Lessenberry Ink Lessenberry Ink

Today I want to start by telling you the story of a young black guy who, eighteen years ago, was frustrated and unhappy with the way his career was going.  He had rashly challenged an incumbent congressman in the Democratic primary the year before, spent a lot of money he didn’t have, and ended up getting his behind kicked big-time, losing more than two to one.







He had two young daughters and a wife who wasn’t

thrilled that he’d run for Congress, and he had to figure out what to do next.

In the end, he didn’t give up; learned from his mistakes, and went to

work.  Eight years later, he was elected President

of the United States.







You don’t need me to tell you his name.  I suppose some would say I have no right to

say anything about African-American history, or the meaning of Black History

month, because I am an old white guy. Well, I disagree with that.  I see the effects of racism. This history is

my history too. I know I am not likely to be pulled over if I drive slowly

around the streets of Grosse Pointe.







Nobody would pay much attention to me if I go into a

jewelry store at Somerset Mall this afternoon and start scrutinizing the

diamonds, but if a black man my age did that, he’d likely feel the eyes of some

suspicious employee scrutinizing him.







This is our legacy and our history, all of ours.  We all have to live with it, and it doesn’t

do any of us any good to be ignorant of it. 

No, I never owned a slave, or did any of my ancestors, so far as I know.

But I have to admit that the legacy of slavery is why I am quite likely to be

treated differently from a black guy by the cops.







That’s wrong, and unfair, and we need to try to fix

it.  That doesn’t mean every white person

need to walk around crippled by guilt over the Dred Scott decision, nor does it

mean black folks can blame racism for everything.  Kwame Kilpatrick was not the victim of

racism; he was and is the victim of Kwame Kilpatrick, a spoiled man-child who

exploited poor black people.







But it does mean we have to be aware of the past.

Fully aware.  Many people know, or think

they know, the story of Ossian Sweet, the black doctor whose family was

attacked by a mob after he bought a home in a white section of Detroit. They

fought to defend their house, a white man was killed, and he and several

members of his family were tried for murder.







The NAACP brought in the great lawyer Clarence Darrow,

he went to work, and in the end, none of the Sweet family was convicted of any

crime.







Yet what you may not know is that the Sweet family’s lives

were ruined. Dr. Sweet’s young wife had contracted tuberculosis while in a

filthy jail, and she and their daughter Iva soon died of it.  His brother died of TB too.  Ossian Sweet’s life went downhill until one

bleak day in early 1960, when in a lonely apartment over a drugstore, he put a

bullet in his brain. He was murdered by racism just as surely and perhaps more

cruelly than Martin Luther King.







Heroes often pay a terrible price.  But, as Teddy Kennedy once said, “the cause

endures, hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

Black

History Month begins tomorrow, and for a long time, I wasn’t sure how I felt

about the whole idea of a special month set aside for our African-American

heritage.  Now, don’t get me wrong. African-American

history is not only crucially important—it is absolutely fascinating, and I

think it is as almost as essential that folks in Bloomfield Hills learn about it

as those in Detroit.







               I only say “almost” as essential,

because I think it is vitally important that black children who may lack

real-life role models learn about the great people in the past that looked like

them.







               But when Black History month was

first invented in the 1970s, my fear was that this would ghettoize it, that it

might have the effect of saying, fine, you now don’t have to care about our

African-American heritage for eleven months of the year.  I felt as the actor Morgan Freeman did, when

he said “I don’t want a Black history month; Black history is American

history.”







He was right. However, I have come to believe that

this month gives a chance to achieve what you might call teachable moments

about black history, that it is a time that we can use to get people to pay

attention to the magnificent pageant that is our African-American heritage.







 Teachers in my

day certainly didn’t do so.  I was in

elementary and junior high school in the years when Martin Luther King Jr. and

Malcolm X were real-life figures being covered in the newspapers, not sacred

historical icons. The only historic black American I learned about was George

Washington Carver, who was presented as some sort of clever eccentric who made

all sorts of things out of peanuts.  We

never heard of Robert S. Abbott, who founded one of the most important black

papers in the country, the Chicago

Defender, on his landlady’s table.







