Hard Stuff: The Autobiography of Mayor Coleman Young.

Some autobiographies strive to deepen the reader's understanding of both their subjects and their times. Those written by Lincoln Steffens, Henry Adams, and Malcolm X are models of that genre. Others, unfortunately, are content to dish out the author's version of events, often offering bad history in the bargain. it's a shame that Coleman Young chose the latter approach.

For fifty years, he was deeply involved in America's most important struggles: the battles for unions and racial equality and the fight against political repression and McCarthyism. During the last twenty years, he led Detroit's efforts to combat the effects of losing most of its economic base. If only Beale Street had talked; what a story he might have told!

Young is a strange case. Born poor in Alabama, he emigrated with his family to Detroit as a small child. Raised in the bosom of the Black Bottom, one of Detroit's legendary ghettos, he recalls a poor but proud community. Serving in the Army during World War II, he led other black servicemen in protesting military racism and segregation. Returning home, he worked with the left wing of the United Auto Workers, which was purged when Walter Reuther consolidated his power.

Next, Young became an organizer for two pioneering civil-rights groups, the National Negro Congress and later the National Negro Labor Council, both of which were close to the Communist Party. Even now, Young refuses to acknowledge whether he was ever a member. Because of his affiliations, Young was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee's traveling witchhunt. In one of his finest moments, Young stood tall and attacked the legitimacy of the committee, branding its chairman a racist.

Unlike most blacks who were elected to mayoral positions in the 1970s, Young eschewed the embrace of white society and middle-class respectability. Although his critics accused him of being too chummy with the big developers and financial institutions, Young always postured as the big, bad "MFIC" (Motherfucker in Charge). Postured is the operative word here, for behind the scenes, he cut sweetheart deals with his developer pals, showering them with millions in Federal urban-aid dollars that could have been used to alleviate some of the city's glaring problems.

A comprehensive discussion of how an embattled city like Detroit can best preserve existing jobs and create new ones should have been at the heart of this book. Urbanologist William Whyte has written that ailing cities often do more harm than good when they build "megastructures" which exist in isolation from the rest of the city.

Coleman Young provided a textbook example by pouring millions in scarce Federal aid into such megastructures as the Renaissance Center office and hotel complex and the People Mover monorail, on which a quarter of a billion dollars was squandered to shuttle a handful of passengers along the waterfront. Perhaps because the problems in the crumbling neighborhoods were so dauting, Young focused his attention on rebuilding along the riverfront downtown. At one point, he even tried to sell off a public auditorium so that a bank could build a tower there.

Young refuses to discuss the issues of urban policy and development. Instead, he treats us to mean-spirited, bullying tirades against his enemies - both real and imagined. His critics on Detroit's city council are dismissed as "pansy-asses" or knee-jerk liberals." Ralph Nader, who had the temerity to oppose Young's deal with General Motors to destroy 1,300 homes for a new auto plant, is branded a "publicity-grabbing little prick." According to Young, he made only one mistake during a half-century of public life: running on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948.

The degree to which an economically depressed city should provide subsidies to preserve jobs is a difficult question. However, Young again fudges the numbers to put his decisions in a favorable light. Although GM opened a new, heavily subsidized plant, it closed two others. So there was no job gain. Ditto for Chrysler's one remaining plant: The company shuttered one next to the site of its new assembly facility. So job creation was a wash - despite Young's claims to the contrary.

Detroit's problems may be worse than any other city's. After World War II, half of all the cars produced in the world were built in Detroit. Today, the city makes about one in a thousand. Between 1960 and 1990, the city lost nearly a million residents (including 90 per cent of its white population) and 300,000 industrial jobs. As appalling as these numbers are, however, they don't validate Young's claim that nothing could have been done differently. His virulent attacks on suburban "racists" and constant feuding with the local media exacerbated a bad situation. Worse, these actions made it nearly impossible to foster the kind of metropolitan planning and coordination that might have alleviated some of Detroit's misery.

During the 1960s, I lived in Detroit's inner city, where I was active with grass-roots community organizations that were quixotically battling the city's "slum clearance" and freeway projects. I don't recall Coleman Young, then a rising star in Michigan's state senate, doing anything to oppose these policies. Belatedly, he questions their wisdom and argues that they destroyed viable neighborhoods, encouraged "white flight," and resulted in thousands of jobs being shifted to the suburbs.

Young doesn't appear to have undergone any change of consciousness, at least as regards women, homosexuals, or other minorities. Women, like booze, exist to be pursued and consumed with as much macho gusto as possible. No sexual partner is ever described or even given a name, although his two former wives come in for a few sentences. He even brags about having tricked women into having sex by palming off dimestore "engagement" rings. At another point, he declares that early in his career, he "learned to separate the class struggle from the ass struggle."

In his last years as mayor - he stepped down in 1993 - Young became increasingly reclusive, spending long hours in the mayoral mansion playing solitaire in his silk pajamas. When three high-ranking aides were indicted and convicted of fraud by Federal juries, Young blamed a "fifty-year campaign" by the Feds to destroy him personally and politically.

Someone with a sense of drama might associate Young's last days with Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones, which traced the rise and fall of a black dictator in the Caribbean. The part was played brilliantly by Paul Robeson - one of Young's idols.