- Coming up, we've got a great New Year's edition of "American Black Journal," taking a look back at some of the guests we had on the show in 2024.

We'll have highlights from our conversations about current issues in the African American community, in the arts, and in the Black church in Detroit.

So sit back and relax and enjoy this special episode of "American Black Journal."

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(upbeat mellow music) (upbeat mellow music continues) - Happy New Year, and welcome to "American Black Journal."

I'm your host, Stephen Henderson.

As we kick off 2025, we're looking forward to bringing you yet another year filled with great guests and important conversations that have an impact on the African American community.

Today, we're taking a look back at some of last year's episodes.

So let's start with our discussions about reparations, crime, and the 10th anniversary of the Flint water crisis.

The Flint water crisis began on April 25th, 2014, when the City of Flint switched its drinking water source from Detroit's system to untreated water from the Flint River in order to save money.

As a result, tens of thousands of residents in the primarily African American city were exposed to dangerous levels of lead, which caused major health issues.

So here we are a decade later, how is the water quality today in Flint, and what health concerns remain?

Here's my conversation with Flint's current mayor, Sheldon Neeley.

I wanna start with you telling me about where we are now in Flint with the state of the water, but then also the state of the people in Flint who I think have to over and over again we've gotta make sure that we center this conversation on the lives of the people in your city.

So tell us how we're doing with water and with just the folks there.

- You know, I'm here as a lifelong resident of this community, born and raised in this community where my mother, and my parents, and my daughters, and my wife are still here, so we were here from very, very day one.

You know, I was a city council person when this tragedy first engaged, this manmade crisis.

You know, we moved on to the state to try to rectify some things, you know, asking for investigations from the attorney general then, at that time, to be able to engage the process of recovery.

And so, 10 years now, you know, we're still moving through the process.

Our infrastructure is in good shape.

We still have some more work to do, a little bit more work to do, major infrastructure, residential infrastructure, you know, making sure that we had a secondary delivery system, you know, major construction, making sure that the accessory to one of the crimes that was committed was with the Flint River water untreated.

But residents of this community never have to worry about ever drinking from the Flint River water again, based upon that level of infrastructure, building a secondary delivery system to our system.

We are in compliance with the lawsuit that was filed against the municipality.

31 lead-service lines need to be replaced still, and that is in process as we speak, currently right now.

- The annual Silence the Violence March and Rally began 17 years ago at Church of the Messiah in Detroit.

This year, more than 20 similar events took place across the state.

"American Black Journal" contributor Deja Moss was at the Detroit March where the innocent victims of gun violence were honored.

- [Crowd] Silence the violence.

Silence the violence.

(people chattering) (drums beating) - I've had so many relatives, it would be unfair to speak on one or two, because we've had several relatives that have died to gun violence.

So that's why it's important to me.

- On October 16th, 2016, my daughter, Jada Rankin, was murdered by senseless gun violence.

She was 15 years old.

(drums beating) It took me two years to even come out the house.

It took me two years to go back to work.

It took me two years to comb my hair.

But I had learned that my daughter was not... She was a butterfly, right?

Every room she walked in, it lit up.

So it is my duty not only as her mother to birth her, nourish her, it's actually my duty to keep her legacy alive.

- This is Shawntaze Cameron Moore, my 8-year-old grandson, who was shot last year, August 19.

It was an unsecured gun on the West Side of Detroit, at his mom house, and parents was careless at my daughter house and, unfortunately, the kids got ahold to it.

I'll never know the whole story, I wasn't there.

But his life was taken with an unsecured gun, so the message today is lock it up.

- I lost a childhood friend by the name of Gerald Gunter.

He was the first one of us to be murdered.

I seen individuals rally and look at our friend as a martyr to the lifestyle, and I seen us go on like a two-year campaign of retaliation.

Trauma can be your superpower 'cause when you had enough, you had enough.

We've seen community members get involved, like most of the people who was addressing gun violence are people who have been caught up in the cycles of gun violence, of having enough, and bearing the responsibility with holding themselves accountable and holding the community accountable.

And holding the community accountable is not just punitive measures or punishment.

Holding the community accountable is figuring out how do we show up as responsible elders, peers, in addressing it.

- "American Black Journal" teamed up with BridgeDetroit recently for a virtual town hall that was titled, "Making Amends: The Quest for Reparations."

Our panel of guests talked about the work of the Detroit Reparations Task Force, the history of discrimination against Black Detroiters, and reparations efforts in other cities.

Catch us up.

Where are we with the monumental effort really that you guys have to undertake to just start figuring out what the scope of this issue is.

