Coleman Young

Coleman Alexander Young was born on the twenty-fourth of May 1918 at Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the eldest of five children of William Coleman Young — a tailor — and Ida Reese Jones Young. The family fled Tuscaloosa in 1923 following a confrontation between his father and a white shopkeeper and migrated to the Black Bottom district of Detroit in the Great Migration. He attended the segregated Eastern High School in Detroit through 1935.

He served four years at the Ford Motor Company River Rouge plant from 1936 and was active in the United Automobile Workers organising drives of the late 1930s. He was drafted into the United States Army in 1942 and joined the segregated Tuskegee Airmen as a bombardier. He participated in the April 1945 Freeman Field Mutiny — the protest by Black officers of the segregation of the Freeman Field officers' club — and was court-martialled and acquitted. He was honourably discharged in 1946 at the rank of second lieutenant.

He organised through the late 1940s the National Negro Labor Council in Detroit. He was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee in February 1952 and conducted at the hearing one of the most celebrated single witness performances in HUAC's history — refusing to identify communist colleagues and challenging the committee on the language of its questioning.

He was elected to the Michigan State Senate in 1964 and served as Democratic floor leader from 1968. He was elected mayor of Detroit on the sixth of November 1973 — the first African American mayor of Detroit — and took office on the second of January 1974. He served the following five consecutive four-year terms.

He directed the city through the 1970s desegregation of the Detroit Police Department, the founding of the Detroit People Mover, and the building of the Renaissance Center. He was the longest-serving mayor of Detroit in the city's history and the principal political figure of post-1967 Black Detroit.

He declined to stand for a sixth term in 1993 on grounds of declining health.

He died of complications of emphysema at Detroit on the twenty-ninth of November 1997, at seventy-nine.

He is honored here as the first African American mayor of Detroit.