Coleman Young: the Communist Who Destroyed Detroit

If one man could be blamed most for the destruction of Detroit, it would be Coleman Young.

Mayor from 1974 to 1993, Young set a city already in decline on the pathway to the disaster area it is today.

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Coleman Young had a well-deserved reputation for corruption, but few today understand his communism.

It is important to know that it was a combination of crony capitalism and communism that destroyed Detroit, because that is exactly the formula being employed by Young’s spiritual heir, Barack Obama, from the White House today.

Born in 1918, Young found communism as a young man. In the 1930s, he found an apprentice electrician program sponsored by Ford Motor Company. There, he became an underground union organizer and “civil rights” activist until he was drafted into the Army in 1942.

Young served as a bombardier and navigator with the famous Tuskegee Airmen. Toward the end of the war, Young and about 100 other African-American men were arrested for demanding service at a segregated officers’ club in Indiana. Young managed to get word to the Black press. Within days, he was released and the Army began the process of integrating the club.

Another black Communist Party supporter also served in the unit, Percy Sutton, a future Manhattan borough president. He would later go on to mentor and employ a young radical named Eric Holder, and write a letter of recommendation to get a young Barack Obama into Harvard.

After the war, Young returned to Detroit, where he became a union organizer. But he lost his job when the head of the United Auto Workers Union “took a dislike to the commotion created by Young and other Black dissidents.” There may have been more to this, as during that period the UAW was being run by socialists, who were trying to oust their rival communists from the union.

Young took his first political job working for Progressive Party 1948 presidential candidate, Henry A. Wallace. The Progressive party was controlled, lock, stock and barrel, by the Communist Party.

In 1949, Young worked with fellow Progressive Party leader, Stanley Nowak, in supporting Ford factory strikers, as this clipping from the Communist Party’s Peoples world proves.

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In 1966, Novak turned up as a sponsor of the Herbert Aptheker Testimonial Dinner. The dinner was held on the occasion of Communist Party theoretician Herbert Aptheker‘s 50th birthday.

The National Negro Labor Council (1950-56), was a Communist Party front for black workers and labor officials.

Key leaders of the Council included Coleman Young (national executive secretary), Charles Hayes (Chicago leader, identified communist and later a Democratic Congressman), Cleveland Robinson, George Crockett and Erma Henderson from Detroit.

Cleveland Robinson would later become a member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and a founder, with Charles Hayes, of the Communist Party created Coalition of Black Trade Unionists – an organization greatly loved by many modern Black leaders including Mississippi’s communist connected Congressman Bennie Thompson and Barack Obama.

Crockett was a close sympathizer and almost certainly a secret Communist Party member, who went on to become a Democratic Congressman from Michigan.

Erma Henderson would later serve on the Detroit City Council under Coleman Young.

In 1946, Erma Henderson was a Michigan representative to the National Council of American Youth for Democracy – the youth wing of the Communist Party USA. Serving alongside Henderson was a young Chicago journalist named Vernon Jarrett. He in turn, was a close colleague of a Chicago Communist party writer named Frank Marshall Davis – later the Hawaii mentor of a teenage Barack Obama.

Vernon Jarrett’s son would later marry the daughter of a Chicago radical educationalist named Barbara Bowman. The brief marriage turned Valerie Bowman into Valerie Jarrett – now Obama’s closest friend and most trusted White House adviser.

By 1952, Young’s work brought him to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating the Communist Party in Michigan. Coleman Young completely refused to answer the committee’s questions.

Coleman Young, HUAC hearings. Lawyer George Crockett, right
Coleman Young, HUAC hearings. Lawyer George Crockett, right

There is no doubt however that Young was a secret Party member.

In 1988, Howard Johnson — who had been one of the leading communists in Harlem during the Great Depression — told interviewer Kay Takora about his return home from World War II: “I came back into activity in the Communist Party… I at first became county educational director. New York county was the biggest county organization. From ’46 to ’49. And during that same period, I was assigned to help build a national Negro veterans organization which was called the United Negro and Allied Veterans of America. And that had the backing of the party and I was assigned by the party to work in that along with my duties as educational director of the county organization.”

Howard Johnson continued, eventually bringing the conversation to Detroit and to Detroit’s mayor, Coleman Young: “When UNAVA was formed, I was elected national vice-commander in charge of education, which fit my training, and the other national vice-commander was Coleman Young, who was national vice-commander in charge of labor.

“Because at that time he was a steward in the auto workers union and [a] very prominent trade unionist in Detroit. Coleman and I were very good friends…. I never anticipated he would be a bourgeois mayor of Detroit. But Coleman’s a great guy, nevertheless. But I think that it was his party training that (helped) him to move forward as he did”.

In the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the Communist Party’s liaison man with Moscow was a secret FBI informant, Morris Childs. On one trip to Moscow, Morris Childs’ fellow-delegate, the black communist James Jackson, asked that Coleman Young, a future mayor of Detroit and a secret Party member, be invited to Moscow to study Marxism-Leninism; the Soviets vetoed him as too old.