- You know, I'ma start it like this, "Weeping may endure for a night, but joyeth cometh in the morning."

Last year, when me and you talked, we was going through some difficult periods, but I think we're now on track.

When Robin Rue Simmons came to Detroit last year, yeah, we were trying to find our way, but Robin got us on track about where do we need to go, and that was to start with a harms report.

Then, after that, we got involved with University of Michigan, and University of Michigan was doing the harm report.

And then, after that, with my relationship with the regional aspect of Robin Rue Simmons' municipal reparations, I met Linda Mann some years ago, and she came in, and she did the, what we call, the impact report.

You got the harm report and the impact report.

And so, you know, we're really trying to get on track to get this report done by October.

Cidney's been really doing a fabulous job in the end of workings of it.

I'm just looking at the big picture, and Cidney can elaborate a little bit more on the internal aspect of it.

But I think we're well on our way to getting this report done.

- We're starting to work on the outline for our report.

So we wanna make sure that this report not only goes to city council, but that it's something that can be consumed by the residents and make sure that they're informed, they know what type of programs we're working on.

We are going to be releasing quite a few surveys over the next couple of months to really engage with our community to make sure that they have an opportunity to engage and give their input to make sure that their voices are amplified in this process.

We've gotten a report back from Columbia University speaking to quite a few different things that they observed while they were here.

It was fantastic to have them here in person, allowing them to visit some of these sites of harms and really put some tangible pieces to the research that they were doing.

I'm very excited about the U of M report to come out, but we really want to center the voices of the residents, give them an opportunity to give us some feedback, and to really help drive the way that this work is gonna go, because the 13 of us can't do it alone.

We're working in a beautiful Black city and we need to make sure that every voice is amplified.

- Throughout the 56 years of this television program, we've spoken with talented African Americans who excel in the arts, and the last year was no different.

We continue to shine a light on African American culture with guests that included two award-winning actors, a renowned poet, and a pioneer of techno.

Take a look.

- Detroit techno started with Juan Atkins and Rick Davis, Cybotron.

That was the beginning.

And by the time I came around, my cousin had done "Technicolor" with Juan, and we'd play basketball in the backyard listening to Kevin and Derrick's music, and listening to Jeff Mills on the radio as the Wizard.

So by the time I got in, you know, it was already primed and well oiled early baby machine.

(Carl and Stephen laughing) So when I had the opportunity to meet Derrick, I thought he was big brother almighty when I first met him.

And went down to the music institute and partied down there with just this multicultural crowd of people that were coming down.

People that I knew from when I went to Cass, you know, people that I knew when I went to Cooley, people that I was meeting when I was going down to the shelter at Saint Andrew's Hall, that club, you know.

So I was seeing these amazing things that were happening on a multicultural level that was way different than anything that I had experienced before.

So I was happy, happy, happy to be a part of it, and I knew that it had to be my destiny.

- So I wanted to start this conversation going back to your first reading at Birdland.

And that story was really interesting to me about how that came to be.

Can you recount that moment for our viewers?

- Sure, I'll never forget my mother's a jazz fan.

And so when my second book came out, "Black Judgment," I thought, "Well, what would be the most perfect place to have the debut of that book?"

And I thought Birdland.

And Birdland was down, that's in the old days when Birdland was down.

And it's New York, you know, and, of course, "The New York Times" was up, so a lot of has changed since then.

But I just went and went down because, on Mondays, almost nobody's in the clubs.

And I just went downstairs and said, you know, "I'd like to meet Mr. Logan," because Logan and Wilson Pickett owned Birdland.

- Okay.

- And he said, "I'm Harold Logan, who are you?"

"I'm Nikki Giovanni, I'm a poet, and I'd like to have a reading at your club."

And he looked at me like, "What?"

And I said, "Well, you know, you're closed on Sunday," that's in the old days when they were closed on Sunday.

I said, "You closed on Sunday, so I was thinking to have a reading at your club on Sunday, if it's okay with you."

And he said, "Well, what you gonna pay me?"

I said, "Oh, Mr. Logan, I don't have any money, I'm a poet."

You know, that's a silly question.

And so he thought about it for a minute, and I guess he said, "If that fool is crazy enough to come down here and ask me."

He said, "Well, I tell you what, you bring me 100 people, and you can have the club.

99 people and you'll owe me $500."

I said, "Well, thank you," and we shook hands.

It's one of those like, "Oh, was that wise?"

And so I got started working on it.

You know, you can get 100 people to do anything, well, you can.

But where the club is and the way it goes, so, on Sunday, I had Morgan Freeman as my next-door neighbor, Novella Nelson, Barbara Ann Teer.

