- Great show ahead for you on American Black Journal.

We've teamed up with Bridge Detroit to take a closer look at the loss of Detroit's African American political representation in congress.

We're gonna talk about the city's black political power past and present.

Plus, we'll examine the impact of redistricting on black candidates.

Also coming up, coping with the Michigan State University shooting tragedy.

Stay right there, American Black Journal starts right now.

- [Male Voiceover] 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 Public TV.

- [Female Voiceover] The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of American Black Journal in covering African American history, culture, and politics.

The DTE foundation and American Black Journal, partners in presenting African American perspectives about out communities and in our world.

- [Male Voiceover] Also brought to you buy Nissan Foundation and viewers like you, thank you.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to American Black Journal.

I'm your host, Stephen Henderson.

Today we've partnered with Bridge Detroit for a look at the changes in Detroit's Black political power.

Following last year's elections, the city found itself without African American representation in congress for the first time in nearly 70 years.

So, what does that mean for a city that is nearly 80% African American?

Let's put things in perspective by starting with a look at the city's Black political history.

Here's Bridge Detroit's Orlando Bailey with long time Detroit political consultant, Adolph Mongo - Adolph, so the conversation about Black representation has been palpable lately with the election of congressman Shri Thanedar in the election a few years ago of congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, but at one point Detroit was a strong hold for Black political power.

How did we get there, and how did we get to where we are now?

- Easy, people didn't vote.

And people don't vote.

And the so-called elitists who are supposed to represent this majority Black population sold out.

Basically, how can you let somebody like Tlaib come into Detroit?

Didn't live in Detroit, lived in Dearborn.

But it wasn't Tlaib, we go back to Steve Tabackman who was a state rep in Southwest Detroit moved from Huntington Woods to Southwest Detroit, and then you had five or six candidates running in that state rep seat which was a seat held by a person of color.

Whether it was Brown or Black, they ran and Tabackman come in well financed, he won.

He's representing a majority of a district of color.

After him, it was Stephanie Chang.

It was Rashida Tlaib.

Listen, it's like they just brought in all these folks and said, "Okay, we gonna represent that area."

So it started there, really.

Detroit has always been fair when it came to electing folks, that when it become a majority Black city, we still elected non people of color.

Mayo Rabbit, Maryann Mahaffey, Jack Kelley, I can name them.

Those people cared about Detroit, but nah, we got people that buy seats.

Shri Thanedar came, he ran for governor and then he went and bought a house in a part of a district and guess what, he bought the state rep seat.

A year later, he's running for congress with eight, nine people in the race.

Tlaib, same way.

Brenda Jones had a great opportunity to win that seat right there, but she decided she want to be in both races when Jon Conyers passed away, oh, I'm gonna run in the special election.

Oh, she won the special election, became a congresswoman, what, for two weeks?

Okay.

- You talked about people not voting, coming out to vote.

Why aren't Black people voting in the city of Detroit?

- People period not voting.

But especially Black people, young folks.

Last candidate we had, it wasn't really an election, it was a movement.

It was Barack Obama.

People came out and voted that hadn't voted, never voted 'cause they wanted to make history.

And he had a lot to say.

- Is that all?

Is it just that they wanted to make history or he-- - Both, both.

He had a lot to say.

People was looking for something different.

He brought them hope.

We don't have candidates like that.

Now, redistricting really diluted Black representation.

The democrats threw Detroit under the bus.

We are in these districts where people from Birmingham and Madison Heights and Warren, they represent Detroit now.

- Do you believe that he last congressional election was a referendum on how redistricting went?

Democrats really wanted to draw districts that were going to favor democrats, but not necessarily favor Black democrats or Black Detroiters.

- There's no question about it that you put a little pocket of Detroit in there, it makes a difference, but not enough difference to elect somebody.

Say like Marshall Bullock was a state senator, boom, eh.

Young lady out in Birmingham that represent Birmingham, Royal Oak and Huntington Woods et cetera.

That's her base.

And she won, she killed them.

Raised all the money in DC, and he didn't even have a chance.

- I hear stories about Comey Young and what his election meant to Black Detroiters in 1973, and they kept him elected all the way until the early 1990s.

Really modeling for the country Black political stronghold.

Talk about that time and what it meant for Black Detroiters to feel really represented.

- Before then, you didn't have too many Black officials.

You had people getting elected.

- Like John Conyers was elected.

- John Conyers, Charlie Dix, Barbarose, Collins, the statehouse, you had many women, Black women particularly that was elected.

That was a heyday though.

Morris Hood, his brother.

Detroit had to fight, at that time, Colmean Young had to fight the police department.

Had to fight the fire department because of, they refuse forever to hire people of color.

They have a few.

During the race riots of 1943, there was 35, 36 African American police officers and they took their guns from them.

And they disarmed them.

And then in '67, who knows.

It was less than 200, and maybe less than 100 that was on the police department.

He got elected, and he worked 20 years in the courts to make the police department the way the community was made up.