We never learned about Frederick Douglass, much less

W.E.B DuBois or James Baldwin or Langston Hughes. I had to find out about them

on my own. We learned about what Clarence Darrow did with the Scopes trial, and

that was fine.  But we also should have

learned about Darrow’s defense of Ossian Sweet, right here in Detroit, in the

very same year.







Black history is, indeed, American history. Blacks in

this country, first slaves, then second-class citizens for decades, did utterly

amazing things, often while dodging lynchings.







We now know something about the Tuskegee airmen, but

did you ever hear of William Sanders Scarborough? He was a little slave boy in

Georgia who secretly learned to read and write at a time when it was illegal to

teach a slave to read.  When the Civil

War ended, he went on to become a renowned professor of the classics and the

author of a textbook on Classical Greek.







I could fill many more minutes with the names of black

folks who accomplished more than you can imagine against all obstacles, and are

doing it still.  The other day, a caller

said that he thought a lot of black folks were afraid of white folks still, and

felt inferior.







Playing the race game is always self-destructive. But

in our own time, there was a black kid, younger than me, whose father left his

mother, and left him with only a bizarre African name.







He went on to not only succeed, but live a life of almost unparalleled integrity and was twice elected P...

I

like restaurants that have photographs on the walls showing their towns in

times past. Last weekend, I was in one with a picture of people lined up to get

into the Bavarian Inn in Frankenmuth. Judging from their clothes and the cars,

it was from the late 1940s.







Another diner near me has a large photo of Cadillac

Square in what I am pretty sure is 1915. There are still some horse-drawn

buggies on the street, but not many. Mostly there are cars.







In another picture taken five years later, the horses

are all gone.  Progress and change are

sometime swift.  Henry Ford sped up the

total victory of the automotive era with the Model T and the assembly

line.  But it still took a while to put

the buggy whip boys out of business.







Now, both the North American International Auto Show,

and the auto industry itself, are changing. 

I knew that, of course, but it was newly impressed upon me yesterday

afternoon by a couple of friends who grew up in Detroit but now live in

Washington, and who flew back to take in the auto show. They weren’t very

impressed by this year’s show itself.







Oh, they did find some pockets of cool.  But they noticed many European manufacturers

skipped the show this year.  Other out-of-town

journalists who came told me that by and large there seemed something a bit

tired about this auto show.







But what amazed my Washington friends, one who whom

worked downtown in the 1980s, was the progress in the city. They couldn’t stop

talking about the revitalized downtown, and despite the cold, spent time after

the show walking around and staring.







They aren’t naïve; they are trained journalists who

work for national publications. Yes, they know many of the neighborhoods are

still grim, though at least they now have streetlights. But while we who have

been living here tend to see the remaining flaws in the city’s comeback, those

who have been gone awhile see amazing things in a city the world gave up as

dead.







Detroit may get more of a boost in the summer of 2020,

when the North American International Auto Show moves to June. Detroit in

January is usually horrible, as note Monday’s cold and today’s freezing

rain.  Detroit in early summer is usually

wonderful.







I have no idea what the auto show will be like then,

but the organizers are almost certain to put some of it outside, and will

hopefully stage some events on the glittering riverfront.







The auto industry is changing dramatically, but then,

it always has.  The dealer network we

take for granted today was once new; so were other exciting developments like

automatic transmissions and four-wheel drive and cars with radios.







Nobody really knows much will change and how fast

things will change in this industry, but I think two things are clear.  First, automobiles, trucks and SUVs and anything

people use to get around, are now extremely complex machines, and getting more

so.







Second, having an automobile, being on the open road

free to determine where you will go is as alluring now as it was to the masses

who bought Model Ts a century ago.







Millennials may be less willing to fight traffic jams

to get to work. Fewer may be crazy about cars. But one survey showed 84 percent

of them feel they can’t live without access to one. The decline of the auto

industry, like that of Detroit, may have been considerably exaggerated.

Here’s

a trivia question for you:  How many

movies have been made throughout history? 

I don’t mean class projects, industrial films or shorts, I mean

full-length feature films.