Democratic Socialists of America member and socialist historian Paul Buhle, wrote in a 1992 article for the Encyclopedia of the American Left:

Communists also gained from long-standing political contacts in the black community. Victories of black mayoral and congressional candidates with decades — old ties to the CP — a short list would include Coleman Young and George Crocket in Detroit, Gus Newport in Berkeley, and somewhat more ambiguously, Harold Washington in Chicago.”

It was the 1983 victory of long time Communist Party affiliate Harold Washington that inspired a young Barack Obama to move to the Windy City two years later.

Washington stacked Chicago City Hall full of communists and socialists. Coleman Young did the same in Detroit. He even appointed Communist Party supporter Dave Moore, Director of the city’s Senior Citizens Department.

So, it’s no surprise to see Barack Obama doing the same thing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Like Obama though, Coleman Young didn’t destroy Detroit alone. He had a whole raft of communist and socialist affiliated Councillors on his team, including Erma Henderson, Ken Cockrel, Sr., Clyde Cleveland and Maryann Mahaffey.

Erma Henderson center, Maryann Mahaffey, fourth from right, Clyde Cleveland, third from right, with a delegation from the Soviet front World Peace Council, 1975
Erma Henderson center, Maryann Mahaffey, fourth from right, Clyde Cleveland, third from right, with a delegation from the Soviet front World Peace Council, 1975

Coleman Young, crony capitalism and communism destroyed Detroit.

Barack Obama is using the same formula to destroy America.

Will you let him?

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41 thoughts on “Coleman Young: the Communist Who Destroyed Detroit

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  3. You have to be an ignorant fool to write this stuff. Anyone who has bothered to study the history of Detroit knows that the seeds of destruction were planted by racist mayors like Mariani and Cobo years before Coleman Young took office. Educate yourself before you embarrass yourself with this self serving drivel.

  4. I always saw it as a clever capitalist way of grow more money from cheaper countries, i mean: if a company grows too much and requires external labor, they would find cheaper countries where the company can pay half for the same work. I as a capitalist would do it, and i am sure that everyone who is not a communist would do it (who am i kidding, even communists would do it, it’s common sense: “The quest means business”).

  5. White flight (irrational fear of a Black mayor), bad Black leadership (enough Blacks kept electing Colman Young even when tho it was a known fact that he was a bad mayor – had Whites STAYED, they could have elected more Dave Bings in the 70s and 80s) and corporate neglect (The Big 3 not giving a damn about “Motown”) in equal measures created this mess. Look at Eastern Europe to see “White Detroits.”

    Colman Young was able to keep power due to how White treated Blacks HISTORICALLY in Detroit.

    READ THIS:

    http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/detroit/detroit.html

    Everyone (Whites, Blacks and the Auto Corporations) is at fault (in equal measures) for the current state of Detroit.

    1. With all due respect, it was the Democrats that began the decline. And how did they achieve this? Break down the Black family. In 1906, the president of Harvard University spoke at the 25th Anniversary of Tuskegee Institute. He said this, “By 1905, Tuskegee Institute produced more self-made millionaires than Harvard, Yale and Princeton.” The historian William Federer pointed out that after the Civil War “free Blacks” made great advances, but the Democrats could not permit this. Who founded Tuskegee? How about George Washington Carver, who invented three sciences? At his death Andrew Carnegie, not a nice guy, said that America had lost one of her greatest orators and leaders. In the 1930s Communists began to infiltrate Black churches. Between them and the Democrats they destroyed the family and education. It is the late Antony Sutton, an economist, the pointed out that the probable author of the Communist Manifesto is not Karl Marx, but a cousin of FDR, Clinton Roosevelt, who published in 1841 and FDR’s policies were Marxist leaning resulting in a longer Depression. Like him Woodrow Wilson had a Marxist adviser, Edward Mandell House, who wrote Philip Dru, Administrator. Of course, praised the KKK and screened the racist film Birth of a Nation based on 2 books by and old college pal that referred to his book.
      Add to these the infiltration of the Communists as described by the FBI agent W. Cleon Skousen in his book The Naked Communist.” https://canadafreepress.com/article/compare-original-45-goals-of-communism-to-modern-woke-crusade
      Paul Kengor’s book “Takedown” puts on the table how the Marxists planned to bring down the nation and it really began with the most vulnerable though it began in the early 19th Century, in 1826.

  6. Pingback: » July 29, 2013
  7. This article compliments well the book by Paul Kengor, Ph.D: The Communist ( Frank Marshall Davis: the Untold story of Barrack Obama’s Mentor). I went to an event at which Kangor and Travor Loudon bot h spoke ( at the National Press Club) . It was an outstanding event; both of these men are truly extremely creditable. America needs to be listening.

