[2][3] The new mayor energetically promoted downtown redevelopment with major projects like the Joe Louis Arena and the Renaissance Center.

Facing intense manufacturing flight, Young worked to keep major plants in the city, most notably General Motors' Poletown project and Chrysler's Jefferson North assembly.

His family later converted to Catholicism, though Young was denied entry to a Catholic high school due to his race.

[7] During World War II, Young served in the 477th Medium-Bomber Group (the renowned Tuskegee Airmen) of the United States Army Air Forces as a second lieutenant, bombardier, and navigator.

In 1952, Young stunned observers when he appeared before the McCarthy era House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and defied the congressmen.

"[16][17]He said to another HUAC congressman: "Congressman, neither me or none of my friends were at this plant the other day brandishing a rope in the face of John Cherveny, a young union organizer and factory worker who was threatened with repeated violence after members of the HUAC alleged that he might be a communist,[18] I can assure you I have had no part in the hanging or bombing of Negroes in the South.

"[19]According to historians Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Ronald Radosh, Coleman Young was "a secret CPUSA [Communist Party USA] member.

During his senate career, he also pointed out inequities in Michigan state funding, "spending $20 million on rural bus service and a fat zero for the same thing in Detroit.

Nichols represented a national trend of increased police power and brutality in post-riot cities, and therefore, in Young's opinion, had to be defeated.

[23] Winning by such a small margin in a racially polarized city, Young knew the burden he would have to shoulder as mayor.

Young won re-election by wide margins in 1977, 1981, 1985 and 1989, to serve a total of 20 years as mayor, based largely on black votes.

He stated that "we found a police department, which had been guilty of excesses in the past, being professional and, even under provocation, not firing a single shot.

[23] His efforts for affirmative action were stalled in 1981, when a budget crisis forced Detroit voters to approve an income tax hike and city officials to sell $125 million in emergency bonds.

Young's third term as mayor focused heavily on both the covert and overt forces of racism that divided the city and suburbs.

[25] During his fourth term, Young continued to work on improving racial relations of the city and neighborhood standards.

[26] Green's death on November 5, 1992, occurred only months after the Los Angeles riots of 1992, which protested the acquittal of police officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King.

Most of the time Young prevailed over this opposition, seeking jobs and economic stimulus as a way to help rebuild Detroit's neighborhoods.

John Engler called the former Democratic mayor "a man of his word who was willing to work with anyone, regardless of party or politics, to help Detroit – the city he loved and fought for all his life.

[33][34][35] In 2000, a FOIA investigation showed that Young was under FBI surveillance beginning in the 1940s (because of his suspected link to communists) and continuing through the 1980s.

They confronted him in random places; asked about his politics; wiretapped his condo; wired a convicted con man who was his business associate and scrutinized the mayor’s finances.

Major criminal gangs that were founded in Detroit and dominated the drug trade at various times included The Errol Flynns (east side), Nasty Flynns (later the NF Bangers) and Black Killers and the drug consortiums of the 1980s such as Young Boys Inc., Pony Down, Best Friends, Black Mafia Family and the Chambers Brothers.

White flight to the Detroit suburbs, which had begun in the 1950s and accelerated after the 1967 race riot, persisted during Young's two decades in office, amid ongoing crime and drug problems in the inner city.

The white exodus from Detroit had been prodigiously steady prior to the riot, totalling twenty-two thousand in 1966, but afterwards it was frantic.

He implemented broad affirmative action programs that lead to racial integration, and created a network of Neighborhood City Halls and Police Mini Stations.

Young used the relationship established by community policing to mobilize large civilian patrols to address the incidents of Devil's Night arson that had come to plague the city each year.

These patrols have been continued by succeeding administrations and have mobilized as many as 30,000 citizens in a single year in an effort to forestall seasonal arson.

[42] A 1993 survey of historians, political scientists and urban experts conducted by Melvin G. Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago ranked Young as the twelfth-worst American big-city mayor to have served between the years 1820 and 1993.