- The Detroit branch of the NAACP is celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Walk to Freedom with a commemorative walk down Woodward Avenue on Saturday, June 24th.

The event is one of many activities that'll take place during the NAACP's June Jubilee Celebration of Freedom.

I got all of the details from the organization's president, Reverend Dr. Wendell Anthony.

Well, welcome back to "American Black Journal."

- Thank you, Stephen.

I feel like I'm at home every time I come on, even though you say, "It's nice to visit, but we don't want you to stay too long."

I understand, but it's all good.

Always good to be with you.

- That's right, it's always great to have you, and of course you used to host this show, so it is a kind of home for you.

- It's a blessing, man.

I'm just glad, Stephen, to see that it's still going on.

- Still going, that's right.

- After all these years, that shows the merit and the value and the significance of what you're doing.

- Yeah, yeah, we're trying hard over here.

So I still have my shirt from the 50th commemoration of the march here in Detroit, the 1963 march with, Walk to Freedom with Dr. King.

I can't believe we're about to have 60.

I mean, it's a lesson in that time goes on, but of course, we are still dealing with many of the things we were talking about 10 years ago and some of the things we're still dealing with 60 years ago.

- You're absolutely correct.

I can still see you walking down Woodward Avenue.

I think you had on white gym shoes and made some white pants and that T-shirt.

- I had the T-shirt, yep.

(laughs) - So I remember that well.

It was a great occasion, and you're absolutely correct.

Dr. King's last book was basically "Chaos or Community: Where Do We Go from Here?"

And we seem to have a lot of chaos.

People wanna take us back 60 years.

They wanna reduce voting rights.

They want to reduce civil rights.

They want to revamp education, public education.

They're banning books as opposed to expanding opportunities to read.

They wanna snap back the SNAP program.

We still have more war than we do peace and more division than we do unity.

So there's still a necessity for us to cross another bridge.

That's why we wanna remind people that the struggle is not over.

The battle for freedom and democracy and respect is still on.

We know that Dr. King was in the valley working, not on the mountaintop just dreaming, and so we want to bring that back to the people.

That's why we're doing this commemorative march.

We did the 30th, the 40th, the 50th, and this year, of course, is the 60th on Saturday, June 24th.

Prior to that Saturday, Stephen, on Friday, by the way, we're going to unveil a life-sized statue of Martin Luther King Jr. that's gonna be placed permanently in Hart Plaza.

- Yeah.

- That's a tribute to the legacy of Dr. King in which he gave his first "I Have a Dream" speech, and I always tell people, "Before you go to DC, you gotta come through The Big D, and that's Detroit, and that would be the place then everybody's invited to be a part of that.

- Yeah, I mean that's gonna be an incredible addition to Hart Plaza, which is a place that we already have lots of wonderful civil rights and progressive kind of markers.

But talk a little more about the things that you're doing.

It's not just the march.

You've got a lot cooking for this anniversary.

- Thanks, we have four days of events, and I'm asking, and we're asking people to go to detroitnaacp.org, detroitnaacp.org and register, or call 313-871-2087.

We start off on Thursday, June 22nd, with what we call Freedom Summit.

You know, marches are structured to a identify causes and issues and people and personalities and predicaments and then change policy, but it's really the work, the call to action, what happens after the march is over.

So we're looking at various issues that Dr. King looked at and what we as the NAACP are dealing with today, i.e.

voting, how we can increase voting registration, mobilization, and protection, excuse me.

You know, there's a bill pending that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and others is trying to do called the Michigan Voting Rights Act.

We'd like to see that passed to make it more palatable and easier for people to vote in Michigan.

Stop the intimidation, stop the reduction of voting places and booths and absentee ballots.

That's what Dr. King would be about.

So we're dealing with that.

We're dealing with the history of the civil rights movement.

Jamon Jordan and Ken Coleman, two historians in Detroit, are gonna deal with that.

We have Ayanna Gregory, these are at the summits.

Ayanna Gregory, who, Stephen, is the daughter of Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory, icon, civil rights leader.

She's gonna do a one-act play on the civil rights movement, entertainer, writer, singer, she's coming.

We're gonna have Dr. Kimberle Crenshaw, one of the foremost authorities on so-called Critical Race Theory, what it is, what it ain't.

A lot of people talk about it don't have a clue as to what they're talking about.

Dr. Crenshaw has written extensively about this.

It's an academic posit or policy dealing with the legalisms and the way the legal system of criminal justice and others have impacted African Americans in this country.

It's simply telling the truth about history.

She's going to come, she's speaking.

Michael Eric Dyson, one of the foremost thought leaders and writers, he's coming, he's gonna tie all this together.

That's gonna be at Wayne County Community College at the Northwest Campus.

That's free and open to the public from 9:00 to 4:00 on Thursday, June 22nd.

Then as I said, we have the unveiling of the statue of Dr. King at 10 o'clock on Friday morning.

That's open to everybody.

Everybody should come for this historic gathering of the unveiling of the statue.

We're the only city in the country that I know of that's doing this, only in The D. And then on Saturday morning at 10:00, we will begin our walk towards freedom at the corner of Woodward and Martin Luther King Boulevard near Mack, and so we're gonna march to Hart Plaza for a big community rally there.

We have a number of people coming in town.