  8. Coleman Young has indeed been proven to be a Communist. That is indeed a fact. If Trevor Loudon says he is then he is. Nobody knows better than Mr. Loudon. Communism is a bigger threat to world peace than the Nazi’s ever were. And yes, Obama is employing the same strategy to cripple the U.S. as Mr. Young used in Detroit. Both of these can be referred to as “Overwhelming the System”. Detroit has fallen because it is indeed overwhelmed. This is generally known as the Cloward/Piven strategy. BUT in all honesty…..you have to ask yourself…..Who is pushing Obama? Who are his masters. That is indeed where the Truth lies. Always remember the phrase “Smoke and Mirrors” because sometimes it is mot what it seems.

    1. After reading this, I come to the conclusion that if you take out all of the names – and name calling….I’d wonder who the CIVIL RIGHTS ADVOCATES / ACTIVISTS were….

      Mad Angel on FB

  9. The liberals are already trying to re-write history by claiming it was all because of conservative policies, the ignorant people in this world will buy that version because they wont bother to do their own research.

    1. Yes, that is Carl Levin, then a member of the Detroit City Council and at one time, the head of it. Next to him is Romesh Chandra, a leader of the Communist Party of India, president of the Soviet front, the World Peace Council, and in reality, a KGB asset, if not downright operative.

      Carl was the perfect liberal dupe for the Soviets and the CPUSA, and has continued to prove it over the decades. His brother, Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich) is just as stupid. Must run in the family.

      [How do you say “Schmucks” in English? Oh, it is “Schmucks”. Sorry]

      This was taken at a reception for the Soviet/KGB front group, the World Peace Council, delegation on their propaganda tour of the US just about the time of the fall of Indochina to the communists.

      Coleman Young was identified in sworn congressional testimony as a member of the CPUSA. As I don’t have my books from where I’m writing this comment, I can’t specifically cite which House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings/report had the testimony, but I would think it was in the roughly entitled Communism in Michigan series.

      It might also be in Kirwan’s book on “Communist Party and the UAW”, by a leftist author but which has some good history/information in it on the CPUSA.

      Re: David Moore – an identified member of the CPUSA and congressional aide to another identified CPUSA member, George Crockett Jr. (Identified by a Party flier concerning lawyers for the convicted spies the Rosenbergs, who went to jail for the equivalent of contempt of court during those proceedings).

      Crockett was a local judge who blamed crime on capitalism and helped reduce sentences for convicted criminals, just as Judge Wright brazenly did in New York City.

      While Coleman Young was in the Communist controlled United Automobile Workers union (UAW), fellow Detroit communist John Conyers Jr. was also in it either Local 600 or 900, both CPUSA controlled, along with Conyers Sr).

      Thus you had a marxist axis of activists/organizers in Detroit whose lifetime red fellowship helped to destroy that once great city: Young, Conyers Jr, Crockett, Moore, Erma Henderson, Maryanne Mahaffey, Cockrel Jr, Jackie Vaugh (Mich State Assembly), and a few others. Another center of both marxism and black extremism was Wayne State University, to which several of the above attended.

      The City was killed from the inside and its citizens fell for communist and liberal propaganda about how great Young and his underlings would be for Detroit.

      Well, these low educated voters learned a lesson, or did they? The liberal media covered up Young’s communist ideology and aides to the point that he was annointed a “saint” in Democrat Party politics, not as the “red czar” he really was.

      Now it is too late for the truth to save the city, but it might teach those liberal voters what a bunch of dupes and fools they were.

      We’ll see at the next election.

      1. I too remember all that you are referring to about Coleman Young. You forgot to mention his weekly air lifts of millions of dollars in cash from Willow Run Airport to the Caymans This was just the tip of the Iceberg.

  10. I moved to Ann Arbor when he was mayor from the South. I was appalled that he kept getting voted in, year after year. I had not read any history on him and I appreciate you posting on his history.

    1. You make judgement without reading about the history but you take this author writing for gospel…wow! There is no wisdom w/o wise counsel…

  11. That is an amazing story of how Coleman Young was influenced by the Communist Part mixed with crony capitalism.
    When I was in 9th grade Mr. Sims, my Social Studies taught us how dangerous Communist was back in the 50’s.
    It just never occurred to me that it is alive and well in the United States today. Thanks for enlightening me with this information; and I do understand and see it now.

    1. Seriously? Please, please, please give TheBlaze.com (all of it, radio, magazine, especially the TV network) a fair listen. It’s all there, explained, documented, verified — and challenged only by sources wishing to cover up what’s going on in this administration. The future of our freedom depends on the Truth.

    2. I lived through much of the America’s hysterical & paranoid period!

      I see that there are some that want us to return to these terrible self defeating times.

      Truth is, Communism did not kill Detroit…it was unbridled Capitalism based upon greed & racism.

      …..observer Jules………

      1. Lyndon B. Johnson destroyed Detroit. I used to work for City of Detroit, a white minority employee while the 80% black City still used Affirmative Action to Promote unqualified blacks above whites. Crime, single women having multiple children to multiple fathers, not naming them on birth records, rewarding these women with more benefits the more children. Multi Culture? When I was young we were all americans, now? If you want to call yourself African, hen you should move to Africa. My family came to US in 1902, so we never had slaves, were in the slave trade, so I resent what they call “White Privilege” now. It is called getting off ass and going to work.

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