- Coming up, we've got a really special episode of "American Black Journal" for you.

Our black church in Detroit series is gonna look at the religious community's role in the historic 1963 Detroit Walk to Freedom.

And a Detroit Pastor is here to talk about the importance of the march, both then and now, plus minister and activist Reverend JoAnn Watson recalls taking part in the walk 60 years ago.

You don't wanna miss today's show.

"American Black Journal" starts right now.

- [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 and Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

- [Announcer] 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.

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

Thank you.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to "American Black Journal."

I'm your host, Stephen Henderson.

Today we are continuing our series on the Black Church in Detroit, which is produced in partnership with the Ecumenical Theological Seminary and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African-American History.

As we commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Detroit Walk to Freedom, we wanna talk about the church's role in the historic march that featured Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The walk was organized by Dr. King's close friend, Reverend C.L Franklin of New Bethel Baptist Church, and Reverend Albert Cleage who's the founder of the Shrine of the Black Madonna.

More than 125,000 people took to the streets to take part making it the largest civil rights demonstration.

Today I spoke with the current pastor of the Shrine of the Black Madonna Bishop in Mbiyu Chui about the walks connection to the city's religious community.

Bishop Chui, welcome back to "American Black Journal."

- Thank you, glad to be back.

- Yeah, yeah.

So this is a big year, lots of big celebration of the 60th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's visit to the city of Detroit and the march down Woodward his deliverance of an early version of his "I Have A Dream" speech in downtown.

You know, one of the things that I think gets lost sometimes when we talk about that visit and that march and that event is the role that the religious community here played not only in putting the march together and making sure it would happen, but in framing the event and framing the discussion about the event.

The Civil Rights movement was a religious movement and I think we should always keep that in the front of our minds.

And this event is a reminder of it.

- Absolutely, Stephen.

I think that's a great point that you're making because a lot of times because of history, and I think also because of who's telling the story that gets disconnected and the backstory to the Detroit Walk To Freedom I don't think many people know, they don't know that the catalyst that really sparked the march was the turning point that year in 1963 when the event happened in Birmingham and Bull Connor turned water hoses and dogs on black women and children.

And that sparked outrage all across the country.

And Detroit organized the protest.

It was CORE, the congress for racial equality, organized protest downtown Detroit.

And it wasn't a good turnout, wasn't a good showing.

And the people who did show up were kind of disgruntled because more people should be upset about this.

But it wasn't a big turnout.

And so, ultimately Reverend Cleage got up to speak and he said, we gotta do better than this.

We gotta, it should be thousands of people here.

And that's really what sparked the Detroit Walk to Freedom.

They began to organize he got together with Reverend C.L Franklin and they started having meetings in churches across the city.

So the church was at the center of this whole process and they started planning and strategizing.

They got Tony Brown on board.

They decided to make Martin Luther King, the figure head of come lead the March.

So they were very strategic in planning these events and the result was the Freedom Walk that kind of set the precedent, I think, for what protests can and could look like at that time.

And then it became the gold standard for the future.

Detroit kinda showed people what's possible.

- Yeah.

- When we put our voices together, we can make an impact.

- Yeah, yeah.

So you are the pastor of the Shrine now, and of course, Reverend Cleage was the original pastor of the Shrine.

I also think that gets obscured a little when we talk about things like the civil rights movement is the role of black nationalism.

The assertion of Black independence sometimes gets pushed aside in favor of other messages.

Here you had Reverend Cleage working with C. L Franklin to bring people together around the idea of this march and Dr. King's appearance.

But talk just a little about the shrine and its role in the Civil Rights Movement and the role of that more radical vision of black existence here in all of that, in the event itself.

And of course, in the movement.

- Dr. King represented one face of civil rights.

There were many other voices and faces that were involved in the Civil rights era from different facets of our community.

And Reverend Cleage was a visionary, so he was able to kind of bring all of those voices together.

And he opened the doors then we were the Central Congregational Church.

And so he opened the doors for those voices to be heard.

So the Shrine was a gathering place for many voices during the Civil rights era and beyond.

So people came to organize, we had several different, when I joined the Shrine as a kid, I was 15 in 1971, but it was my home church as a smaller child when I was five, six, seven, I lived right there on Hogar.

So it was my home church even as a kid.

And the shrine was always a place in the community where people could come and allow their voices to be heard.

And Reverend Cleage was the type of leader that did not shy away from agitating voices and rational voices.

And he embraced all of it.

And he was not afraid to create that kind of platform where people could come together and organize even if they weren't of the same religious faith.

So, he looked beyond denominational and all those things to understand the bigger picture and what we need as a community.

And so he embraced the political side of it, the economic side of it, the social justice side of it, all of it.

And he pushed that agenda from the pulpit.

- Yeah, yeah.

So let's talk a little about the commemoration this year.

The things that are happening and the role the religious community is playing in all of that.

There again, it's right in the middle of making sure that we not only remember this but remember the right things about it.

