Jerome Cavanagh - Mayoral Campaign

Mayoral Campaign

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. 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. Cavanagh ran second to Miriani in the primary, earning a slot in the general election, but received less than half the primary votes Miriani did. However, Cavanagh campaigned relentlessly, criticizing Miriani's handling of Detroit's financial affairs and race relations with the city's African-American community. And indeed, many in the black community believed Miriani condoned police brutality. On election day, black voters turned out in force, and Cavanagh stunned political observers by defeating incumbent Miriani.

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. Unlike Richard J. Daley, who resisted forced implementation of the American civil rights movement, Jerry Cavanagh welcomed Martin Luther King, Jr. to Detroit, and marched with him in June 1963 down Woodward Avenue in the 100,000 strong March for Freedom.

Cavanagh was successful in receiving money from the U.S. federal government through the Model Cities Program. New skyscrapers were built downtown. Well-informed observers believed that Detroit had extinguished the embers of resentment left over from the 1943 Detroit Race Riot.

For example, Fortune magazine commented:

"the most significant is the progress Detroit has made in race relations. The grim specter of the 1943 riots never quite fades from the minds of city leaders. 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.

"Negroes in Detroit have deep roots in the community, compared with the more transient population of Negro ghettos in Harlem and elsewhere in the North. ... more than 40% of the negro population own their own houses.

Nor was Detroit doing so badly economically. The National Observer commented:

"The evidence, both statistical and visual, is everywhere. Retail sales are up dramatically. Earnings are higher. Unemployment is lower. People are putting new aluminum sidings on their homes, new carpets on the floor, new cars in the garage.

"Some people are forsaking the suburbs and returning to the city. Physically Detroit has acquired freshness and vitality. Acres of slums have been razed, and steel and glass apartments, angular and lonely in the vacated landscape, have sprung up in their place. 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.

"Accustomed to years of adversity, to decades of drabness and civil immobility, Detroiters are naturally exhilarated. 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.'

In the face of this optimism, Cavanaugh was re-elected overwhelmingly in 1965. In 1966, Cavanagh was elected president of both the United States Conference of Mayors and the National League of Cities, the only mayor to hold both posts at the same time.