As founder of the Mayors Automotive Coalition, Bernero was invited on Fox News to bicker with a right-wing anchor about how much the unions should give up in the auto industry realignment. It didn’t look like a fair debate: the anchor, Gregg Jarrett, was indistinguishable from a junior Republican Congressman, with a well-fed full-moon face and dark, carefully parted hair that resembled the topping on a Lego figurine. Bernero, whose kinky ethnic hair was defoliating along his brow-line, revealing pink scalp, wore a round Lansing pin on his broad lapel. Jarrett was even in higher resolution: he was in a New York studio, while Bernero was broadcasting on Skype from the city hall of a dwindling Rust Belt capital. But some people only need five minutes on television to become famous. Barack Obama did it at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Susan Boyle did it on Britian’s Got Talent. And Virg Bernero did it on Fox News, with a friend-of-the-workingman oration that anyone who has ever seen a Michael Moore movie should have expected from a mid-Michigan liberal. In abrasiveness and indignation, Bernero had the edge over his interlocutor.
“I gotta say, in all honesty, I was a little offended by your question, ‘Have the unions given up enough? Has the workingman given up enough?’” Bernero began, before Jarrett had even asked him a question. “My question is, ‘Has Wall Street given up enough, for the billions they have taken?’ I gotta tell ya, I am sick and tired of the double standard. One standard for Washington and Wall Street, another standard for the working people in this country. It always comes down to, in order to be more competitive, we gotta take it out of the hide of the working person. Cut their pay, cut their benefits. Let me ask you, have the bonuses been cut on Wall Street?”
“General Motors has forty-seven billion dollars in future costs for UAW workers who have health care for life,” Jarrett interjected at last. “They need to give up that which no other worker gets: health care for life.”
Bernero entertained the interruption with grumpy impatience, then switched on again.
“If you think you’re gonna make me feel guilty about the fact that I had health benefits as a kid, and I was able to have straight teeth because my dad retired from GM, and if you think my eighty-four-year-old father and other retirees like him, if you think they should feel guilty for the benefits they received, I disagree with you. General Motors and the auto companies created a great standard of living in this country. They helped create the middle class, which is now under attack, because of the outsourcing that’s taken place. Since 2001, when China joined the WTO, we’ve lost something like two point seven million jobs to China, because of the unfair trade.”
“Mr. Mayor, this is a television show, not a campaign speech,” Jarrett said. “You’re not the Eveready battery. We’re just having a discussion here.”
Bernero’s tightly wound populism was such a hit that he was invited back onto Fox and CNN to debate free-market fundamentalists such as John Fund of the Wall Street Journal. “Is this the angriest mayor in America?” CNN American Morning anchor John Roberts asked before playing a Bernero clip. That became Bernero’s nom de politics: America’s Angriest Mayor. The following year, he won the Democratic primary for governor, with the support of the UAW, but lost by twenty points to a Republican businessman who styled himself “One Tough Nerd.” Michigan had been governed by a Democrat for most of its Lost Decade, so it was a Republican’s turn to preside over the state’s reversion to the rural woodland it would have remained had Henry Ford not grown up in Dearborn. As I like to say, though, Michigan did not become great because of the auto industry. The auto industry became great because of a Michigander. Larry Page, who grew up in East Lansing, co-invented Google, making him as much a tycoon of the early twenty-first century as Ford was of the early twentieth. (Unfortunately, when Page opened a Google office in his home state, he put it in Ann Arbor, the state’s intellectual capital and home of the University of Michigan, his alma mater.) So, when I finally got an appointment to meet my hometown’s angry mayor, I pointed out that even with two new auto plants, Lansing’s population of autoworkers has declined from 25,000 to 6,000—and 177 of the workers in the Delta plant were Tier Twos. Who had a plan to replace 20,000 of the best jobs in town?
