Stateside

In July 1967, Walter and Wallace Crawford had just graduated from St. Vincent High School in Detroit.

The twin brothers were dedicated athletes, heading to college on track scholarships in the fall. On the morning of July 23, the Crawfords woke up and headed to their weekend job at a car wash.

The Next Idea

Helping underserved young people embrace education, get into college and go on to be world-class citizens is the mission of a program called FATE. It's operated as part of the cause-based clothing company Merit Goodness.

Give Merit  Executive Director Kuhu Saha and 2016 FATE graduate Asha Stewart joined Stateside to share how FATE provides a space where students can create aspirations.

We entrust our kids with Michigan's teachers five days a week. Yet most us of probably don't know much  about the way our teachers are paid. The truth might be surprising.

This week, Michigan Radio's Jennifer Guerra is exploring teacher pay in Michigan, and what it means for keeping the best teachers in their classrooms instead of seeing them flee for more lucrative and less stressful jobs elsewhere.

Today, more than 100 Iraqi Christians facing deportation from the United States could discover their fate.

The Iraqis were detained for visa violations – including past criminal convictions – which had been ignored for years, after they were caught up in a crackdown ordered by the current administration.

Their families say they feel betrayed by a president they'd largely supported in last year's election, and who they'd seen as a defender of Christians.

After this week, we’re starting to get a clearer picture of what the 2018 governor’s race will look like in Michigan.

In just a little more than a year, Republicans and Democrats in Michigan will choose their candidates for governor in the August primary. Governor Rick Snyder is term-limited so, it’s a wide open field.

More than 7,000 people were swept up in mass arrests during the 1967 Detroit uprising.

Jails and police stations were overflowing, so many people were held in makeshift detention centers, often in squalid conditions.

Jim Atkin was a member of the Michigan Air National Guard at that time. His unit was called up to try and contain the situation in Detroit, and his first assignment was guarding people taken into custody during the initial days of the chaos.

Republican State Sen. Patrick Colbeck, R-Canton, will officially launch his campaign to be Michigan’s next governor tomorrow, at the Willow Run Airport near Ypsilanti.

Colbeck made a career as an aerospace engineer and small business owner before entering politics. He has disagreed with current Governor Rick Snyder in the past, calling Snyder's decision to veto legislation that would have created a "Choose Life" Michigan license plate "disgraceful." Colbeck promises to bring “principled solutions” to Lansing, and says tax increases should always be a last resort.

The mistreatment of African-Americans and Detroit's mostly white police force fueled the violence of July 1967. But black Detroiters didn't fare much better in the courts.

Bill Goodman was a young lawyer in the city during the uprising, when thousands of people were being arrested and held in cramped, unsanitary conditions.

There are many histories of Detroit. The latest is a comprehensive look at the contributions, accomplishments and long-suffering of the African Americans who have called Detroit home.

The book is Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination by Herb Boyd, son of Detroit and an instructor at The City College of New York currently teaching African American history. Boyd now lives in Harlem.

This week, the state of Michigan dropped charges and arrest warrants against 186 people — almost all of them Detroit residents — after accusing them of illegally collecting unemployment benefits. This group is among about 28,000 people the state wrongly accused of unemployment benefit fraud due to serious flaws in its automated fraud detection system.

Ken Sikkema, senior policy fellow at Public Sector Consultants and a former Republican legislative leader, and Vicki Barnett, a former mayor of Farmington Hills and a former Democratic legislator, joined Stateside to discuss this week's political news.

The Cheers! team visited the Grove restaurant in Grand Rapids to learn about an old cocktail the restaurant is taking one step farther..

To understand why African-American Detroiters hit a breaking point with the city's police force in July 1967, we must turn to the history of the Detroit Police Department, and how white officers treated black men, women and children.

At Cops and Doughnuts in Clare, classic tunes play on the stereo while customers line up at the glass display case, waiting to place their orders.

But Bill White isn’t here for the doughnuts.

“I never have a doughnut,” says White. “When you get old enough you can’t eat good stuff anymore. You have to go with fruits and vegetables.”

White has been coming in every Saturday morning, for years, even though he doesn’t partake in the doughnuts or coffee. In fact, White doesn’t order anything at all at Cops and Doughnuts.

The seventh season of HBO’s Game of Thrones premiered this week. The show is a ground-breaker in many ways, including becoming TV’s first global blockbuster.

University of Michigan professor of media studies Amanda Lotz joined Stateside to explain why and how Game of Thrones gained such success without the use of the internet like many TV show success stories these days.

