but there's a smoldering fire in him that won't go out until all blacks have equal rights." Jackson himself puts his goal simply: to make Atlanta "a city of brotherhood, prosperity and peace for all."

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