- Just ahead on American Black Journal, as the nation prepares to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, we're gonna check in with the Charles H. Wright Museum right here in Detroit to see how they are celebrating the federal holiday.

Plus, 60 years ago, Dr. King walked down Woodward Avenue here in Detroit in a march that made history.

We'll take a look back at this important civil rights event.

Stay tuned, American Black Journal starts right now.

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(upbeat music) - Welcome to American Black Journal.

I'm Stephen Henderson, your host.

The nation will celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on January 16th.

This federal holiday is observed as a day of service to encourage Americans to volunteer in their communities.

It's also a call to action to advance Dr. King's dream of racial equality.

Here in Detroit, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History has special programming planned for Martin Luther King Day every year, and this year is no exception.

I got the details from the museum's director of learning and engagement, Marline Martin.

This is an exciting time each year at the Wright Museum as we get ready to celebrate the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Let's start with what's on tap this year at the museum.

- Yeah, well, it's been a long legacy of celebrating MLK Day, as we call it.

So we are very excited to continue the tradition this year.

It's one of our most anticipated day here at the Wright.

So we are looking forward to welcoming all community members, or media partners, elected officials, and museum members.

So what's on tap this year is, it's always a series of activities that are not just engaging, but also impactful, and program activities that really embodies the mission of the Wright Museum to open minds and changing lives through the exploration and celebration of African American history and culture.

So this year our theme, overall theme is the tipping point of race, politics, and Dr. King's vision.

It's the idea behind that is how much has changed and how much has remained the same.

And needless to say that we are at a very magical moment in history, the threshold of moving forward to the fulfillment of a dream, or backwards until possibly last six decades nightmare.

(Marline laughs) So we have a full program of activity.

We will be opening the day with an invocation by Queen Mother Joanne Watson who is a woman of many accomplishments, as you know, a pastor, a media personality, and also she was a Detroit city council member for 10 years.

We will also be having a keynote.

The breakfast keynote address is by Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd, who is also a native Detroiter and is a distinguished professor in the Department of African American Studies at Wayne State University, and also an adjunct professor at University of Michigan.

She's also an award winning author and editor of about three books.

And she composed the first official poem for the Charles H. Wright Museum, which is inscribed in our dedication wall.

And she was a poet laureate for the Wright Museum.

So we are looking forward to hearing her presentation on Fred Was Feeling It.

(Stephen and Marline laughing) Echos of Frederick Douglass in the voices of Gail Scott "Heroine" and "Childish Gambino."

- Oh, very nice.

(Stephen and Marline laughing) Well, and that really speaks I think to the way that the Wright kind of indulges the state.

It's not just a celebration of Dr. King and his life.

It's also a celebration of us as Detroiters and our particular spin or connection to Dr. Wright and his legacy.

And that's, it's different because it is Detroit.

- Yeah.

Yeah, I think that is a great point.

There is Dr. King's universal vision, but how it impacts us individually in the place that we live, much of it is about geography, location, who your community is, listening to the voices of your community, and really using that information to fuel you, to interpret your stories, whether it is the African American story cannot be told in one way because we all have different interpretations of it, and we have different experiences of it.

So we have to figure out ways in which to present it.

And so we can share our voices together.

- Yeah.

This is an important milestone year in the legacy of Dr. King.

Of course, this is the year, 60 years ago that he gave his "I Have a Dream" speech on the mall in Washington.

And of course he did that first here in Detroit after a march downtown.

Talk about how significant that is in the Wright celebration of King Day in 2023.

Is there much of a look back to 1963?

- Well, I'm glad that you mentioned that because a lot of people I know don't know that that speech was delivered here first in Detroit.

One of the things throughout the day, because we're focusing on the tipping point, right, as our theme, so one of the things that we are going to be doing is doing a film screening for the documentary "Who We Are: The Chronicle of Racism in America, which comes out of ACLU deputy legal director, Jeffrey Robinson.

And he uses a lot of interviews, revelations, personal antidotes to kind of draw this timeline of anti-black racism in the United States from slavery to modern day, and kind of our collective responsibility as how we can overcome that.

So of course in the back of my head is, how do we do that, right?

How can we overcome that?

We sang that.

We saw the dream, right?

We talk about like, everybody knows the "I Have a Dream," speech, but what is the, beyond the dream, what is the vision, and where it is that we actually are now with that vision?

And that's why the tipping point is so important to us, right?

So we're, in addition to just like having the film screening, we're also looking at programming, that people can empower themselves through the King's legacy.

So we're doing throughout the day like tipping the poem, poetry workshop where it's a workshop about creating poem, the form of poetry, and helping people just find their poetic voice, right?