After spending a little time on the Internet, I was

able to come up with this definitive answer: Nobody knows. I found estimates

ranging from 140,000 to more than half a million – and that higher estimate was

more than seven years old. So the short answer is –







More than you could ever watch. Okay, now for my next

question, which occurred to me here at the North American International Auto

Show.  How many car movies have there been, and which was the best one of all

time.  Not surprisingly, that’s not all

that clear either.







First of all, there’s a question of defining just what

a “car movie” is.  When I looked at auto

buffs lists of car movies and the best car movies, they are all over the place.

Some people think Martin Scorsese’s Taxi

Driver is the best car movie.  Others

don’t even think it qualifies as a a car movie at all.  Not surprisingly, the Mad Max movies got a

lot of votes. 







So did Stephen King’s Christine.   My two personal

favorites, at least without thinking deeply about it, are the immortal Thelma and Louise, and also a wonderful

1988 biopic called Tucker, The Man and

his Dream, a too-little appreciated collaboration between George Lucas and

Francis Ford Coppola.  With those two

guys behind it, how could any movie be bad?







But my two favorite car movies of all time are two

movies that have never been made.  Here

are the plots:  Movie number one:  At the dawn of the automotive era, a

brilliant if erratic genius named Billy Durant takes over a struggling automaker

called Buick, builds it into the top-selling brand in the country, and then

uses it to create a holding company that takes over Oldsmobile, Pontiac,

Cadillac and other automakers.  He calls

his creation “General Motors.”







He almost succeeds in buying Ford too.  But he fails, and is forced out of the

company by the stockholders.  Unfazed, he

starts a new car company, calls it Chevrolet, and before long uses it to get

control of General Motors again. But eventually, he is again fired in a palace

coup.







Billy again starts another car company, but the coming

Great Depression does him in. He ends his career flipping hamburgers and

running a bowling alley in Flint.







Sound too crazy? 

Maybe – but every word of that is true.







Okay, here is my second movie.  Another genius, this one half crazy, actually

invents the modern auto industry, and puts the world on wheels with his Model T

Ford.  He becomes insanely rich, but

mistreats his brilliant and cultured only son, who worships his father.  Nothing the boy does is good enough, even

when he saves the company by insisting on a new model.







Instead, his father, yes, Henry Ford, prefers the

company of a goon-like former security guard. The two of them drive the

heartbroken son into an early grave, and nearly drive the company into

bankruptcy, till his 26-year-old grandson, aided by a team of young former Air

Corps officers, manages to win control and save the Ford Motor Co. from

destruction.







Once again, that is all true, and just a smattering of

the highlights of the stories of both firms, whose rich and storied history

goes on and on and continues still.

Three

years ago, I saw a silly article published by the Mackinac Center, under this

headline: “Michigan Economy No Longer Dependent on the Auto Industry.” 







The author based that ridiculous statement on the fact

that more people now work in retail trade and in hospitals than in the auto

industry.  I wonder what he thought

brought all the retail here in the first place, or created the need for all the

hospitals.







Actually, what the article said about jobs wasn’t even

correct.  Yes, more people in Michigan do

work in retail than work for one of the major auto manufacturers.







But when you count all the auto related jobs in

Michigan, the total is 944,000, according to the 2017 Annual Automotive

Industry report. That’s one out of every five jobs in the state.







According to MICHauto, a branch of the Detroit

Regional Chamber of Commerce, the state has received $17.5 billion dollars in

automotive investment in the last five years.







The industry’s total economic impact on the state is

nearly $57 billion a year. And if you thought this was a business in permanent

decline, the auto industry has added more than 38,000 jobs since the Great

Recession started to end nine years ago.







Not too shabby, eh? 

Not exactly a minor part of our economy. Now, that doesn’t mean we can

afford to get complacent.  We’ve made

that mistake before.  The industry is

constantly changing, and workers at every level are going to have to be riding

the surf with it.







The fact that Ford, GM and Chrysler let quality

controls slip in the 1970s and 80s is a good part of the reason we are in the

mess that we are in. In any event, The Detroit Three will never again be mass

employers of hundreds of thousands of unskilled workers at high wages.







