- [Narrator] Coming up on One Detroit, we're talking with authors about their literary works.

Award-winning poet Kwame Alexander discusses his passion for literacy, books and writing.

Plus we'll hear from graphic novelist Rob Edwards about his comic book that tells the story of a little known figure in black history.

Also ahead author Curtis Chin reflects on his life as a child growing up and his family's Chinese restaurant.

And we'll share one of the many family stories from our new Destination Detroit series.

It's all coming up next on One Detroit.

- [Announcer] 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 PBS.

- [Announcer 2] The DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit PBS.

Through our giving, we are committed to meeting the needs of the communities we serve statewide to help ensure a bright and thriving future for all.

Learn more at DTEFoundation.com.

- [Announcer] Nissan Foundation and viewers like you.

(bright music) - [Narrator] Just ahead on One Detroit, Detroit born screenwriter, Rob Edwards, talks about his graphic novel titled "Defiant", plus a memoir by Curtis Chin details the life lessons he learned growing up in a popular family owned business in Detroit's Chinatown.

And we'll meet a woman whose family made radio broadcasting history after migrating from the south to the Detroit area.

But first up, one Detroit contributor and American Black Journal host Stephen Henderson sits down for a conversation with award-winning author, poet, producer, and educator, Kwame Alexander.

He's a New York Times bestselling author of 44 books, including "The Crossover," "The Undefeated," and "How Sweet the Sound."

Alexander's writings include poetry, stories for young people, and books about African American trailblazers.

(bright music) - It's great to have you take time out from writing books (Stephen laughs) to sit and talk about writing books because at the pace you're going, I mean, I just can't imagine you have time for anything else, and somehow you've managed to squeeze all these other things in too.

- Well, you know what's interesting is I love talking.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

(Stephen laughs) - I began my career as an actor.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- Like, that's where I started at a place called Virginia Tech.

And I auditioned for plays and didn't get cast.

And I said, okay, well, I gotta figure this out.

And so I began writing plays.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- To cast myself.

- Right.

(Stephen laughs) - So the writing happened as a result of that.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

44 books, I mean, that is an incredible number.

Prolific is the word that keeps coming to mind.

But there are also the range of things that you're writing about is really broad.

Talk about how you get inspiration for these books, and for each one, what's the thing you're trying to accomplish with it?

- I think ultimately, as Langston Hughes said, I'm trying to distill my human heart into a few words on the page.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- And sometimes that heart is filled with longing and love, and so a love story or a love poem might come out.

Other times it's my two-year-old who won't stop crying.

And so I play some jazz music, and she stops crying.

And so I say, well, let me write a book about Duck Ellington and Mules Davis, and teach her about jazz.

So it really is about what I'm feeling, what I'm experiencing, what I'm thinking, when I'm dealing with sort of the woes and the wonders of life.

- Yeah.

- And it comes out in various ways.

- Yeah.

Let's talk about the difference between writing poetry and writing stories.

- Sure.

- I think of poetry as, you know, of course, more subject to rhythm, and pacing, and the kind of things that you see in music.

- Sure.

- More often.

And of course stories can do that too.

- Right.

- But it's a very different process.

- Oh, absolutely.

- Yeah.

- I mean, you think about it like this, with prose, you have a lot of words at your disposal.

- Yes.

- You know?

- You can go on as long as you want.

- With poetry- - Yeah.

- You have to capture sort of the heavy things that are happening in just a few words.

And so it requires more conciseness.

And so if you look at a page of poetry versus prose, there's more white space on the poetry page.

- Yeah.

- And I believe that's so that the reader can take that spiritual journey.

It's not just about the words that are there, but it's about the words that aren't there that sort of challenge us and make us pay attention to what's happening in our lives in the world.

- That's an interesting way to think about that.

I've always thought that the best music often is about the notes that aren't there.

- Right.

- Miles in particular, right?

- Exactly.

- You don't have to play every note.

Some of 'em are understood.

I guess poetry is the same.

- I mean, look, you could tell, and I did.

I told a woman that I loved her, you know, over and over, and she didn't really pay attention.

(Stephen laughs) I wasn't very cool.

I didn't get cool till very recently.