Remember that this was about struggle that this was about protest, that this was about pushing America to be different and to treat African-Americans really differently.

- Yeah, so that again, that the moral the Black church has always been the moral voice of not just Black America, but America, period.

- Right.

- And calling speaking truth to power and calling those in authority to the carpet about these kinds of issues.

And not only that, the black church has been the catalyst for so many non-religious organizations in our community.

Even going back to the Detroit Freedom Walk, that's spawned the Detroit Council for Human Rights and so many other organizations that were in the city of Detroit and that were prominent in terms of representing our issue issues, needs, problems on some local level.

So the church has always been the center again, of just bringing our people together in the community and opening its doors to the kind of activities that can bring about some action.

So not just being a moral voice but also creating opportunities for action to take place that can change our collective reality as a people.

- As the leader of the shrine now, I'd love to hear what you think all of those challenges, all of those responsibilities and obligations for the black church, what they look like now and especially what they look like now in Detroit.

We're just a few summers from the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement.

- Yeah.

- So much of that was very critical in Detroit and it looked different here than it did other places.

I wonder what you make as we celebrate this 60th anniversary of what we're facing now and what the challenge in the call is.

- Great question.

I think the challenge is that we raise up a new generation who can understand programmatic struggle.

That things like racism and injustice and inequality are not gonna be erased overnight.

That it takes protracted effort and struggle and organization and mobilization of skills and energy and resources and all those things.

It's the other side of protests has to be programmatic action.

And if those two things aren't coming together, then protest is just senseless.

It's not gonna lead to anything.

It's not gonna transform anything.

People don't, people in power don't give up their power because somebody protests.

So there has to be some programmatic action that can lead to programmatic change that can lead to transformation, real transformation.

So I think it's about getting that training to our young people and helping them to understand what the past has done, the avenues and doors it's opened that we can take advantage of today to continue to struggle in this generation.

Every generation has a particular responsibility to address the issues of their time in their way.

So it's a matter of supporting and mentoring those young people who voices need to be heard and guiding and directing them with the resources and support they need to get their voices heard.

- Yeah.

I was really struck during the summer of 2020 and the real emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement by how much it was shaped here in Detroit by young people, the number of young people and particularly young African-American women.

- Yeah.

- Who stepped forward and really pulled that together and made it into a movement.

I wonder what you see when you look at young people here in the city and how they're stepping up to that call.

- Yeah, we actually opened our doors to the Black Lives Matter movement.

We gave them a room to meet in one of our buildings.

So, we're kind of on the ground with them in terms of helping them organize and plan and having those opportunities, I think is critical and keeping up open mind and trying to help understand what young people feel are the needs and the issues that they want to address.

And then supporting them, like I said in the effort to do that.

And it as many ways as we can do that, whether it's culturally, whether it's economically, whether it's socially, whether it's helping them to build networks and just getting behind them because they're the ones who have to really fight this fight.

We've done our prior, all we have to do now is to pass it down to the next generation and make sure that they're prepared to.

- Yeah.

- Take on the challenges that they have to confront.

- Are we winning?

And that's an oversimplification I know of a very complex question, but I think, it's hard to sometimes see progress and note that it's actual progress, but it's also hard to take in the things that remind us of how far we still have to go.

- Yeah.

- And so anniversaries like this I think are an opportunity to think about how far we've come and how far we still think we want to get.

- Yeah, it's complex.

You take one step forward and then you turn around and it seems like you're going backwards.

Well, life is full of complex ideas, issues, problems, needs.

And so, it's really about a balancing act knowing that for every step you take forward, there's gonna be pushback.

And so there has to be a regrouping and a regathering.

And I think that's what this any anniversary affords us the opportunity to regroup and redirect our energies and our efforts to see how we can continue the forward progress.

So, it's again, about endurance and being willing to fight the good fight.

- Okay, Bishop Chui, it's always great to have you here on "American Black Journal," but it's especially great to have you here in our city and at the helm of the Shrine, which is such a critical institution for all the things that we're talking about.

So I really appreciate you coming by.

Detroit minister and activist and friend of "American Black Journal."

Reverend JoAnn Watson was a young girl in 1963 when her grandparents took her to the Walk to Freedom.

"American Black Journal" contributor Cecilia Sharpe of 90.9 WRCJ sat down with Reverend Watson to get her memories of that day.

- I am here with Reverend JoAnn Watson and we are talking about the 60th anniversary of the Detroit Walk to Freedom that occurred in 1963.

And you were there for that event.

What was your experience on that day?

- It was a magnificent day.

I was 12 years old and my grandparents unexpectedly picked me up.

I had no idea where I was headed.

We were headed to Cobol to hear Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And to see the largest crowd I had ever seen in my life.

It was just truly a triumphant event 'cause you felt lifted up by the crowd.

You felt energized by the excitement.

And my grandmother held my hand tightly as we surged through that huge crowd.

For some reason, I never felt tired.

We were there a long time, but I felt lifted up.

