STEPHEN HENDERSON, Detroit Free Press
- A friend reminded me last week of one important tragedy emerging from the farcical collapse of responsible self-governance we’re witnessing in Detroit.
He did it with an old quote.
“One of the things that we have to give black people the time to learn to do is to learn how to run city governments. … Unfortunately, they’re still in an era of development, many of them, in which they think all you have to do is talk about this thing.”
That was Federal District Court Judge John Feikens, speaking way out of school in 1984 about the state of Detroit politics, after the first major scandal of the Coleman Young administration.
Feikens got ripped back then for taking an isolated instance of alleged corruption and mismanagement and using it as some kind of referendum on African-American managerial competence. It was a ridiculously racist comment.