- [Stephen] You gotta show her.

- And so I recited a poem to her.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- I have never been a slave, yet I know I am whipped.

I have never been to Canada, yet I hope to cross your border.

I have never traveled underground, yet the knight knows my journey.

If I were a poet in love, I say that with you I have found that new place where romance is just a beginning and freedom is our end.

And she married me.

- Oh, there you go.

(Stephen laughs) - And so- - There you go, it worked!

- The poetry works.

- Right, it worked!

Let's talk about your new work, your new book.

- The new book.

So my dad says, my dad's my biggest fan.

- Yeah.

- He'll be in the grocery store.

"Have you read my son's new book?"

- That's right, have you seen this?

- Have you seen this?

- You know he made the New York Times.

(Stephen laughs) (Kwame laughs) The latest book is called "How Sweet the Sound."

And it's a picture book that's for ages one to 99.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- And it's about the history of black music in America.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- And how music from, you know, when we look at the blues.

- Which is the history of American music.

- Right?

Absolutely.

- There's isn't a way to separate those things, right?

- Absolutely.

When we look at jazz, which is American music, when we look at reggae, at at hip hop.

And so I wanted to sort of document how we, you know, brought the rhythms, and the sounds, and the leaps and the bounds from West Africa.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- To the present, how we got here, and look at that sort of journey.

And so I wrote that story.

- Who's that story for in your mind?

Who are you writing to in that book?

- You know, I like to think that I am always writing a love letter to black people, and I am always writing sort of a reminder to all of us.

- To everybody else.

- To everybody.

- Yeah.

- To recognize, and acknowledge, and appreciate the humanity of black folks.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- You know?

And so that's my goal.

- Yeah, yeah.

I also wanna ask you about one of the kind of fun projects that you have.

Acoustic Rooster.

- Acoustic Rooster.

(Stephen laughs) - I love that, and Jazzy Jams.

- Which started here in Michigan.

- Is that right?

- In 2010.

- Yeah.

- I had written 10 books of love poems, and I wasn't making a whole lot of money.

I wasn't able to provide for my family, so I had jobs.

- Yeah.

- And I got a book deal for Acoustic Roosters Barnyard Band from a company in, I wanna say Grand Rapids.

- Okay, yeah.

- Okay?

- Other side of the state, yeah.

- Called Sleeping Bear Press.

- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

- And they published Acoustic Rooster, which is about a rooster that starts a jazz band with Thelonious Monkey, and Ella Finch Gerald, and Duck Ellington.

(Stephen laughs) And so that became my first children's book in 2011, and of course I've gone on to write many more, but that recently got turned into a cartoon.

- [Stephen] It's on television now.

- [Kwame] Animated special on PBS.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- [Kwame] So that's pretty exciting.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- [Kwame] Yeah.

♪ Old McDonald had a farm ♪ E-I-E-I-O - But this is the Bebop Barnyard.

We should sing a jazz song about our farm.

- I know A jazzy rooster who can sing all about our band.

- Yay!

- I mean, you know, the transference of a story like that from page to screen is one of the things that's kind of really fascinating to me.

- Yeah, well, it made sense because we're writing about music.

- [Stephen] Right.

- Which is sort of an auditory experience.

And so how do we then, you know, take these words on the page and put them on the stage?

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- And make them come alive and bring the music out.

I like to think that we're entertaining, but we're also informing.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- The biggest metaphor that I can think about when it comes to jazz is that jazz, as Winton says, is the metaphor for democracy.

And you've got all these different players, the sax.

- Yeah.

- The drummer, the horn.

- Yeah.

- You know?

You got the piano, you got the singer, and they all gotta exist on stage together to create this musical masterpiece.

- Yeah.

- But at any given point, somebody's gonna solo.

- Right.

- Somebody's gotta shine.

- Someone's in the front.

- And the other people stand back and let them do their thing, because at some point they know they're gonna have the respect to do their thing.

And I think that's a beautiful thing.

- That's a great analogy.

- We're trying to teach kids a lot of these things, I think, through the show.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Ya know.

- [Narrator] Let's turn now to Detroit born screenwriter, Rob Edwards, who's known for his work on Disney's the Princess and the Frog and Treasure Planet.

