Wayne State University announced it will offer a course centered on Coleman A. Young, a pivotal Detroit mayor who also served in the Michigan Senate.
The course, “Planning and Social Legacies of Coleman A. Young,” will be a spring/summer three-credit offering and guest lecture series running on Thursdays from May 11 until July 27 on WSU’s main campus in Detroit. It is open for registration to university students, guest students and non-degree-seeking professionals.
Young served as Detroit mayor from 1974 to 1994.
“While Mayor Young’s legacy is most commonly characterized as that of a polarizing figure during his 20 years in office, there is a largely untold story about his planning successes and failures in what was once the fifth-most-populous city in the U.S.,” said Jeff Horner, associate professor of teaching in the WSU Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “This exciting course with first-rate guest lecturers, including those who worked in the Young administration, will attempt to tell the story.”
The series will examine how the early life of Detroit’s first African American mayor shaped his views on the city’s development in his administration, including an important review of Black Bottom, Young’s childhood neighborhood, and once the city’s largest enclave of African Americans before its removal by federal “urban renewal” programs in the 1950s.
Born in Tuscaloosa, Ala., Young moved to the Black Bottom section of Detroit in 1923 to join his father, William Coleman Young. After graduating from Eastern High School at age 16 in 1935, Young was active in labor union organizing in the 1940s and joined the Tuskegee Airmen, the famed set of African Americans who served with distinction during World War II in racially segregated armed services. During his service, he and other African Americans led an effort to rebel against an all-white U.S. Army officers’ club.
In 1948, Young rallied for justice when 15-year-old Black boy, Leon Mosley, was fatally shot in the back by a white Detroit police officer during a running chase. Mosely had reportedly stolen a car.
The WSU class also will explore Young’s pre-mayoral career in labor organizing and state politics, which shaped his views on the social and planning fabric he envisioned for the city during his time as mayor. The former union activist served as a Michigan state senator from 1965 to 1973.
Detroit Mayor Coleman A. Young in 1977. | Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University
During the 1950s, like other labor organizers, Young was hauled in to face the Red Scare-mongering House on the Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S. Congress during the Joseph McCarthy era. Young, a feisty personality with an occasional sharp tongue, refused to share names of people who the committee deemed as Communists.
Young died in 1997 at age 79. In 2022 the Michigan House and Senate adopted resolutions to have a statue of Young placed in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol Building.
Emmet Moten, former city of Detroit community and economic development director, and Khary Turner, executive director of the Coleman A. Young Foundation, are scheduled to talk to the class.
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authored by Ken Coleman
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