“It’s an evolution,” Mayor Bernero said, not angry but intense, with a clipped, rapid voice, like a Midwestern minor-league hockey announcer’s. “Even if the industry was here, it’s more automated. We have the capability of making the same number of cars that we made with twenty-five thousand people with five thousand. So we need a bunch of GMs. We need the green energy, we need the high tech, we need the biotech. You name it. And we’ve got that possibility in mid-Michigan—with Michigan State University, with some of the companies that have come out of the lab and into the community, like Niowave.”
NIOWAVE OCCUPIED an inner-city elementary school that had closed for lack of students. That alone made it a quintessential Lansing business. Not even Mayor Bernero would send his children to the city’s schools, which have become poorer and blacker every year since I graduated. The Harding-era craftsmanship is too good to waste, though, and Lansing is not large enough to absorb the ruins that make the more rural corners of Detroit look like the Arkansas Delta. The old school-houses have been occupied by yoga studios, and even an African-based academy named after Lansing’s most famous escapee, Malcolm X, known in his Lansing days by his “slave name,” Malcolm Little.
Niowave manufactures equipment for particle accelerators used in physics experiments, X-ray imaging devices, and missile defense systems. It’s a business that requires both physics Ph.D.s, to design the machines, and skilled tradesmen, to build them. Niowave’s founder, Terry Grimm, had spent fourteen years working at Michigan State University’s nationally known cyclotron. But this was not a business he could have started in Cambridge, Massachusetts, despite MIT’s technical expertise. Nor could he have started it in Cleveland, despite its population of laid-off machinists. He needed a major research university and a major industrial facility.
“There are not many places in the world that have both of those,” Grimm said. “And the infrastructure. Try finding that on Long Island.”
Academic colonies also lack the ethic that manual craftsmanship is a worthwhile pursuit. One of Niowave’s technicians, Jeff Tarr, was a GM model maker who took an early retirement buyout when the company switched from physical prototyping to computer-assisted drafting. Nio-wave didn’t pay as well as GM, but nobody paid $33 an hour anymore. When I visited Niowave, Tarr was building a vacuum plate he had designed on a computer. Niowave’s products were as industrial as the Oldsmobiles he’d designed. They just weren’t mass-produced. Its atom smashers were gleaming barrels with lids bolted to the top, like portholes. Its electron guns were shaped like shock absorbers. Everything was built of niobium, a metal that shields instrumentation from magnetic fields.
“What I do here is really close to what I did there,” Tarr said. “It’s a lot of the prototyping, a lot of the research. Being a model maker, I was always looking for the next challenge. I grew up around cars all my life. I didn’t grow up around accelerators. I don’t understand everything that goes in there, but I’m just happy to do my part.”
THAT YEAR the Delta plant opened, and Fisher Body was torn apart in strips of rippled metal. I decided it was time to come home to Lansing. My goal in life had always been to sell so many books I could live wherever I wanted, and I’d never wanted to leave Michigan. I had moved away in 1992 because none of my jobs there paid worth a damn.
Still, I was about to turn forty, so it seemed like time to end my decade-long big-city adventure and return to a place where I could always count on Sunday dinner. And maybe, I thought, Lansing needed me more than Chicago. How could I mourn my hometown’s abandonment if I refused to live there myself? I applied for a job at a small weekly newspaper. It didn’t pay much, but it doesn’t cost much to live in Lansing. After I was offered the position, a real estate agent showed me a sturdy two-bedroom house for $75,000.
If I had
gone to work for the newspaper, I might have bought that little house. But it didn’t work out that way. When I went to lunch with the publisher, to discuss the final details, I overplayed my hand.
“What about vacation?” I asked.
“Oh, we don’t offer vacation the first year,” he said. “It wouldn’t be fair to the other staffers if I gave it to you. Maybe we can work out some long weekends.”
I didn’t really care what was fair to the other staffers. I cared about what was fair to me. But I’d been gone so long I didn’t understand how little leverage I possessed in Michigan’s job market. The day after our meeting, I e-mailed the publisher, proposing a compromise: one week’s vacation the first year. Minutes later, his number appeared on my phone.