The Next Idea

It’s the quintessential American success story. Three young, black engineers left a major technology corporation to form their own business. They built it into an internationally successful company and eventually sold it. 

Today’s guest on The Next Idea, David Tarver, was one of the engineers who founded Telecom Analysis Systems over 30 years ago amid the challenges and promise of the post-Civil Rights era. 

Online readers of the Detroit Free Press logged on last week and were greeted with a surprise: No more traditional Olde English typeface known as "Blackletter".

Instead, readers found a custom typeface: Unify Sans and Unify Serif, to be specific. And a blue circle, which is the look of USA Today.

And that's exactly what the owners of the Free Press want, because the venerable Detroit paper is owned by Gannett/USA Today Network. Immediately, howls of dismay and outrage went up on social media.

In the second installment of our series showcasing the Detroit music scene we welcome back to Stateside Paul Young, founder and publisher of Detroit Music Magazine and Khalid Bhatti, executive editor of Detroit Music Magazine, to introduce three more talented artists.

The Great Lakes are the largest group of freshwater lakes on the planet. But their future is uncertain.

Every year, a Native American group called the Mother Earth Water Walkers treks hundreds of miles around the Great Lakes to raise awareness of water issues in the region.

This year, the group is making its 2,000 mile trip from Duluth, Minnesota to Matane, Quebec.

Stateside producer Mercedes Mejia caught up with the group near Leamington, Ontario, and learned that the walk is more than a call to action. For many, it's a spiritual journey that connects them to each other and to other indigenous communities.

If you've ever been driving through the countryside, unsure of exactly where you are, maybe you’ve told a friend: “I passed some podunk town in the middle of nowhere.”

Many Michiganders are familiar with the saying. But there’s really only one Podunk, Michigan.

It was almost 4 a.m. on July 23, 1967 when police raided the Detroit blind pig owned by William Scott II. As they led the occupants of the illegal after-hours drinking club out to waiting paddy-wagons, a crowd gathered. Frustrated by years of racism and police abuse, the crowd soon grew angry with the police.

These were the beginning moments of the 1967 Detroit Riot, which would last five days, eventually claiming 43 lives.

Keeping backyard chickens is getting more popular in Michigan, as more communities decide to let residents maintain backyard coops.

Megan Nichols is a public health veterinarian with the Centers for Disease Control. She says keeping backyard chickens is linked to salmonella outbreaks.

The Founding Fathers crafted a Constitution that has stood the test of time. But it has required tweaking.

One very important tweak happened on this day in 1947.

There's been an important development in the story of Nicole Beverly.

Beverly is the Ypsilanti mom who spoke to Stateside last month, describing the abuse she's suffered from her ex-husband Kevin Beverly even as he's been serving a five-year prison sentence for aggravated stalking.

It was 1957 when 14-year-old Isaiah "Ike" McKinnon made the decision to become a Detroit police officer. It was a surprising decision given the beating he'd just suffered at the hands of the cops. But instead of turning against the police, McKinnon, who is African-American, decided to join them. 

In 1967, a series of civil disturbances in cities across America rocked the country. The unrest, called a rebellion by some and a riot by others, made its way to the city of Detroit in July of that year. 

The Next Idea

Budget cuts for school districts are increasingly a way of life. Often, the first things to go when money gets tight are music and art programs. 

But there is both anecdotal and scientific evidence that arts improve kids’ overall learning in a number of ways.

Director of the Art Experience in Pontiac Judy Wilson joined Stateside to tell us about the nonprofit that has taken on the mission of bringing back art for young people whose schools may or may not be able to afford it. Their latest project is the Community Art Lab, a storefront where anyone in the community can have access to art making experiences.

Only a few manufacturing facilities in the world measure over a million square feet. These marvels of modern industrialism are massive operations, and often heavily impact local economies. So when the residents of Vernon Township, a quiet agricultural community in Shiawassee County, heard rumors that an unknown company wanted to build a 24 million square foot manufacturing facility right next door, they naturally had some questions.

But local officials offered few answers. Citing non-disclosure agreements that prevent them from revealing most details, neither the township nor the city of Durand, the town nestled in the middle of the Vernon Township, have unveiled the identity of the company, or what type of facility it would be.

Joan Larsen faces a tangled path to a plum spot on a federal appeals court. The only thing standing in her way is Michigan’s two U.S. Senators.

Social assistance programs that serve the poor are targeted for budget cuts in President Trump’s proposed budget.

While Congress approaches its fall deadline to set a federal budget for the next fiscal year, Stateside set out to talk with people whose voice isn’t often a part of the conversation: people who are struggling to live paycheck to paycheck, the so-called “working poor”.