Then there is Restoring the Dream workshop where they learn about that famous King's march in Memphis, Tennessee in support of sanitation workers where they use the iconic "I am a man protest" sign, and create their own, and again, voice, vision.

Then it's tipping the scales of justice where you're using what issues we are facing right now in our society and how we can empower ourselves to overcome them or to defeat them.

And then what's your dream?

So using the Adinkra symbols of the Akan people, participants will consider their dreams in relationship to Dr. King's speech, 'I Have a Dream'.

- Yeah.

- So that's pretty much the day, except at the end of the day we are, our president and CEO, Mr. Neil Barkley, is launching a presidential lecture series, which is a curated collection of events by selected speakers who can bring insight and conversation to some of the critical issues that we are facing in the areas of civic engagement, art, history, and culture.

So we'll be kicking off that lecture series with Charles Blow, the prophilic journalist, commentator of the New York Times and political analyst of MSNBC, and you might, I'm sure you know him, and he's the author of a couple of books, "Fire Shut Up in My Bones," and "The Devil You Know."

So he will be closing our evening program with his critical lens.

(Stephen laughs) - Right.

- And there we are.

- Yeah, yeah.

Okay, well, it's always an exciting day, and I always, when we talk about it here on the show, we wanna remind people that this is about us as a community, that this day at the Wright wouldn't be special without Detroiters.

So we need people to come out and be part of it, and take in all of the things that we can learn, but also express that very Detroit sense that we have of not just Dr. King and his legacy, but of course of civil rights and the fight for equality.

So we want people to be there with you.

- Yes, we do.

And they can find more information out on our website, which is www.thewright.org.

And when you get on it, sign up for a newsletter.

This is a ticketed event.

So please get your tickets as early as possible so we can celebrate together.

And while you're here, we will also have our exhibitions.

Exhibitions will be open, so our core exhibitions And Still We Rise will be open for you to enjoy and explore as well as our jazz greats.

And again the Detroit jazz, which accompanies the other exhibition, which again, looks at the legacy of Detroit jazz musicians here.

And we look forward to spending the day with you at the Wright.

- Yeah, well, it's so great to have you here as well to talk with us.

Thanks so much for joining us on American Black Journal.

- Thank you for having me.

- June 23rd will mark the 60th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's visit to Detroit for the Walk To Freedom.

More than 125,000 people joined Dr. King and other civil rights activists, ministers, and civic leaders for a march down Woodward Avenue.

At the time, it was the largest demonstration ever to highlight the injustices faced by African Americans.

And following the march, Dr. King delivered an early version of his 'I Have a Dream' speech at Cobo Arena.

I sat down with Detroit historian Ken Coleman to talk about Dr. King's connections to Detroit and the importance of the 1963 Walk To Freedom.

This is such an important milestone for such an important event.

Dr. King's visit here in 1963, and of course the fact that he gives this speech, or a version of this very pivotal speech in his career for the first time here.

But let's start with how this all comes together.

What brought Martin Luther King to Detroit in the summer of 1963 and gave him the opportunity to give this speech at Cobo Hall?

- Well, it's a great question, Stephen, and a lot of people don't necessarily understand or maybe missed what what happened in Detroit coming up to 1963.

As you know, the Reverend C.L.

Franklin of New Bethel Baptist Church was really to sort of lead on putting together the march in Detroit in 1963.

He looked at it as a pivotal point in Detroit's history as it related to African Americans.

He looked at the '63 march as going back to 1943 and the race riot that happened in the city, largely white folk going to black communities and destroying property and possessions there.

What Reverend Franklin and others wanted to do in 1963 is point out some of the very same inequities that were happening in 1943.

They wanted to point out that those same inequities were still in place, still happening in 1963 even though, even though African-Americans, particularly as individuals in 1963, by 1963, had reached a tenor of economic, political, and social success.

Right, let's just go back several years before that.

Charles Diggs becomes the first African American in Michigan to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.

That was 1955.

And then in 1957, William Patrick becomes the first African American to serve on what they called at that time the Common Council.

- Common Council, yeah.

- Well, what we call today the city council, Patrick becomes the first black to serve on that body since the 1880s.

But at the same time, out of a 5,000 member police force, out of a 5,000 member police force in 1963, fewer than 300 of those people, men and women, were black.

And the reality was, even in 19, it took until 1963 when African American children became the majority of pupils enrolled at Detroit public schools.

And so couple that with the race discrimination carried out in the housing market, even in the public and private sector, even downtown and city hall.

What what Reverend Franklin, and Reverend Albert Clegg, and the great Tony Brown, of course, no stranger to Detroit Public Television, really the sort of predecessor in a way of Detroit Black Journal and American Black Journal, those three gentlemen and others formed the Council for Human Rights, Detroit Council for Human Rights.