We also are going to pay tribute to the hip hop industry.

This is the 50th anniversary of the hip hop industry.

Doug E. Fresh, Yo-Yo, some others are coming in.

We're going to acknowledge that.

They're gonna be a part of the walk and the march toward freedom.

And then Sunday is the creme de la creme, Stephen.

We're going to have the 68th annual Fight for Freedom Fund dinner featuring the senator from the great state of Georgia, the Honorable Raphael Warnock, the first African American senator from Georgia.

We're presenting a number of awards, Freedom and Justice, Lifetime Achievement.

- You mentioned it a few times, but the things that, I mean, if you kind of add up all the things that you're doing on that weekend, they all point to this real tension that still exists right now, and in some ways is it more inflected than it always is in terms of the pushback against what Dr. King was trying to achieve and what people have been trying to achieve, you know, since then and certainly before him.

We live in some strange times where people are saying some strange things and doing even stranger things.

- I tell you how strange it is, when you have the Republican Party, many of them, attacking the FBI, calling them liberal and calling them a woke organization.

And you got Wendell Anthony and others saying, "Wait a minute, that stuff, they ain't like that at all."

I mean, this is crazy when you got people using the words of Dr. King, talking about he would not be for diversity and inclusion and extending the rights of people, DEI, he would be opposed.

That's crazy when you're talking about the fact that Dr. King would not be for certain people having the opportunity to be equalized, economically, socially and politic in society.

He was for all, he was for all people, but he recognized the need for African Americans and Brown people and women to be able to have an opportunity to be included at the table as opposed to being the meal on the table.

So this is crazy to the degree that America seems to be going backwards as opposed to going forward.

We are reducing our rights for democracy and freedom rather than increasing them and expanding them.

We were the shining light for the world in terms of democracy.

When you look at what's happening with the refugees trying to come into this country, the immigrants that are trying to come here, and yes, there should be legal ways to come into the country.

Yes, there should be treatment of fairness and equality.

But by the same token, aren't we supposed to be the land of the free, the home of the brave, the place where bring me your tired and your worn-out masses, huddled masses yearning to breathe free?

I mean, that's what the lady with the lamp says.

And so we're saying that we have some difficult days ahead.

But I'm confident that when we come together, we want Black people, white people, red people, yellow people, urbanites, suburbanites, ruralites, everybody to come and to be a part of this because Dr. King was for everybody in terms of an injustice to anyone anywhere is a threat to justice to everybody everywhere.

- Yeah, yeah, I wanna talk a little more about this idea of a Michigan Voting Rights Act, which you mentioned earlier, and how critical that could be here.

You've got Raphael Warnock coming for the dinner.

He is the living embodiment of the power of the Voting Rights Act, right?

Once you got people to vote in Georgia in large numbers, they decided that, "Hey, we want an African American in that seat."

It would never have happened without that.

And the threats to it, right, at the federal level, especially threaten to send us back.

- And now because of the success and the expansion of voting, see, it's not just for Black people.

It's for white, Brown, red, it's for all people.

Well, this is not a Democratic thing or a Republican thing or an Independent thing.

I want everybody to vote, Stephen.

I want people to vote who don't even agree with me.

Let the best policies win fairly.

And so there are over 400 voter suppression bills that have been introduced since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.

And they still may gut it even further.

And you see, states have opened up on it.

So what we're doing in Michigan is trying to make sure that we can expand voting, that we can have absentee ballots still available for all Michiganders who are registered to vote, that we can have voting groups and polling and precincts that are available in communities that may be shortchanged, that we can have enough election officials who are there to make sure that they assist people who need that kind of guidance, not to tell them how to vote but to assist them with things they need, that we stop people from bringing guns to the voting booth and intimidating polling workers and people who are trying to exercise their right to vote.

That's what the Michigan Voting Rights Act does.

And so we're simply saying, we need this.

Everybody needs this, because if we don't, you're gonna choke the very life out of people who want to participate.

We already have a challenge trying to get people to exercise their rights.

Now you wanna cut them off at the knees so they can't even begin to assume their rights.

And so we say, "No, that won't go."

We need the Michigan Voting Rights Act.

We need to march for freedom and justice.

That's why we want everybody to be with us on the June Jubilee, June 22nd through June 23rd.

We need marshals.

We need people that can direct folk as to how to go.

For people that were in the '63 march, Stephen, we're gonna recognize them and honor them for being there.

Those are people that have been for the whole, the journey that we've had, and so we're gonna honor them.

That's why you need to go to Detroit NAACP and register.

If you got photos, you can upload them to the website.

If you wanna volunteer, please go and register or call 313-871-2087.

It's gonna be on and poppin' in The Big D. - Yeah, well, if it was anything like it was 10 years ago, it'll be amazing.

And the statue really I think just tops it off in a really important way.

I'm really excited to see that.

- I am, too, no question about it, Steve.

Only in The D, and you are witness.

- Yeah, yeah, all right, Reverend Anthony, always great to have you here.

Congratulations on everything you got coming up, and thanks for joining.

- It's been 15 minutes already?

- It's been 15 minutes.

(both laughing) We always run out of time.

- Absolutely.

- We'll see you- - Thank you, Stephen.

I appreciate you.

- Yeah, we'll see you soon.