His comic series "Defiant" was released last month in graphic novel form.

The story is about Robert Smalls, a little known figure in black history.

One Detroit's Chris Jordan caught up with Edwards at Comics & More in Madison Heights.

They talked about "Defiant" and how the comic book teaches African American history to kids.

(people chatting) - Hey.

- How's it going?

- Great, great.

How you doing?

- Good to see ya.

Rob Edwards.

A lot of viewers will know your work as a screenwriter from stuff like Princess and the Frog, Treasure Planet, In Living Color, Fresh Prince.

- Yeah.

- A very storied career in TV and film, but now your latest project is a graphic novel.

- Yes.

- About the life of the fascinating and way too little known still historical figure, Robert Smalls.

- Exactly, yeah.

And that's the tragedy is that this guy lived this extraordinary life, and just nobody knows about him.

You know, you tell people, and the first question, they don't say like, "Well, wait, and then what did he do?"

They say, "Why don't I know about this guy?"

- For those who are watching who don't know anything about Robert Smalls, tell us the short version of his story.

- He was a, you know, born a slave.

When he was about 23 years old, he was, during the Civil War, he was basically signed to work on this ship, the Planter, which ferried munitions back and forth.

And one night when the white crew took off, they commandeered the boat.

All their families got onto the boat, and they took off.

They went through five checkpoints, (Rob laughs) disguised as the captain, and then surrendered the ship to the Union Army that was just outside of Charleston Harbor.

He then became rich because it was loaded with weapons.

And so it was the biggest hall in the Civil War.

He was famous for pulling this thing off.

- Yeah.

- He then ran for Congress five times, won.

He started a printing press.

He started a railroad.

He's the reason why we have black people in the military because they showed courage, you know, intelligence and strength.

He's the reason why we have public schools.

So, (Rob laughs) 'cause he really, really wanted to be able to read all of his life.

So that is the shortest version possible.

- Wow.

- Of the extraordinary life of Robert Smalls.

- How did you decide that you were gonna tell this story and that this was how you were gonna tell it?

- Well, actually, the story starts here in Bloomfield Hills, where a classmate of mine, a guy named David Baxter, I'd gone to Cranbrook with, he calls me up and he says, "Hey, we got this script."

And he gave it to me and said, "You know, well, what do you think?"

And basically the story, well written, but it focused on the heist itself.

You know, just the taking of the Planter.

And as I was reading it, and then went down the rabbit hole of like, all the stuff that this guy had done, I said, "Well, I think that that's the beginning of the story.

I think that it's about a man who is free in his heart, he becomes free, and then he does all the things that you, you know, you do when you've been caged for so long."

And I said, "Well, I hope you don't mind, but rather than just give a bunch of notes on it, I'd like to take a crack at it.

And also I think it's important that a story like this be told by a black author, just because it's, you know, times we live in, and also my filter is different."

- Of course.

- And so for me as a, I'm not a historian.

I'm just a writer.

I just write Disney movies and stuff.

And so I took it as a character study.

What kind of person would do this thing?

And I discovered actually that as I was doing it, that in a lot of ways I was able to find things that the historians were not 'cause I was asking questions that they weren't.

You know, I was always focused on like, well, where's the family, and whatever, you know?

And why would he do this?

Rather than what did he do, why would he do it?

And so it's just been a really great journey for me.

- Since you are a screenwriter, how did you end up deciding to write it as a graphic novel rather than just a screenplay?

- Well, it's interesting because I had just been into Netflix with a project, and we just kept hitting against the fact that we didn't have IP, you know, that there was no intellectual property that it was based on.

And my heart had been broken so many times, you know, by the kind of risk averse world that I said, well, you know what, let's not go in just with the story.

Let's go in with something, you know?

And the books that were out there were good, but none of 'em did what wanted to do.

So I said, well, look, I'm writing the script anyway, (Rob laughs) you know, I know the story.

Why don't we just make a graphic novel of it?

If the graphic novel works, then we know we're in good shape.

And the graphic novel was fantastic.

I thought, okay, well this guy's basically larger than life anyway.

He's essentially a superhero, so why not?

It's a perfect format for him.