“I’m withdrawing the offer,” he said curtly. “If all you’re thinking about is vacation, that’s no way to start a new job.”
When I shut my phone, I also shut away any illusions of ever living in Lansing again. If the best my hometown could offer was a job with no paid vacation, it was no town for me anymore.
I SAT in the principal’s office of Sexton High School with a copy of Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President resting atop my thigh. It was the book I’d written after giving up on Lansing and going back to Chicago, and it was another reason I would never move back home. But I was spending a summer in Lansing, to research this book. A week earlier, I’d met the principal at a city council meeting where the boys’ basketball team was honored for winning the state championship. I knew I couldn’t finish this book without visiting Sexton, and I knew I couldn’t get inside the school without the principal’s permission, so I offered to donate a copy of Young Mr. Obama to the library. The principal told me to call his office, which was probably what he told everyone he met, but now I had a ten o’clock appointment, and I was inside the principal’s office for the first time in twenty-six years, since I had interviewed my own principal, as the editor of our school newspaper, the Zodiac.
Sexton’s hallways were emptier now. No one was standing in the lobby, where Lansing’s original seal—a pioneer axing a tree—was painted on the tile floor. In that quarter century, the student body had dwindled from 2,100 to 750, almost entirely because whites had withdrawn their children from the urban public schools. My school years, the 1970s and 1980s, coincided with the era when Lansing’s falling white population and its rising black population were intersecting. Lansing’s blacks and whites both lived prosperously, because the auto factories paid equal wages. But the blacks lived on the West Side, and we lived on the South Side.
In 1973, when a local judge ordered busing to integrate the grade schools, I was about to enter first grade. Precocious enough to read the paper, I knew buses would be coming to our neighborhood, but I didn’t know what they would be carrying, until one of my friends warned me black kids would be bused to Lewton Elementary, our all-white school. At the time, the prospect of going to school with black kids was frightening. Rumors had filtered all the way down the grade ladder from Sexton that some bathrooms were controlled by blacks, others by whites, and you dared not pee in the wrong one. Militant black students had taken over the principal’s office, demanding passing grades. White girls couldn’t wear ponytails, because black girls carried scissors in their purses.
So my friend had a plan: every afternoon, four of us would line up outside the school and give the bus the finger. For four days straight, we acted out our not-so-massive resistance against integration. On Friday, the bus stopped. The fed-up driver stepped down. My friends fled to a nearby field. I stood in place, frozen with the fear of authority. The driver took down my name and phone number and called my mother. That afternoon, for the only time in my life, I was spanked with my pants down.
The bus was from Main Street Elementary, a West Side school near the Oldsmobile plant. (Main Street was Earvin “Magic” Johnson’s alma mater. On the first page of his autobiography, he writes of growing up attending Sexton basketball games, dreaming of winning a championship for “the pride of the West Side.” Starting high school in the midseventies, Magic was bused to all-white Everett, on the South Side. Thanks to busing, they won the state championship.) We didn’t start taking classes with black kids until the third grade. Before that happened, we white kids were driven to Main Street and assigned a black “partner” for a day of total immersion with the opposite race.
That sounds as sappy as a Davey and Goliath episode on racial tolerance, but it worked. By the time I arrived at Sexton, the student body was 55 percent white and 40 percent black, with a few Mexicans and Vietnamese making up the balance, but there were no office takeovers, because the principal was a respected black minister, and because we’d had seven years to get used to each other, instead of being thrown together during puberty, when one’s natural response to a new kid is to beat the crap out of him. There were no black bathrooms or white bathrooms. We all smoked pot in the same bathrooms. The homecoming king was a black football player, the queen a white cheerleader. We were a statewide power in basketball and golf. My classmates included Malcolm X’s niece and the daughter of a Lebanese lawyer whose golf bag I’d carried at the country club. There were racial tensions, but they were over matters of culture, not turf. At a postgame dance, Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancin’ in the Dark” was hooted down by a crowd that wanted to hear Cameo. Dan Oberdorfer’s parents would not allow him to take Janine Morris to the prom. I had to step around break-dancers to get to the library. But my only physical altercation was with a redneck who was dating my ex-girlfriend.
