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All About Richard Austin

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Parent Issue
Day
31
Month
December
Year
1975
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
OCR Text

 

 

All About Richard Austin                         

 by Mary Ann George

   Richard Austin spoke calmly and deliberately from behind the huge wooden desk in the impressively-panelled office; behind him was the seal of Michigan's Secretary of State.

   "In 1976, we will be attempting to elect a President and a Vice President at a time when we have a President and a Vice President serving who were not elected by the people. At a time when the last person we elected was forced to resign from his office, when people have lost a great deal off faith in themselves and the system as a whole, and at a time when the nation is celebrating it's 200th birthday."

   Despite the imposing surroundings, Austin's personable manner makes him easy to talk to, and hints at the reasons why, at 62, he is one of Michigan's most successful black political figures.

   Richard Austin,born in Alabama and raised in Detroit's inner city, is Michigan's first black Secretary of State. In 1969, he nearly became Detroit's first black mayor, losing by less than one percentage point to Roman Gribbs. He had missed election to

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 All About Richard continued from cover the United States Congress by 43 votes in 1964, and became Wayne County's Auditor two years later.

   Austin is widely mentioned as a likely candidate for the Democratic nomination for this year's U.S. Senate race in Michigan. If he wins, he will become the first black Democratic Senator in U.S. history.

   Although Austin has achieved some notable firsts as a black man, he has fought hard against the stereotype of "black political leader", preferring, as he says, to be evaluated on the basis of his achievements rather than the color of his skin. He saw his election as Secretary of State in 1970 "as a demonstration on the part of the voters of Michigan that they were willing to consider candidates for high office on the basis of merit, regardless of their race, their creed, or any other identification which shouldn't be important." Accordingly, he saw his re-election in 1974 as evidence that "my performance in office merited the voters' continued support."

    Austin's father was an itinerant coal miner, "which meant that he was unable to get permanent employment at any coal mine." During World War 1, he migrated from the coal fields of Alabama to the coal fields of Pennsylvania. He died when Austin was eleven, and Richard's mother moved the family to Detroit. Richard grew up in a central-city neighborhood just south of the Boulevard, attended school there and graduated from the Detroit Institute of Technology with a B.S. in 1937. Five years-later, he became Michigan's first black Certified Public Accountant.

   Austin became involved in politics because "I became interested in human rights. But the more I became interested in civic activities, the more I realized that the most important decision affecting the lives of people are made by people in government."

   As Secretary of State, Michigan's third highest office he has sought to "humanize the services of the department and make it easier for people to do business with the state." It is now possible, for example, to pay for services by personal check and to obtain license plates by mail. People whose driver's licenses are about to expire are now notified through the mail. The driver's license test is now given in fifteen different languages. Under Austin, the department has also expanded into consumer protection, licensing car dealers and auto mechanics

   Perhaps Austin's biggest achievement in his current position, however, is the culmination of a three-year battle with the state legislature to permit voter registration in driver's license examination stations.  In the first month of the new program, we registered 42,000 people. Over a three-year cycle, we are going to add close to a million people to the voter registration rolls"

DETROIT IN TRANSITION

     Growing up in Detroit, Austin saw the city change over the years. "When I first came to Detroit, it was the automobile capital of the world, a one-industry city. Everything seemed to focus on automobile production. Then a great deal of that industry left the city. Since 1950, the city has also lost approximately 600,000 people, and that has had a devastating effect on progress in the city and the capacity to raise revenues to pay for public services."

   To revitalize itself, Austin says the city will have to seek help from the state and federal government. "The city not only needs funds to maintain services, but there is a rebuilding job that has to be done, because so much of the city is now dilapidated and so much of the housing has been destroyed to make way for expressways, the University-culture center, and the Medical Center. Detroit is a city in transition, in the process of becoming what appears to be a service center from having been an industrial center. There are a lot of dislocation problems, such as high crime, that require expenditure of large sums of money which the city does not have."

