[1] Jerome P. Cavanagh was born on June 16, 1928, in Detroit, the son of Mary Irene (Timmins) and Sylvester J. Cavanaugh, a boilermaker at Ford Motor Company.

[2] He was active in Democratic Party politics while attending school, and afterward served in low-level appointed positions as an administrative assistant at the Michigan State Fair Authority and as a member of the Metropolitan Airport Board of Zoning Appeals.

In his first campaign ever, the 33-year-old Cavanagh entered the 1961 Detroit mayoral race, one of eleven candidates in the nonpartisan primary opposing incumbent Louis Miriani.

[2] None of these candidates was seen as serious opposition to Miriani, who had an enormous amount of institutional support and had easily won the mayoral race four years earlier.

[2] However, Cavanagh campaigned relentlessly, criticizing Miriani's handling of Detroit's financial affairs and race relations with the city's African-American community.

[2] On election day, black voters turned out in force, and Cavanagh stunned political observers by defeating the incumbent Miriani.

[2] Cavanagh got off to a popular start as mayor, appointing a reformer to be chief of police and implementing an affirmative action program for most city agencies.

As much as anything else, that specter has enabled the power structure to overcome tenacious prejudice and give the Negro community a role in the consensus probably unparalleled in any major American city.

In the central business district, hard by the Detroit River, severely rectangular skyscrapers—none more than 5 years old—jostle uncomfortably with the gilded behemoths of another age.

They note with particular pride that Detroit has been removed from the Federal Bureau of Employment Security's classification of 'an area with substantial and persistent unemployment.

Some 22,000 residents, mostly white, moved to the suburbs in 1966 alone, following new auto plants and new housing, or using the newly constructed Interstate system to commute into Detroit.

[citation needed] To close the gap, and to pay for the new programs he wanted to implement, Cavanagh had pushed through the legislature income and commuter taxes for Detroit, but these proved unpopular with residents and businesses.

Feeling a large police presence would make things worse, Cavanagh acted slowly to stop the riots.

Late Sunday afternoon, Cavanaugh and city officials met at the 10th precinct with black community leaders and neighborhood activists.

He was, moreover, procedurally limited in his ability to control the riots as it was the role of Governor George Romney to ask for federal assistance once it appeared local resources might not be sufficient.

Cavanagh died of a heart attack on November 27, 1979, at St. Joseph Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, while visiting a client in that city.