And that was the body that put together the '63 march that featured, of course, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - Yeah.

And we should remind folks that, I feel like Martin Luther King in retrospect is a mythical character, somebody that it's almost impossible to get anybody to say something negative about.

But in 1963, he was not popular in a lot of quarters and was thought to be something of a rabble rouser or a troublemaker, right?

- He was in the vernacular.

I think Public Enemy used this phrase 30 years ago.

He was a controversial negro.

- Yeah.

(Ken laughs) - Right.

- And so much so, and you know this story well, we had a chance as reporters to interview people like the late Arthur Johnson, at one time the Detroit NACP executive director and later president.

Arthur Johnson wrote in his memoir a dozen years ago or so before he passed that the NAACP did not support the march.

- That's right.

- Did not support.

And to sort of think about that in terms maybe for millennials and others, they might say, why was that?

But as you pointed out, King was, people felt like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and others were moving a little too fast.

It wasn't that the NAACP didn't support Dr. King's vision and the Detroit Council for Human Right's vision.

They just felt like a slower, more thoughtful path was the better way to go.

- Yeah, yeah.

And so he comes, and there's this march, and 125,000 people show up, which even at that time with the city being much bigger, that's just an enormous number of folks.

Talk about the impact though of that day and this speech he gives at Cobo Hall, which of course would become much more famous when he gives it in Washington.

- Absolutely.

Of course, as you pointed out, it happens a couple of months earlier that summer before the the famous march on Washington.

He gives the 'I Have a Dream' speech.

What really begins to happen after that, and it takes time.

Detroit has a rebellion four years later.

So things didn't become markably or are dramatically different.

But if I think about, and there's a great photo, shared it on your broadcast in past years, a great photo of that march that has people like UAW President Walter Reuther.

Your grandfather William Beckham, who served as a a leader in the UAW had Dr. King and others.

But it also had a gentleman named George Harge, and a gentleman who's probably not known by many people our age or younger.

But immediately after the 1963 march, Harge is made a major official in the Detroit Police Department, in part because of his body work over the years.

But he did participate in the Detroit Walk To Freedom.

People also forget that that, even though the NAACP didn't support that march, the Detroit's young mayor Jerome Cavanagh did embrace that march and helped Reverend Franklin and others obtain the permits and the various things that takes take on a massive movement like that one day movement.

The city embraced that marching movement.

And I only point that out to say, it was blacks and whites working together.

The Jewish community was very, there's a long relationship between the Jewish community and the black community, and civil rights and union representation.

And so they played a major part in it too.

So you started to see people like Harge ascend to leadership.

Two years later a pastor at Plymouth Congregational Church who participated in that march, a man that you and I know well, the Reverend Nicholas Hood Sr. and his young sons participated in that march.

Reverend Hood was elected to the Detroit Common Council a couple years later.

And the rest is history.

Coleman Young becomes the first black mayor 10 years later.

- Yeah, yeah.

It's really this kind of pivotal momentum, I guess point that sends us forward as a community.

- And it took time, my friend.

It took time.

- Yeah.

- It did not happen overnight.

- That's right.

There's a lot of struggle ahead of that, including this rebellion that happens in '67 that really does remind people of the inequalities that people are living with.

And quickly before we have to end, talk about 60 years later, what young Detroiters in particular ought to draw from Dr. King's visit here, and that moment, and what happens after?

- Well, what I'm hoping is, and I haven't had these conversations, so I'm sort of talking about this at least in terms of your reaction to, my reaction to your question.

I hope that city institutions, both public-private foundations, embrace the 60th anniversary of this march just like we embraced the 50th remembrance of the rebellion.

As you know, and your programming has represented, there was a large body of people from all walks of life that took two or three years to kind of look back at 1967.

What were we able to achieve as a community?

What did we not do?

And what can we leave behind for current and future generations?

It is my hope, Stephen, that there is that type of attention paid to the 60th anniversary of this march, programming for people of all ages, collecting oral histories from people who were there.

And obviously 60 years ago, there aren't a whole lot of people around anymore, but there are some.

I've talked to some in my reporting and research over the years.

And so what I hope is that it is a teachable moment, as the phrase goes, one where we can all remember.

Some can learn, but we can find ways to move forward.

- That'll do it for us this week.

Thanks for watching.

And you can find out more about our guests at americanblackjournal.org.

Of course, you can also connect with us all the time on Facebook and on Twitter.

We're gonna leave you now with a performance by the JIT Masters from Detroit, performs live from Marygrove.

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

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Masco, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

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

- [Announcer 2] 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.

- [Announcer] Also brought to you by Nissan Foundation and viewers like you.

Thank you.

(mellow chiming)