So I knew a lot of people and they all agreed to read.

And so the line started, and then the line turned.

And when they did that, "The New York Times" was wondering, "Well, what are those mostly Black people doing down there?"

So they sent a reporter down, and he said, "You know, I'm looking for Nick Giovanni."

And he finally got to me, he said, "I'm looking for Nick Giovanni."

I said, "Well, I'm Nikki Giovanni."

He said, "No, no, where is he?"

It's just the way people look at things.

I said, "Well," I figured he'll find out eventually.

- He'll figure it out.

- Yeah, he'll figure it out.

- He'll get the picture.

- But they did, because of the line and everything, it got a headline in, what they call, the extra, the second, because nobody had seen a poet, you know, to bring that many people into a club.

It was great.

- CCH Pounder-Kone, welcome to Detroit.

- Thank you.

- And welcome to the Wright Museum.

- It's lovely to be back again, I have to say.

- Yeah, this is not your first time here.

- It is not my first rodeo at the Wright.

- Yeah.

- And it's wonderful to be able to bring something completely different, and feel like you're just beginning again.

So that's really nice.

- So let's talk about this exhibit.

- Absolutely.

- "Double ID."

It is about Black men and the duality, right?

- Yes, well, first of all, I should really say that I started off at the right with "Queen," which was an all-female show.

- Right.

- And then, we talked later on that somebody had mentioned, said, "Well, what about the men?"

- What about the men?

What about us?

- And so I said, "Okay, well, the next time I come, we'll do a show on men."

- Yeah.

- But what I loved about how this was done is that it is couched in the philosophy of W.E.B.

Dubois' of "Double Consciousness."

And so it was providing paintings that not only were sort of very present on, as you look at them, as you get an idea, and the moment that you think of double consciousness, you get another idea of what this man may have had to do to present himself in a way that is less threatening one way as less powerful than he actually is.

And so I thought, "Let's bring up these paintings," and these were the ones that they chose from my collection.

- [Stephen] Award-winning actor Roger Guenveur Smith was in Detroit recently for three solo performances at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.

"American Black Journal" contributor Cecelia Sharpe, of 90.9 WRCJ, sat down with Smith to talk about his long acting career and his many collaborations with filmmaker Spike Lee.

- Spike Lee.

- Yes.

- You were able to come in at such just a creative time with "Do the Right Thing," "School Daze," and collaborate and work with him.

- I never thought that I would have a career in film.

I was really happy to be playing a season at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

And I went to see this film called "She's Gotta Have It."

And I sat through it twice, and I said, "Who is this guy Spike Lee?

And what is he doing next?"

So I was able to finagle a cattle call audition.

- How did you finagle this cattle call?

Is this top secret?

- [Roger] No, just like everybody else.

- Okay.

- I mean, I stood in line with 100 other people to tell a joke, to, you know, sing a song, and do a little bit from the script for this film called "School Daze."

And Spike Lee thought that I was demented enough to play a, you know, fraternity pledge named Yoda, and we've been working together ever since.

- So 2024 was our fourth year bringing you monthly episodes that focused on the Black church in Detroit.

We have covered a really wide range of topics with a remarkable group of African American faith leaders right here in our city.

The series is produced in partnership with the Ecumenical Theological Seminary and with the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.

Here are some of the highlights from last year.

Historically, the church has been a place of refuge for the Black community during really difficult times.

So how can it lead the way on improving young people's mental health?

Here's my conversation with Minister Mikiah Keener, from Triumph Church, and seminarian student Ashley Lewis.

- So I like to start off by saying that teen suicide has been identified as a national crisis, and so much so that even the Biden-Harris administration is really doing a lot to really counter this.

For me, personally, it hits home because my son, who's 13 years old, and he's a young Black male who goes to a predominantly European school, I don't subscribe to Black, white, but European school, and what I've noticed is, is the impact of AI.

So if you look at the history of the Black church, when you talk about anti-Black or racism manifesting, there were signs, there was this overt manifestation of it.

While some of it is still overt, a lot of it is covert.

So my own son, I didn't even know he was dealing with depression.

Thank God they had those forms with the doctors when they do their annual physicals, because I had no idea, but part of it was because of bullying.

And he talked about how, in social media, those algorithms he was noticing within his friend group.

And so then there was all of these different racial, and not just towards African Americans, but towards other racial ethnic groups as well.

And so, as a result, the bullying began to increase not only through the perception of anti-Blackness within social media, but also in terms of manifesting within his friend group.

- So one of the things I see, and to be honest, not only at Triumph, but just within my community, being a 26-year-old that does a lot of activity in the Metro Detroit area, a lot of our young people are eager for God, they're eager for Christ, they're eager to be a part of a church, they're eager to be a part of that community, they just don't know where to start.