I knew that Sexton was unusual—that most other schools were lily-white suburban or all-black inner-city—but I didn’t realize how unusual until I went to Michigan State University. Most of my college classmates had grown up in segregated metro Detroit, and the campus was constantly sparking with racial controversies: one spring, black students occupied the administration building for nine days. The young men inside that building were acting on grievances I naively thought had been settled twenty years before—we’d been through that in Lansing, but we were long past it. Since then, though, Lansing seems to have given up on interracial education. On the one hand, it opened an Afrocentric charter school named after Malcolm X. On the other, a schools-of-choice policy allows white kids to defect to the suburbs. Today, Sexton is 66 percent white and 19 percent black. My old school is no outlier. According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, public school integration peaked in 1988, three years after my graduation from Sexton, when 48 percent of black students attended integrated schools. Today, that figure is 31 percent.
I never thought of Sexton as Ghetto High. Most of us were white, after all. But the rest of greater Lansing did. “You go to Sexton?” a kid from the suburbs once said to me. “I went to a basketball game there when we played you guys. All I saw were the dark ones.” In college, I tried to impress a black girl from Detroit by telling her I’d attended an inner-city high school.
“Where’d you go?” she inquired skeptically.
“Lansing Sexton.”
“Can’t argue with that!” she exclaimed.
Even the Detroit kids thought Sexton was a tough school. A biracial education is the only street cred I’ve ever had in my life. During his 2008 speech on race in Philadelphia, Barack Obama said that “segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools.” I hope he meant all-white schools as well as all-black schools. And I hope he meant inferior socially as well as academically. Today, I live in a neighborhood that’s one-third black, one-third white, and one-third Latino. It seems normal to me, but I’m not sure I’d be comfortable if I’d graduated from a suburban high school. Young Mr. Obama is a study of how Chicago’s black politics elevated Obama to the Senate and the presidency. I’m not sure I would have been comfortable on the South Side if I hadn’t gone to school with African-Americans. The fact that Sexton was multicultural before that term existed is a legacy of Oldsmobile, which was itself multicultural, at least at the shop-floor l
evel. And the school itself has left a legacy of integration, among its graduates and their children. In the 2010 census, Lansing had a higher percentage of mixed-race residents with a black parent than any city in the United States. That’s also what happens when you throw black kids and white kids together during puberty. My hometown fulfilled the fears of every segregationist who swore to defend Southern womanhood. It’s the Miscegenation Capital of America, and proud of it.
The principal’s office had two doors: one opening south, one west. The occupant, Dr. Reginald Bates, a transplant from Washington, D.C., seemed to expect trouble to come through both. My appearance in the south door was just what he’d feared.
“I have a headache,” Dr. Bates grumbled as I sat down. He glared at my copy of Young Mr. Obama.
“You want to donate that book? I’ve never done this before. Let me call the librarian. Does it have any profanity in it?”
“One word.”
“Let me see it.”
I opened the book to a passage in which one of Obama’s campaign advisers calls him “motherfucker.”
“It’s in the context of a journalistic quote,” I explained.
While we waited for the librarian, I asked Dr. Bates how many students attended Sexton.
“Around seven hundred and fifty.”
“When I was here, it was twenty-one hundred.”
“I’ve heard that story a hundred million times. I had an alumni come in yesterday at seven o’clock, wanting to talk about the old days. That’s my time to get things done. Don’t come in here at seven o’clock to talk about that. Not to cut your story off.”
“Closing the factory must have reduced enrollment,” I ventured.
“I don’t know,” Dr. Bates said curtly. “That was gone before I got here. I don’t have a frame of reference for that.”
Nothin' but Blue Skies Page 42
