Kwame's Swan Song Could Be a New Tune

So it's come to this Detroit, which you always knew it would.

Your city's leader, who was billed early on as the "hip hop mayor" has finally taken a bow after being part of a City Hall scandal that amounts to the Motor City equivalent of Watergate. If there was a time for finger pointing, it has passed. If slick political moves could have been made to save face, those opportunities are as distant a memory as Edgewater Park.

Motown, you are now forced to do something you have not been forced to do in generations: face yourself butt naked. And that won't be easy, but it's the only way to heal a wound ripped right up the middle of Woodward Ave from Jefferson to 8 Mile. ...



Some, actually many, people were waiting to see Kwame Kilpatrick crash and burn following the debacle stemming from a whistleblower lawsuit, which evolved into a legal nightmare and political scandal which resulted from his lying under oath about his adulterous relationship with Chief of Staff Christine Beatty. Everyone called him every name in the book, people bitched and moaned about him being in office, others bitched and moaned about him being forced out of office.

But now that this chapter of the book has closed, another opens and it is a very trecherous one to read. Kilpatrick's behavior is not unique in City Hall. Corruption has plagued Detroit's city government for the better part of the last century. Kickbacks and cronyism reach back in that town to the days of the Purple Gang, prohibition and Albert E. Cobo. It has been constant, and the people who paid for it have always been the working folks who just wanted to put food on the table and clothes on their kids' backs.


This thing, however, is the toughest hill the city's had to climb since the 1967 riot. That was also as much a political mess as it was a physical mess. It left Detroit devastated, changed its demographic structure and opened the door to a new generation of the same crap which, with the help of the city's megachurch culture, became entrenched in Detroit's political foundation.

In short, like many other urban areas, bullshit was the way lots of things got done. Why am I saying this? Because I grew up there watching it happen. Nothing that is wrong with Detroit today is Kilpatrick's fault. He just inherited it, then got caught up in the sweet scent of power, and she's one sexy bitch.

Really, this is just the tip of the iceberg. With the retirement announcement of police chief Ella Bully-Cummings, the door to an outhouse is about to be opened where the FBI (which rarely investigates local political problems) is going to uncover a heap of manure beginning with her role in the firing of one of the cops, which started the whole scandal.

After that, the city council will have to deal with a third of its members falling under FBI investigation as well because of the approval of a $47 million sludge hauling contract with a Houston-based firm. Four members are facing allegations of taking money to approve the deal.

Look, corruption is not unique to Detroit, or to black people as the sentencing of people like Jack Abramoff or the scandal-wraught resignation of ex-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer will prove.

But from Detroit to Zimbabwe, everywhere black communities are plagued with corrupt politicians, the people suffer because elected or appointed officials abuse their power over a people who have been socialized to naively think government is their friend.

Please, if you look at the Detroit Public Schools alone, you'll find a correlation between bureaucracy bolstered by corrupt and/or incompetent leadership and severe high school dropout rates.

At the end of the day, and this isn't a Republican thing because they don't really believe this particularly when it comes to black folk, putting a leash on government and leaving people to make their own damn decisions instead of having to fight city hall tooth and nail actually grows communities.

Detroit, it's high time you changed from a community of people beholden to politicians who are arrogant enough to believe that the citizenry should worship them, to a free society of people who do and think what they want.

Ancient Rome failed because everyone either wanted to be a potentate or the Pope. Ken Cockrel, who will assume the mayor's duties after Kilpatrick's resignation becomes official, has the opportunity to show Detroit and the rest of the world that he's not Caesar and neither should anyone else be.