And I think that is the role of the church, especially in this season, is to hold their hand and give them a GPS.

I think that's what the church should be is a GPS to kind of just help young people navigate and walk through life.

A lot of them have questions about mental health.

A lot of people raise up questions about depression.

"Is God mad at me because I'm depressed"?

"Because my mental health is declining"?

And so I think that the church should serve in a role of holding their hand and walking with so many young people and just guiding them to what that looks like to integrate faith and mental health.

- What do you see as the Black church's role in preparing their congregations for the elections?

- Well, I think the first thing we have to do is help people understand that their faith is not separate from their citizen responsibilities, and that you can act out your faith in the voting booth.

And I think that we have a rich history of Christians, Black Christians in particular, and Christians of all faiths, who have sacrificed so that we could have the right to vote.

And so the thing that I say to the congregation that I serve is that, "I can't tell you who to vote for, but I'm encouraging you to vote."

And I think that the Black church has historically been so involved in the community that we have been an outspoken voice on this issue, that we are to be citizens of a higher kingdom and also citizens of this world.

- I think Dr. Hill really kicked it off the right way, because the Black church has always been historically one of the leading voices against oppression, particularly against, you know, Black and Brown people, misogyny, I mean, you name it.

The reason why I am a proud member of Triumph Church under Pastor Solomon Kinloch, because he teaches and he tries to live out the fact that our theology ought to impact our sociology.

There's no way, in a Christian framework, we would be able or should be able to look at the conditions that our people find themselves in and not get engaged in the civic process that impacts so many people, the least than, the left out, and the left behind.

- We are fired up about voting at Second Baptist Church of Detroit.

As you are already aware, Second Baptist was established in 1836 and is the oldest historically Black congregation in Michigan and was a part of every liberation struggle that Black folks faced in the United States.

Second Baptist members were fighting for suffrage in the 1800s.

And I think that the responsibility that we have, as the Black church, it reminds me of a song, "Victory in Jesus," and that is, "I heard an old, old story."

We have an obligation to tell the story of the good news, the story that there is victory in Jesus.

- My last question for you is about, you know, the enduring legacy of gospel music and especially here in the city of Detroit and what you hope for it to become.

- I would hope that Detroit would continue to be a beacon of gospel music in this industry and in this time.

I know LA is going to, they're gonna claim theirs, and Chicago's gonna claim its, and Atlanta's gonna claim its.

But before Atlanta became a Black Mecca Capital, you know, (scoffs) Atlanta, Detroit, Detroit was the place.

Detroit had more community choirs and church choirs that really had the sound and had the quality to perform nationally and, as we call it, on wax on albums, but just never did.

But that's why it was hard to get a paid concert in Detroit at Ford Auditorium, because you can go to any church on a Sunday and hear a church choir rocking the house, no if, ands, or buts about it.

So I would hope that, you know, one of the legacies would be, you know, whenever you talk about gospel music, Detroit always comes up.

♪ What he's done for me ♪ What he's done for me ♪ I just got to tell you ♪ What the Lord has done for me ♪ ♪ He loosed my shackles and he set me free ♪ ♪ And I just got to tell you ♪ What the Lord has done for me ♪ ♪ Help me choir ♪ What he's done for me ♪ What he's done for me ♪ Oh, what he's done for me ♪ I just got to tell you ♪ I just got to tell you ♪ What the Lord has done ♪ What he's done for me ♪ Loosed my shackles ♪ Oh, he loosed my shackles ♪ And set me free ♪ And he set me free ♪ I just got to tell you ♪ I just got to tell you ♪ What the Lord has done ♪ Oh, what he's done for me ♪ Let me tell you what he did ♪ When sin had me out ♪ Jesus took me in ♪ When I felt all alone ♪ He became my best friend ♪ And now he's right here with me ♪ ♪ Through the thick and the thin ♪ ♪ And I just got to tell you ♪ What the Lord has done for me ♪ - Of course, you can see these entire conversations and more at AmericanBlackJournal.org.

We thank you for being loyal viewers and we always wanna hear from you, so go ahead and connect with us anytime on social media.

Take care and we'll see you next time.

(upbeat mellow music) - [Narrator] From Delta Faucets to Behr Paint, Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco serving Michigan communities since 1929.

Support also provided by the Cynthia & Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit PBS.

- [Narrator] DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit PBS.

Among the state's largest foundations committed to Michigan-focused giving, we support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Learn more at DTEFoundation.com.

- [Narrator] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation, and viewers like you, thank you.

(gentle music)