- Loss of Detroit's Black representation in Washington is the focus of a podcast series produced by Bridge Detroit and WDET.

The podcast includes interviews with some of the congressional candidates and it examines the impact of the election results on the city's African American community.

I sat down with Bridge Detroit Executive Director and Editor, Catherine Kelly, to talk about what happened and what it means for Detroit.

You and I grew up in a time in this city when the idea of Black representation at home, Lansing, in Washington, was something that I feel like we just took for granted.

Of course we were going to be able to choose people who look like us, who are from our community to speak for us.

And that was new for Black people in Detroit in our generation.

Boy, you look around now, it's a little different.

I think about the different ways in which we're represented in politics.

That's not so much of a foregone conclusion, and I was aware of the idea for this podcast came from after Shri Thanedar was represented to, or elected to represent Detroit in congress, we decided that we didn't need to look at the idea of Black representation.

Where it is, and where it may be going.

- Yeah, not only was it new, it was really an imperative.

And I think about that time, it was the late '60s, early '70s when you had rebellions across the country.

And there was a real focus on Black economic power, Black political power.

I think you really saw that in the development of Detroit.

I think you still see those politics in the vision and the ideal.

But I think that's absolutely a part of our childhood and growing up.

I remember going to community meetings and political events and conventions and the focus was always pretty singular and very focused around maintaining Mayor Coleman Young's legacy, his political organization.

All that he was putting in place to make sure Detroit would be a Black city where Black people could benefit from it.

- Ma'am.

So, one of the things that comes up in a lot of the interviews that we did with people who were running for the 13th congressional district seat, and with Warren Evans who tried to bring people together around a consensus candidate is the way that Coleman Young approached this issue.

The authority, I guess, that he had.

Now to be able to say, "Look, what's important is that we all get a voice in who's elected, and the way to do that is to work together."

And I'm gonna boss up on the people I need to boss up on, but that's the way we maintain this.

They all said that that doesn't work anymore in Detroit, and that you don't have a figure who could do that, but you also don't have people who are willing to set aside their own ambitions necessarily for the idea of the community.

- I think it's kind of a sign of the times.

What is Blackness now?

I thing during those years, the experience of Black people was more similar.

I think you can have a diversity of experiences now that you didn't have then.

You have Black people who grew up in the suburbs and moved back to the city.

You have more income diversity.

So I think the interests and the focus of Blackness has also changed.

If there ever was one monolithic thing, but I do think one thing that united certain objectives was more of a shared experience than what you have now.

If you look at what has happened around redistricting and the loss of Black representation even on a statewide level, what does Blackness mean nowadays?

What are black interests?

It was something that came up in my conversation with Adam Hollier about his run.

Are there interests that Black candidates now represent?

And if so, what are they?

You have more Black people living in the suburbs.

There was a time, we've talked about it, the two of us, there was a time when if you traveled anywhere and someone who wasn't Black said they were from Detroit, you were like, "No way, where you really from?"

And they'd always tell you some suburb, and you'd be like, "No."

Because it was that definitive and clear.

- If you think about the things that someone like Shri Thanedar, who is an immigrant to this country, somebody who didn't grow up under really extreme poverty conditions, and now will represent Detroit in Washington.

If you think of the things that he might have trouble getting his mind around, if you think about the things that he might struggle to really represent how Detroiters feel and what they might need, what comes to mind?

- I think some of this will be ... Will kind of unfold, and I don't mean to punt on that, but I think as a legislator, there's less more room for nuance than I think more executives see it.

It's just kind of the function of what it is.

But, and especially in a national context, but I do think locally, there really is going to be this ...

There's gonna be more of an opportunity to examine where do Black interests, if there are any, separate from democratic policies and interests?

If you look at the agenda that the democrats have laid out in Lansing right now, there's some, there's some bright spots, but it's very much a democratic agenda.

And how will it affect Black people especially in Detroit?

If you look at the last election and what happened, how Detroit voters moved on Prop 3, more than 83%, I believe of voters, voted to support a woman's right to choose an abortion.

I think that really illustrates how there are certain interests and certain beliefs in a majority Black city that are different.

Sometimes that partisan bickering doesn't even work here.

There's a bigger set of issues and concerns and it will be interesting at what moments will the democrats take up things that actually impact Detroit?

In the past there's been such a stall around instituting legislation that could help the city.

One of the big things that I think Detroit needs to focus on is its revenue stream.

As income taxes have fallen off and people are increasingly work from home, a lot of these policies that Detroiters have criticized through the years, investing in casinos, investing in bringing big corporations downtown, what has it really done for city residents?

What is it doing?

And this is a real moment to kind of test where democrats and race kind of fall because it's this time to shift, give Detroit the ability to tax on how we're building our economy which is on entertainment, which is on casinos and sharing economy and restaurants.

- One huge distinction with Shri Thanedar, I think, is that sense of history.

That sense of memory.

And that's not his fault.