And also like for kids that will be hearing this story for the first time, what better way to hear it, you know?

Meet people where they live.

You know, I think for the kid that I most wanna hear this, it's graphic novel.

- It was funded with a very successful kickstarter campaign.

- Yes.

- And something that you had told me that really stood out to me was how many of the contributions were people buying boxes of the comics to have sent to schools and libraries.

- Yes, yeah, people wanted to buy a, you know, boxes of 'em and take 'em to schools.

Because I do think it's important, you know, what better, you know, gift, (Rob laughs) you know, at, you know, Black History Month or whatever to kind of like, you know, go outside, and there's a great box of these fantastic comic books.

Hopefully they'll be fun to read and everything, and inspirational, life changing, I believe.

I would think that if I was a kid, if I was, you know, 10, 15 or whatever, and I read the story, I would say, okay, that is the measure of a great man.

You know?

(Rob laughs) What would it take for me to be like that?

Okay, I should read this story.

And then, wow, what did he do afterwards?

Well, okay, public schools, (Rob laughs) you know, whatever.

The military.

You know, just proving one after the other to people that were skeptical, and the all the more reason why, you know, you need this story to kind of emphasize why we need, you know, history, why we need to learn all this stuff.

- [Narrator] Turning now to a memoir about life in Detroit's once thriving Chinatown district at the intersection of Cass and Peterboro.

Curtis Chin penned the book about his experiences working in the now closed Chung's Restaurant, which was owned by his family and served as a neighborhood anchor for more than 60 years.

One Detroit's Bill Kubota and contributor Chien-An Yuan talked with Chin about chronicling his life as a Chinese restaurant kid.

(bright music) - [Bill] Writer, activist, Curtis Chin's new book, "Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant," it's about growing up in Detroit in the 1980s, weaving his family's history running Chung's Restaurant, a community anchor in the now vanished Chinatown area of Cass and Peterboro.

Chin recently visited Metro Detroit to preview his book in a series of Q&As where we caught up with him.

- I just feel like I was the luckiest kid growing up in a Chinese restaurant.

Yeah, it was really, yeah, it was really a good time.

Growing up in a Chinese restaurant, being surrounded by your family, and your friends, and your cousins, eating as much free food as you want.

People always ask me like, "Well, your title of your book is "Everything I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant."

So what did you learn?"

And the first thing that I always say to them is, growing up, a lot of parents tell their kids "Don't talk to strangers," but my parents actually gave me the exact opposite advice.

And what they were talking about were the strangers in our dining room.

And so every time my dad met somebody who came from a different occupation, whether it was somebody worked on the factory line, where they were a doctor or a newspaper reporter, he would pull us over and say, "Talk to this person.

Ask them who they are.

Ask them how they got where they were."

And because of that, it opened up my eyes to like other possibilities in life beyond just working in a Chinese restaurant.

For decades, we had been feeding Detroit.

Our fans included celebrities like Smokey Robinson and Joni Mitchell, the Earl of Snowden, and Senator Eugene McCarthy.

We were all good at something.

Mgin-Ngin specialized in dumplings and sweets.

Yeh-Yeh excelled at barbecue pork and homemade tofu.

In a cross-cultural twist, my immigrant mom made the best American fare, while my native born dad cooked wonderful dishes from Hong Kong, - [Bill] Chin's book centers the Chinese community's history and struggles within Detroit's history.

He chronicles his family's journey to Detroit, spotlighting an immigrant story so familiar to so many here, and yet these stories remain hidden in the city's history.

Chin hopes to change that.

- One of my goals in writing the book was really to weave in my family's history with Detroit.

I think a lot of times you can look at literature and particularly literature of communities of color, and it comes off as like this sidebar to a main story of America.

And I really wanted to tie in my family's experience, the Asian American experience with the city itself so that you can see that they're intertwined, that you can't have one without the other.

And that was really important for me.

- Happy Thanksgiving!

- In Chinatown, though we followed our own headlines.

It was all about our Vincent.

Our workers were beside themselves as they felt such guilt for not being there to defend their friend.

A stream of ahoos and members of the online Chinese Merchant Association dropped by with updates from the hospital.

Emotions ping-ponged by the hour from hope to dread, and then back to hope.

