The first time Taylor Segue III met former Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, he was terrified.
It was the mid-1980s, and Segue was a young lawyer for the Detroit firm Lewis, White & Clay, he told BridgeDetroit. Segue and two other lawyers had put together a tri-party agreement for preservationist Charles Forbes and Mike Ilitch to purchase and restore the Fox Theatre, which was in serious decline.
Emmett Moten, then the city’s director of community and economic development, told the lawyers to present the deal to Young at the Manoogian Mansion, Segue recalled.
“‘You (expletive) got five minutes,’” Segue remembered Young telling them. “I was so intimidated. “I knew I didn’t want to be in there with Coleman Young. Why did Emmett make me come over here?”
But the presentation worked in Segue’s favor, with Young signing off on the agreement. The Fox reopened in 1988 following a $12 million restoration project from the Ilitch family.
Known for having a no-nonsense approach and approving some of the city’s biggest development projects in the 1970s and 1980s, Young was elected as Detroit’s first Black mayor in 1973, holding on to that reign for 20 years.
The Coleman A. Young Foundation, which the mayor founded in 1982, honored Young’s life and accomplishments at an event Tuesday at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. The celebration also served as the launch of the Coleman A. Young Statue Initiative, an effort to place a statue of the politician inside the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection in Washington DC. The collection consists of 100 statues donated by each of the 50 states to honor notable people in the state’s history. Each state contributes two statues. For Michigan, that includes the state’s territorial governor Lewis Cass and former US president Gerald Ford.
Lewis Cass was a territorial governor of Michigan before it was a state from 1813 to 1831, represented Michigan in the Senate from 1845-1857 and served as President James Buchanan’s secretary of state. He was a slave owner and supported the expansion of slavery into northern states. As President Andrew Jackson’s secretary of war, Cass was involved in the forced removal of Native Americans from their homelands.
The statue is being created by Detroit-based sculptor Austen Brantley, and the project has received $1.2 million, thanks to contributions from organizations like Bedrock, Kresge Foundation, the DTE Foundation and the Knight Foundation.
During the event, Bedrock CEO Jared Fleisher announced the company will be funding $250,000 toward the development of a second statue of Young, potentially located along the east riverfront as part of the Renaissance Center redevelopment project. Earlier this week, Bedrock founder Dan Gilbert pledged $1 billion to create a new nonprofit to redevelop and run the RenCen and east riverfront.
Fleisher noted that Young cut the ribbon on the RenCen when it opened in 1977.
“Knowing what I know about this great man, it is my humble supposition that he would want a Renaissance Center to not be an empty relic, but to be reimagined and reborn, alive and thriving,” Fleisher said. “Mayor Young stood for the fundamental ideal that you cannot uplift the human condition without economic progress, and he was a relentless champion for economic progress.”
Efforts for a Coleman Young statue in Washington DC began in 2022, when the Michigan Legislature unanimously passed a resolution that aims to replace the Michigan statue of Cass in the U.S. Capitol with one of Young. The resolution was created by former state senator Adam Hollier, who spoke at the initiative event. He said when he first began drafting the resolution, people told him the idea was crazy and that he should pick someone less controversial. But Hollier had the support of Mayor Mary Sheffield and former mayor Mike Duggan. Both were in attendance at the event Tuesday, along with former Detroit mayors Dennis Archer, Kwame Kilpatrick, Ken Cockrel Jr. and Dave Bing.
“When we talk about Mayor Young, we talk about somebody who typified everything that was important in our state over the past century,” Hollier said. “But the statue is not the most important part of this discussion. When people go to the nation’s capital and they say, ‘Who did Michigan send?’ They’re going to see somebody who was a war hero, a builder, an union activist, someone who stood up when it was inconvenient.”
Jeff Horner, associate professor of teaching in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, told BridgeDetroit he’s pleased about the statues, saying there’s not a more transformative elected figure in Michigan’s 20th century politics than Young. Horner initially taught a course on the former mayor in 2023 titled, “Planning and Social Legacies of Coleman A. Young.” He has since taught the class two more times.
“It’s very well deserved,” Horner said. “It will certainly bring pride to Black Detroiters and he’s been a huge inspiration. It’s a real honor that he’ll be in the Capitol.”
Horner added that Young has been adjudicated by history in terms of his impact and that people are thinking more positively of him almost 30 years since his death.
“Politicians always become more respectable the longer that they’re out of office,” he said. “There’s always a kind of resuscitation, if you will, of someone’s unpopularity, and Coleman Young in death has capably proved that.”
An artist’s vision
Brantley unveiled a miniature version of the statue at Tuesday’s event, which shows Young standing with a stern look on his face and his arms crossed, donning a suit. Brantley said the stance conveys “confidence, conviction, and self-assurance.” He hopes the statue will serve as a reminder for Black children that they belong in powerful spaces.