General Motors will never again sell more than half of

all the cars sold in this nation, as it did in the early 1960s. But neither do

these companies seem likely to go out of business, and that was a real

possibility, especially for Chrysler and GM a decade ago.







The auto industry does need to become much more aware

of the need to change. They are doing much better.  Years ago, George Romney told me that

sometimes Walter Reuther would come to his house on a Saturday afternoon, back

when Romney was head of American Motors.







Romney’s wife would make them sandwiches, and they’d

talk.  Romney told me that both men

agreed that the economic model of charging ever more for cars and passing the

cost off to the consumer was unsustainable. Neither man felt, however, that he

could sell it to his constituency, and so nothing much changed – until oil

shocks and the rise of the Japanese.







I don’t know exactly where the auto industry is going

long-term and except perhaps for a few visionaries, I don’t think anyone else

does either.  My theory is that the

future will see us use a  complex array

of transportation options. I don’t think the private car will vanish.







I think cars powered by gasoline and internal

combustion engines may be around for longer than some believe. But I know that

Michigan was bound to have its future wedded to the assembly line almost from

the moment that old Henry Ford started using one.







And on the whole, it’s made us richer, and made us

what we are. Now, we can stay tuned for and try to influence the next chapter.

Though

I am a Detroiter, I have never been a big car buff.   I admire the styling of some really classic

cars – especially from the 1930s. But I spend a lot of time in my car, and want

it to be safe, comfortable, practical, and have whatever other features make

sense.







I’ve always felt that anything other than that was too

much. I was once on an airplane flight with two guys, clearly engineers, who

talked about camshafts in great detail.







That was sheer agony. 

But over the past several days, wandering the auto show and talking to

people in the industry, I suddenly got a new appreciation for what these

machines are and represent, which is personal, individual freedom. 







That’s always been the attraction of having your own

car: The ability to essentially go on a whim, or at need, anywhere. By sheer

chance, the major breakthroughs that made that amazing dream practical and

affordable happened right here, in this city, a little over a century ago.







When it all started, the vehicle was essentially a

buggy that lurched forward by burning fuel instead of being pulled by a horse.

Soon, it was enclosed with windows. Today, automobiles are highly complex creations

full of computers, sensors and technology.







Today, the leaders of our nation cannot even agree to let

the government function. The leaders of our state are failing to fix the roads

or properly educate our children. Yet the auto companies build machines that can

take me to a precise street address in Georgia, and play Janis Joplin, suggest

restaurants and find gas stations along the way.







Private sector success, public sector failure. Yet the

same people choose our cars and our politicians.  This is fascinating, if occasionally a bit unnerving.









 You can learn a

lot about how cars work at this year’s auto show. Even though some foreign

manufacturers didn’t come, you can see pretty much every variety of vehicle you

can imagine, and some you can’t.  Whenever

I wander around an auto show, either of cutting edge new cars or older classics

at the Concours d’Elegance, I see

ghosts, of cars and men past.







Buccaneers like Billy Durant, the man who founded

General Motors, lost control, got it back, and then ended his days running a

bowling alley in Flint.  Alfred E. Sloan,

who made GM the world’s biggest corporation, with his slogan “a car for every

purse and purpose.”







The poignant family saga of the Fords, Henry the

visionary and crazy founder, hounding his brilliant and cultured son to an early

grave; Hank the Deuce saving the company.







Lesser, but still fascinating characters like the whiz

kids, Harley Earl, Preston Tucker, and John DeLorean. The auto industry is

about a lot more than machines.  Had it

settled in New York, I’m certain there would be more epic movies and novels

about the industry.







But it is ours, and the main reason that Detroit came

to be what it is, good and bad. Many of us have in our driveways machines in

many ways are technologically superior to the spaceships that took the

astronauts to the moon; those certainly didn’t have GPS and blue tooth.







Most of us can’t function without our cars, and the

industry is still creating jobs, jobs more fascinating and challenging than the

old metal-bending ones of old.







So take the kids to the auto show. You just might be

surprised by what you see.