Dearborn Dispute : Town Finds It Hard to Shed Racist Image

When Orville L. Hubbard, the outspoken segregationist mayor and flamboyant political boss who ruled this overwhelmingly white, industrial city for more than three decades, died in 1982, the town’s new leaders hoped that Dearborn’s reputation for racism would be buried with him.

But now it seems that Hubbard’s ghost is bent on coming back to haunt Dearborn’s 90,000 residents. An ordinance designed to keep non-residents out of Dearborn’s parks, approved by the city’s voters in November, has opened old wounds between Dearborn and its predominantly black next-door neighbor, Detroit.

The vote, following an apparently racially motivated grass-roots petition drive to get the issue on the ballot, has sparked a court challenge of the ordinance and a massive boycott of Dearborn stores by Detroit’s inner city blacks.

Businesses, especially those at Dearborn’s regional shopping center, Fairlane Town Center, have been caught in the middle, because they have traditionally relied heavily on black customers. With few major stores remaining in the blighted inner city, Detroit residents are forced to travel to the suburbs to shop.

Black leaders, with memories of Hubbard’s era still fresh in their minds, charge that the parks ordinance is designed to keep Detroit blacks out of Dearborn. They see it as a product of an effort to create an updated, subtle form of segregation in the Detroit area, a system that, if successful, would allow inner city blacks to shop in suburban stores, but restrict them from enjoying the parks in towns where they spend their dollars.

Leaders of a civil rights coalition formed to fight the ordinance are vowing to continue their boycott until Dearborn officials agree not to enforce the ordinance pending a court ruling on the law’s constitutionality. They also hope to use the Dearborn boycott as a catalyst to spark a nationwide fight against other ordinances or more informal practices in white suburbs around the country that they say are designed to inhibit inner city blacks from using municipal services and facilities or from frequenting suburban residential or shopping districts.

James Crow, Esquire

“We’re not dealing with the Jim Crow of the 1950s here,” says Joe Madison, national director for voter education for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, who is helping to coordinate the Dearborn boycott. “We’re dealing with James Crow, Esquire--Jim Crow’s first cousin--a more sophisticated segregation for the 1980s.”

In Dearborn, the racist legacy of Hubbard, Dearborn’s strongman mayor from 1942 through 1977, is widely seen as the main reason that this blue-collar city, home to Ford Motor Co.’s world headquarters and some of its biggest manufacturing plants, is still almost completely segregated.

Arabs and other ethnic groups now account for a significant percentage of Dearborn’s population, but the latest census figures show that Dearborn has just 83 black residents, less than 0.1% of the population.

‘Remnants of Racism’

“To think that racism in Dearborn died with Orville Hubbard is ludicrous,” Madison charged. “Orville Hubbard didn’t do things by himself, and this ordinance reflects the fact that remnants of racism still exist there.”

Meanwhile, outgoing Dearborn Mayor John O’Reilly, who unsuccessfully fought the ordinance during the election, is concerned that the park ban and the controversy surrounding it have damaged Dearborn’s reputation. “I think it has dredged up the past, and it is hurting our image,” said O’Reilly, who left office last week when his term expired.

But city officials believe it is unfair that Dearborn is getting so much negative publicity. “There is segregation here just like there is in 95% of the white suburbs ringing every city in the country,” said Doyne Jackson, Dearborn’s director of citizen resources and information.

Rejected by City Council

To most Dearborn officials, the ordinance seemed to be a solution in search of a problem. Few inner city blacks have ever used the parks, and the parks have never had a significant crime problem, city officials say. So when the issue was first raised at a City Council meeting last summer, the council defeated the residents-only policy.

But a Dearborn neighborhood group, led by a former City Council member, mounted a petition drive that placed the issue on the November ballot, and the ordinance was passed over the protests of most of Dearborn’s leadership, including O’Reilly, his chief of police and the Chamber of Commerce.

During the campaign, the mayor and police chief stressed that the policy would be unenforceable without expensive new fences, park passes and the addition of guards to check residents’ passes; they warned that any less uniform entry policy would be unconstitutional. But the ordinance still passed by a vote of 17,790 to 13,976.

A Tentative Compromise

But just a few weeks after the election in late November, Dearborn and the civil rights coalition opposed to the ban appeared to have reached a compromise. The city agreed to sign a court injunction prohibiting it from enforcing the ban until the ordinance’s constitutionality could be determined, and in return the coalition agreed to call off a boycott of Dearborn stores in the middle of the Christmas shopping season.

In December, however, O’Reilly refused to agree to the injunction when he discovered that the coalition was seeking to use the court case as a way to air allegations of civil rights violations by Dearborn; in the written complaint backing up its injunction filing, the group charged the city with upholding a tradition of racism.

The complaint stated that “historically” Dearborn “has maintained itself as a virtually all-white city” and that “throughout the years, public officials of the city of Dearborn have publicly stated that blacks were not welcome to reside in Dearborn.” It went on to allege that the “primary purpose” of the ordinance was to “exclude large numbers of black persons residing in the city of Detroit.”

O’Reilly complained that the coalition wanted to put the history of Dearborn on trial, while contending that he had only agreed with the coalition to seek a quick court decision that would be limited to determining the constitutionality of the ordinance, without dredging up Orville Hubbard.

O’Reilly acknowledges that the neighborhood group that got the ordinance on the ballot may have had racist motivations, but he does not believe that all of the voters were being racist by simply agreeing to keep their parks to themselves. So he and other city officials have insisted that the issue of race be kept out of any agreement.

In response, the NAACP and its allied groups charged O’Reilly with reneging on their agreement. “If the mayor was surprised that we raised the issue of race (in the court documents), he must have been living in a cave since November,” said Howard Simon, executive director of the Detroit branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is working with the NAACP in the coalition.

Boycott Resumed

After their failure to reach a settlement with the city, the coalition announced just before Christmas that its boycott would resume. Since then, no negotiations have been held, and both Dearborn and the coalition say they still see no possibility for a compromise.

Because of the boycott, sales at many Dearborn businesses plunged, and businesses began urging the city to seek a new settlement. “It’s killing my business and the rest of the mall,” said Richard Spector, manager of the Sundance shoe store at Fairlane Town Center. “On a good Saturday, our mall is 40% black, and now there are hardly any here.”

“We’ve definitely lost business,” added Anne MacDonald, manager of the Tannery West, a leather goods store at Fairlane. “We’ve even gotten calls from black customers asking if they can mail in their layaway checks for items they’ve already ordered, because they don’t want to enter the mall at all.”

At the same time, the legal challenge of the Dearborn ordinance, now awaiting action in Wayne County, Mich., Circuit Court, could also affect other suburbs around Detroit, because the case could help determine whether municipalities have the right under Michigan’s Constitution to limit the use of their public facilities to residents.

O’Reilly is still confident that Dearborn will win any court battle, arguing that a city has a right to give preferential treatment to its residents. “I think the ordinance per se is constitutional,” he said. “And I think a city should be able to prioritize its services for its residents. Otherwise, if everybody could use everything a city had to offer, you would have chaos.”