“At this stage, I’m continuing to refine the anatomy, the clothing, and the subtleties of his likeness,” Brantley said. “Those decisions matter because a monument has to do more than resemble the person; it has to communicate something about their presence. I want viewers to encounter Mayor Young as someone who occupied space with purpose, carried the weight of leadership and left a legacy that deserves to be understood beyond a name in a history book.”
Khary Turner, executive director of the Coleman A. Young Foundation, told BridgeDetroit that Brantley was one of at least six submissions the organization received when the statue commission began issuing proposals in 2024. Some of the commission members include Hollier, foundation president Marvin Beatty and Illitch Holdings CEO Chris Illitch.
What made Brantley stand out from the other artists was that he’s a self-taught sculptor and his willingness to study and research Young, Turner said.
“Besides being an awesome sculptor, he looks like the kind of talent that the Coleman Young Foundation would support if he were applying for a scholarship,” he said about Brantley. “He’s from Detroit, he’s one of ours.”
A part of Detroit’s history
Coleman began his political career in 1962 when he ran for the Michigan House of Representatives. He was unsuccessful, but was elected to the Michigan State Senate two years later, becoming Michigan’s second Black state senator. In 1966, Young was elected Democratic minority floor leader and remained in Lansing for eight more years.
In 1973, Young declared his candidacy for Detroit mayor, going on to defeat Police Commissioner John Nichols the following year. During that time, the city was almost 50% Black, with Young promising a better future for Black residents, reported the Michigan Chronicle.
Segue and his friend Ronald Dean, who’s now an accountant for the Young Foundation, were hopeful 19-year-olds in 1973 when they went off to the polls and voted for Young.
It was a tumultuous time for the city and the country, Dean and Segue said. Detroit was still dealing with the aftermath of the 1967 uprising, which caused intense racial conflict between Black and white Detroiters. The police department had enacted its STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets) unit, which killed at least 22 people between 1971 and 1973, a majority of them Black men. In addition, the Vietnam War was still ongoing, and Dean and Segue feared being drafted.
“It was a very interesting time,” Dean told BridgeDetroit. “Black women and men, we knew that in order to get our political foothold, we had to support Coleman because he was truly, on a local level, our first political representation of real stature.”
Young was known to speak his mind, which was evident in his inaugural address: “I issue a warning to all those pushers, to all rip-off artists, to all muggers; it’s time to leave Detroit; hit Eight Mile. And I don’t give a damn if they are Black or white, or if they wear ‘Superfly’ suits or blue uniforms with silver badges. Hit the road.”
Young’s outspoken manner, often laced with profanity, brought its share of critics, many of whom lived in the suburbs. While the Black community largely celebrated Young, some white people believed he contributed to Detroit’s downfall.
Young served five consecutive terms as mayor, ushering in downtown developments like the RenCen and overseeing the creation of Hart Plaza, the Joe Louis Arena and the People Mover.
He also disbanded STRESS when he took office and integrated the police department. Coleman also provided opportunities for Black men and women to have positions in city government.
But Young’s 20 years in office weren’t always full of good times. Under Young, Detroit’s population declined by 400,000, its homicide rates went up and the auto industry was coming undone.
In 1994, Young retired from public office and published his autobiography, “Hard Stuff.” He died a few years later on Nov. 29, 1997, from emphysema. He was 79.
Young’s son, Coleman A. Young II, is currently serving as president pro tempore of the Detroit City Council. He gave an emotional speech at the statue event, saying the sculptures of his father will be a culmination of the sacrifices he made, the death threats he received and the time spent away from his family.
“I’m sad because he’s gone physically, but I’m happy because his spirit lives within all of us,” Young II said through tears. “I’m healed because I know he’s looking down from heaven, and he’s happy.”
Next steps
Despite receiving $1.2 million from corporations and nonprofits, the Coleman A. Young Foundation still needs to raise between $3 and $5 million to accomplish its goal, Turner said. That includes transporting the statue to Washington DC, removing the Lewis Cass statue and sending it to the Historical Society of Michigan in Lansing and hosting ceremonial events of the installation in DC and Detroit.
“It’s a heavy lift,” Turner told BridgeDetroit. “What we’ll love to do is raise enough to pay for all of our responsibilities and then have something left over to help scale our mission work and put more Detroit kids through college and develop leadership through our Real Skills program.”
Turner said people who want to contribute to the statue initiative can donate on the foundation’s website.
The two statues of Young remind Turner of how limitless our possibilities are.
“We live in an age where, let’s face it, screens can overwhelm us and make us think that our reality is what we see on our devices,” he said. “The true reality is right here in our hearts. What we feel we can do, what we envision. Mayor Young, he led by vision and by heart, and then he found the people and the opportunities to make those realities real for the people of Detroit.”