No one chooses where they're born, but for those of us who are from here.

I have a close friend who always says that you become a real Detroiter when the city takes something precious from you.

- Wow.

- Which is a really dark way to think about it, but I think there's something really true about that.

And I worry, I worry about someone like Shri Thanedar, who I think is very well intentioned and is not cynical about what he's doing, I don't think he can surmount that hurdle.

- And if you also think about the visionary legislation that some of these Black representatives moved.

You have Representative Conyers who went in and created the legislation about studying reparations.

Will the kind of impetus, the vision, the innate belief and desire to move that kind of agenda or set that kind of agenda, will that come from our Brown representatives?

The do a lot of ...

They fall on the right side of a lot of these issues.

They're for funding schools.

They're for a lot of very baseline things that help a lot of people, but there are always some really specific things that I do deeply believe that Black people need and deserve.

- And finally today, we wanna remember the Michigan State University students who were killed and wounded in last week's mass shooting on campus.

As the parent of an MSU freshman, I know all to well the flood of emotions that overwhelm in a tragedy such as this.

I spoke with Dr. Lekie Dwanyen, an assistant professor in MSU's department of human development and family studies about dealing with the emotional and mental trauma of gun violence.

So, I'm a parent at Michigan State University.

And I spent Monday night last week doing what every other parent was doing.

Trying to make sure my kid was safe.

I just want to have you start by talking about the atmosphere on campus.

The things that you're hearing from students about what happened and how they're feeling the effects of this.

And I think are immeasurable on the people who are part of the MSU community.

- You're absolutely right, Stephen.

My sense of the emotional energy and climate on campus is that students, faculty, staff, anybody who is affiliated with MSU, whether we were present there at the time or not, is experiencing a high level of distress.

We are emotionally experiencing fear, anxiety, worries of what this means for the families that are directly impacted.

How we can support one another as we cope with high levels of stress from the shooting.

So, the emotional climate is very, very tense, but it also is very supportive.

We have several opportunities that are arising to convene as a community and really try to form some understanding together around what happened.

Memorialize the lives that were lost as much as we really can in this moment.

- Yeah.

The kind of trauma that people experience when something like this happens is, I think, analogous to other really violent situations that most people don't experience, right?

War and those kind of inflects.

I really wonder how, outside the context of something like that, you deal with this kind of trauma.

How do you free students, young people who are experiencing something that most young people still, thank God, would never experience?

- When we experience events like this, even if we're exposed to the event virtually, we can experience a number of traumatic stress reactions that, again, are normal based on the way that we have to kind of metabolize this information or the experience.

So we might feel more jumpy or startled immediately after events like this.

Or for a period of time, we might not feel our sleep routine normalize.

We might get less sleep than we're used to.

We might want to ... For children for example, we might see our children want to sleep closer to us, or have a closer proximity.

So, we might also feel symptoms like being unable to eat in the same ways that we normally do.

Our digestive systems are impacted.

And so we want to give ourselves and our children a lot of flexibility and a lot of grace in these days following this event.

And for a period of time after, we wanna be checking in with ourselves asking how we're feeling, trying to verbalize it and allowing children and students the opportunity to verbalize how they're feeling as well.

And we want to validate ourselves and validate each other.

Because however we're feeling right now is normal to such an abnormal event.

- One of the things that I detected from my son when this happened was a sense that this is just the way the world is now.

And he's never been associated with a shooting like this, but they are happening with more frequency, and of course he knows about it.

That bothered me.

It bothered me that he didn't seem more bothered.

And I wonder what we're to make of that, that we are raising a generation of young people who think of this as more acceptable or just they make way for it in a way that, I think, should disturb us.

- Yes, and I would agree with you.

When we look at our societal context, and we see how common these events are, unfortunately, we can understand how youth and college students are not necessarily surprised by the event.

We saw students at Michigan State with paraphernalia supporting other schools that had just recently experienced shootings.

There are students here that have experienced school shootings before.

And so there is an element of that it is more common, but it is not normal.

When I say normal, I'm talking about our individual and our relational reactions to the traumatic event.

In that whatever we're feeling right now, or however we're coping, or however we feel our routine disrupted, we should normalize that for one another.

If you're having bad dreams, if you're feeling more startled or if you're feeling more irritable about things that normally didn't irritate you before, those are normal reactions.

And so we wanna offer ourselves a lot of flexibility in these moments after the shooting.

- And you can find more resources to help you cope at OneDetroitPBS.org.

That's gonna do it for this week's show, which was produced in partnership with Bridge Detroit.

You can find out more about today's guests at americanblackjournal.org.

And connect with us anytime on Facebook and on Twitter.

Take care, and we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) - [Male Voiceover] 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 Public TV.

- [Female Voiceover] The DTE Foundation proudly supports 50 years of American Black Journal in covering African American history, culture and politics.

The DTE Foundation and American Black Journal, partners in presenting African American perspectives about our communities and in our world.

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

(calm piano music)