- So the march or the Walk to Freedom was to generate awareness and raise funds for the Southern Christian Leadership Council.

- [JoAnn] Well, the signs all said jobs justice, peace.

- [Cecelia] Okay.

- Jobs justice, which is which I later learned was the mantra for Dr. King's events.

But that march really changed my life and it still touches me today to think about Dr. King's voice, how it reverberated with those loudspeakers how the crowd hung on every word.

Nobody left without talking about Dr. King's Speech.

It was mesmerizing.

- Now, this was the first time that he gave the "I Had A Dream" speech.

- Right.

- Before Washington.

- That's true.

- Which people forget.

What did the walk to freedom mean to the people in Detroit at that time?

- It meant a lot because the injustice that was happening around the country was not just in the South.

It also included the north.

There were housing issues, employment issues.

We had police brutality in Detroit that was unaddressed.

And I remember walking to choir here so was as the eldest of 10.

The girls never got stopped, but the boys in my family would get stopped frequently by police for nothing, nothing.

And so we witnessed injustice and there was a need to have a march in Detroit.

We felt that Detroit was part of the movement.

So not only organized labor but block clubs, community groups, youth groups.

We felt a part of it.

We felt a part of what was happening.

- You've had a career in public service serving for the YWCA as the executive director for the Detroit branch, the assistant executive director for the national YWCA, served on city council, the community liaison for Congressman John Conyers.

At 12 years old, did you know this was going to be your path?

- Had no idea.

Didn't know what I was going to be doing.

I just knew that I was going to try to make a difference in my life.

I was an early reader, my mother was a reader and as an early, I read everything I put in my hands.

I was reading the newspaper at four and I just read everything and wanted to be a part of the solution of things that were challenging in this country.

A Reverend Dr. CT Vivian was a mentor of mine and he was one that Dr. King called the greatest preacher who ever lived.

I'll never forget the impact he had.

For one of the marches the recommemorations of the six of the march on Detroit.

And he got out of the car, VIP car.

We had selected for him and wanted to walk the whole way in his 80s.

I was certainly mentored by Dr. Dorothy Irene Height, who I loved and respected.

She was actually the highest ranking black woman in the YWCA of the USA.

But she saw all of us as her mentees.

We were all her children.

I was mentored by Mother Rosa Parks who I loved and respected.

She lived in Detroit more years than she lived in Montgomery, Alabama.

And we both worked for Congressman John Conyers.

She would go to reparations conferences with me.

So I'm very blessed, very blessed.

I didn't ask for it, could not have hoped for it, but it came into my life.

- But you continue to share that legacy and you continue to pass it on to the next generations and to the community and to impact change.

Can you talk about some of the ways that you have made those changes and the people that you have helped to nurture and mentor and guide?

- There's a wonderful organization in Detroit called "We, The People of Detroit."

And they have gone door to door making sure people have access to water in Detroit and Flint.

They have been galvanizing and organizing around the country and of course, in Detroit to make sure that people keep their water on, have access to water.

So I've made water as a human right, an important part of my legacy and made sure that there's somebody following me who will carry that on in a generational way.

- Something people may not know about you, as you spoke of youth is that you were on the board of American Girl.

- I was.

- The doll company.

And you had an impact on one of the dolls that was created.

Melody.

- I did.

- Tell us a little bit about Melody and the inspiration for Melody.

- They wanted to have someone who had a regular life who had the kind of connection that they were writing about in the Melody book.

So they had an advisory board that included myself, Dr. Gloria Aneb House, Julian Bond and others.

And we sat down with them on a number of occasions.

They were looking for someone who could help them understand what life was like for a girl in the '60s who was embracing the Motown music sound, which I did.

Mattel folks and the American girl people when they came to Detroit.

And I drove them all around the city to show them all the things that made Detroit so unique and special.

And also to talk about how Detroit was proudly a part of that '63 march.

- What can people do today to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Detroit Walk to Freedom?

- I think they should identify acts that will help change.

We're not just here to take care of ourselves.

What have you done to help somebody today?

If I can help somebody along the way then my living has not been in vain.

- And we really hope you'll join us on Wednesday, June 28th at noon and we're gonna partner with Bridge Detroit for a live virtual town hall about the 60th anniversary of the Detroit Walk to Freedom and the March on Washington.

We are looking forward to great conversations with some really special guests.

Horace Sheffield III, who is the son of Detroit labor leader Horace Sheffield Jr. will be here to talk about his connection to the march here in Detroit.

Will also be joined by Ken Coleman, a local historian who is always reminding us of the importance of Black history on our lives here in the city.

And Edith Lee-Payne as a young girl, attended both the Walk to Freedom here in Detroit and the March on Washington will be here to recount her experiences.

So make sure you get in on the discussion on the "American Black Journal," Facebook and YouTube pages.

That's gonna do it for us this week.

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

And as always, you can connect with us on Facebook and on Twitter.

Take care and we'll see you next time.

(upbeat 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 and Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV.

- [Announcer] 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.

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

Thank you.

(upbeat music)