It was scary and comforting to see so many faces I hadn't seen in years.

This time, the elders didn't even bring up my grades or report cards.

As a shock, Chinatown coped with the untimely loss of one of our own.

My mind kept returning to Vincent's mom, Lily.

Her face always had a natural smile, and I'd seen her slurping my mom's pork bone soup at the kitchen table in our home.

But when I saw her on television, her eyes and read only despair.

It was rare to see any Asians on TV, much less in public exposing their hurt.

But Lily epitomized the most universal figure in history, the grieving mother.

How could anyone hear her anguish and not think of their own mom?

I know I thought of mine.

My book talks a lot about Detroit history, and amazingly, a lot of students just don't know about the Vincent Chin case, but they also don't know about things like the Detroit riots, or the rebellion, or even Hudson's department store.

There's this rich history of this city that just is not being covered.

And that's why I want to talk about these things, and I wanna bring up these consciousness to these people so that they know the history of the city that they're from.

And I tried to do that with my book.

I weave in a lot of Detroit history.

The 1980s in Detroit were tumultuous times.

Trying to understand, accept, and establish my own identity by race, class, and sexuality was difficult, especially when these intersections contradicted and collided.

The important lessons that guided me through my childhood came served like a big Chinese banquet from the highs of cooking with my mom and dad to the lows of waiting on some of the rudest customers, a chorus of sweet and sour, salty and savory, sugary and spicy flavors that counseled me toward a well led and well fed life.

I grew up in Detroit in the 80s.

It was a really tough time period.

It was not just crack, AIDS.

I knew five people that had been murdered by the time I was 18 years old.

But at the same time, I loved my childhood.

I thought it was a great time growing up in Detroit, and I was very fortunate.

I had this wonderful restaurant on the corner of Cass and Peterboro that really provided a nurturing space and taught me a lot of values.

I wanna commemorate that.

And so in my memoir, yes, I do talk about the difficulties of growing up in Detroit in the 80s, but at the same time, I want readers to walk away and say like, yes, but good things did come out of that too.

- [Narrator] Over the next year, Detroit PBS is celebrating America's 250th birthday by sharing stories from our Destination Detroit series.

We've collected interviews and family accounts from the people who moved to the Detroit region and helped shape its rich history.

Today we hear from Annette Bass, a West Bloomfield resident, about how her family built the nation's first black owned and operated FCC licensed radio station from the ground up.

- Grandma Bell said they put three cities in a hat.

(bubbly music) Since my husband passed, and a lot of his family members have passed, there's only one surviving grandchild and then great-grandchildren.

They know so little history about my husband's family, so I spend my time archiving.

Grandpa Bell came to Detroit in 1923.

He's from Brunswick, Georgia.

He was born in 1895 in October.

And Mary Bell, his wife, she was born in Lebanon, Tennessee, which is outside of Nashville, in 1900.

They married in 1921.

So they, Grandma Bell said they put three cities in a hat, and one was Texas.

And I believe probably because her sister, Minnie Sparks, lived in Texas.

I think the third one was West Virginia, and Detroit was second.

So they put their hand and they drew Detroit twice.

So they decided to come to Detroit.

In 1955, he decided to go into the radio business, and they knew nothing about radio.

And whenever Grandma Bell tells a story, she would always say that "Fools rush in were angels fear to tread."

And that's also, she would say when she mentioned about coming to Detroit, "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

In 1956, they went on the air.

November of 1956, they went on the air for the first time, WCHB, and they were the first African American family to build a radio station from the ground up through an FCC license.

(bubbly music) - [Narrator] For more Destination Detroit stories, go to OneDetroitPBS.org/DestinationDe.

That'll do it for this week's One Detroit.

Thanks for watching.

Head to the One Detroit website for all the stories we're working on.

Follow us on social media and sign up for our weekly newsletter.

(bright music) - [Announcer] 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 PBS.

- [Announcer 2] The DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit PBS.

Through our giving, we are committed to meeting the needs of the communities we serve statewide to help ensure a bright and thriving future for all.

Learn more at DTEFoundation.com.

- [Announcer] Nissan Foundation and viewers like you.

(bright music)