   Austin was a member of the Michigan Tax Study Advisory Committee in 1958 (the Conlin Committee) and the Citizens Income Tax Study Committee of Detroit in 1961 . The Michigan Tax Study "set the tone for tax planning in state government for the next fifteen years or longer." Austin comments on the current efforts by the city to increase the tax on residents and non-residents:

   "As the city found it necessary to raise additional revenues, the Legislature was more reluctant to increase the tax to be paid by residents outside of the city. The reason is pretty obvious. There are more legislators who do not live in the city of Detroit in the Michigan legislature than there are who live in the city. So the majority would always prevail, and the prevailing opinion would be that if you are going to raise that tax, just raise it on the residents of the city of Detroit and leave the rest of us alone, even though we work in the city and live elsewhere. I would also say that that attitude is still prevalent in - the Michigan Legislature. It is going to, be extremely difficult to get the Legislature to increase the amount of resident tax. I hope they would maintain the balance as it was originally conceived.

   "You have to keep in mind that the income tax was necessary because so much of the property tax base was being eroded to build expressways, which facilitated the movement of people from the suburbs into the city and out. The only way the city could recover the loss of revenue from the property that had been taken over by the expressways was to ask tor some payment of revenue from whatever has been earned from those who come in and go right back out."

THE ISSUES IN 76

   Austin, as he sizes up the Senate race sees the 1976 elections as a challenge to candidates to "articulate the great needs of the people today and win back their confidence." More than a leadership vacuum, he feels that the national problem is that "we have not fully responded to the vast changes in our society. It may be that there is a need for more sensitive leadership, but the system by which we select leaders is one that discourages many sensitive people from aspiring." 

   "I recall a remark made by Mayor Coleman Young. He said 'this job of Mayor is a mean job. I tend to like it however, but it is a mean job.' There aren't many people who would like a mean job, not if they are well-trained and other options are available to them. Just think how many times President Ford has had a close shave. Look back and see what happened to George Wallace in 1972. Bobby Kennedy, John Kennedy. There are a lot of reasons why it is difficult to get people who would be most sensitive to the great needs of the country today."

   While he says there "may be some merit in it", he does not necessarily favor a re-opening of the investigation into the assassination of Dr.Martin Luther King.

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Jr. "I would rather look for answers to the more basic problems confronting people: how to provide enough jobs, and how to feed the people in tli is nation. We have a malnutrition problem in this nation, not to speak of the problems around the world, and we have a responsibility to do something about that, loo. This globe is shrinking to the point where we are all in this thing together. We have got to be concerned about the total quality of life of the people who populate this globe.               "There is some value in reopening of the investigation.         We have got to know the truth. hut I don't think we should be totally consumed by the investigation."

   Austin evinces somewhat greater concern for another form of political "assassination" the trial and conviction of former Michigan Supreme Court Justice John Swainson.

   "It is obviously one of the most unfortunate occurrences in our state's history. It is not often that you find a war hero, a man who lost both legs while serving his country and who through grit was able to rehabilitate himself and stand up like any other man, even to the point to become Governor of this state and later a jurist and a member of the Michigan Supreme Court. It isn't often that we find a person of his caliber involved in something that results in his having to resign a high post like the Supreme Court.

   "I think the real tragedy, however, is that he had to resign, not because be was found guilty of what he was charged with. He was charged with having accepted a bribe. He was found not guilty of having told something that was untrue about his movements and his contacts and some of his conversations in his testimony to the Grand Jury. He was found guilty of perjury.

   "Think about it! He was charged by a convicted criminal of wrong-doing which was not proved. But in his effort to answer the charges and his inability to remember exactly all the events that occurred at that time his life, he made some mistakes. The result is because of the accusation of a convicted criminal, which was proved later not true, a career has been destroyed. I think that is a great tragedy."      Austin sees the upcoming Bicentennial year as "an opportunity to learn from the lessons the past, to see how to solve the problems of today, and to set some goals for ourselves in the future.

    "Even among blacks, a good deal has been accomplished in this 200-year period, and though we, as blacks, are not completely happy with the progress that's been made- we certainly haven't gone everywhere we think we ought to have gone, accomplished everything that we feel we should- we are very well pleased that we are not where we were."

 Maryann George, a free-lance writer based in Ann Arbor, spent three weeks interviewing political figures likely to enter Michigan's 1976 Senate race in order to compile this report.