Jerome Cavanagh

Jerome Patrick Cavanagh (June 16, 1928 – November 27, 1979) was an American politician who served as the mayor of Detroit, Michigan from 1962 to 1970.

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.

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."

The economy of the city also seemed in generally good health.

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.

He attended the University of Detroit, earning an undergraduate degree in 1950 and a law degree in 1954, and practiced law in Detroit after graduation.

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.

Cavanagh was a Roman Catholic.

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 fewer 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.

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 the 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 Detroit Walk to Freedom.

Cavanagh was successful in receiving money from the U.S. federal government through the Model Cities Program.

New skyscrapers were built downtown.

The Model Cities Program was a key component of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty.

Begun in 1966, it operated five-year-long experiments in 150 cities to develop new antipoverty programs and alternative forms of municipal government.

The ambitious federal urban aid program succeeded in fostering a new generation of mostly black urban leaders.

Detroit was one of the largest Model Cities projects.

Mayor Cavanagh was the only elected official to serve on Johnson's task force.

Detroit received widespread acclaim for its leadership in the program, which used $490 million to try to turn a nine-square-mile section of the city (with 134,000 inhabitants) into a model city.

The city's political and business elite, and city planners, along with the black middle class, wanted federal funding to assist the economic growth of the entire city.

They sought to protect the central business district property values from nearby slums and to construct new revenue-generating structures.

However local community organizers and civil rights activists rallied poor residents in opposition to these plans.

They said federal renewal funding should be used to replace deteriorating housing stock, whether with new public housing or low-cost housing built by private developers.

Initially seen as another John F. Kennedy, his reputation was doomed by the city's 1967 riots, the most destructive of any U.S. city that decade.

He was the first mayor to reside at the Manoogian Mansion, donated to the city by the industrial baron Alex Manoogian.

The Model City program was terminated in Detroit and nationwide in 1974 after major race riots in most of its target cities.

He is the brother of Mike Cavanagh, a former Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court (1983–2014) and father of eight children, among whom are Mark Jerome Cavanagh, since 1989 a judge on the Michigan Court of Appeals, David Peter Cavanagh and Christopher Francis Cavanagh (both former Wayne County Commissioners), and Phil Cavanagh (a former member of the Michigan House of Representatives).