- [Zosette] Coming up on "One Detroit."

We'll share the history behind one of the state's newest Pride festivals in Livingston County.

Also ahead, a street sign honoring Vincent Chin is unveiled in Detroit 43 years after his death.

Plus, we'll get details on an event this weekend that honors two prominent members of Detroit's arts community.

And we'll share some other arts and culture activities happening in metro Detroit over the weekend.

It's all coming up next on "One Detroit."

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(upbeat music) - [Zosette] Just ahead on "One Detroit."

Community leaders gather in Detroit's Chinatown neighborhood to honor the life and legacy of Vincent Chin.

Plus, the GhostLight Arts Initiative is holding its inaugural gala, celebrating the nonprofit's mission-driven work in the performing arts.

And we'll tell you about some of the activities taking place around town this last weekend in June.

But first up June is LGBTQ+ Pride Month.

Earlier this month we looked into Michigan's first Pride celebration in Detroit in 1972.

Now we turn to one of the newest Pride festivals in the state.

It took place in Howell and is now in its fifth year.

"One Detroit"'s Chris Jordan was there and talked with the organizers and attendees.

(crowd cheering and applauding) (upbeat music) - It is amazing just to see all of the Pride in Howell and everyone coming together, especially, you know, during these trying times.

It's really, really wonderful to see in 2025.

- Coming here, you get to meet more people like you, and know that you're not alone.

It's so important for minorities, people who are marginalized to know that they have a community, that they have people that care, that we have allies that are standing up for us.

- Every year, more and more people get involved and wanna show their support.

- I feel very seen.

♪ Pink pony club ♪ - [Chris] Pride has become an annual tradition in many Michigan cities.

Detroit's first Pride March took place in 1972, and Ferndale has been home to Pride Festivals since 2003.

But new Pride festivals continue to pop up all over the state.

One of those newer Prides is in Howell, in Livingston County.

- We started this five years ago as just kind of an idea, and we said, why not Howell and why not we downtown Howell?

And I think a lot of people were very surprised for the first one.

- [Chris] Howell Pride is organized by Pride Alliance of Livingston, which is part of the Livingston Diversity Council, a grassroots nonprofit organization formed nearly 40 years ago to address acts of hate in the county.

- The Livingston Diversity Council began in 1987 as a grassroots group of folks, in response to the existence of the KKK in Livingston County.

There would oftentimes be cross burnings that occurred in the community, and the leaders in the community got together and wanted to ensure that that did not become our legacy, that didn't represent who we were in Livingston County, specifically in Howell.

In 2018, we invited the community to come together to have some conversations around how we support the LGBTQ community.

And it was really determined at that point that there wasn't a lot of support.

And so we formed what was supposed to be kind of a committee, so to speak.

And what has ended up being really its own organization under the umbrella of the Diversity Council and Pride Alliance of Livingston.

(attendees cheering) - Being a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I just thought it'd be great to build awareness in this area.

The more we bring the awareness, the more we do these events, the more the city is accepting it.

And that to me is what's really cool.

- [Chris] When moving back to Michigan after some time out of state, Pride Alliance of Livingston co-chair, Marilyn Waxberg, chose to settle in Livingston County, in part because she discovered the website of the Diversity Council and Pride Alliance.

- When I go to a community, I wanna be able to do something to impact that community, to do something positive.

- In Howell, you don't always expect things like this, so when you get them, they're a gift.

And I've found living in Howell, that when I came out and started walking around, I had more support, and I didn't have any detractors, which a lot of people might not expect for this community, but it's a beautiful community.

- Hi.

Hi.

- [Attendee] Come here, man.

Come here, Yippy.

- I grew up half of my life in Ypsi and then the other half around Chicago.

And then I recently came back and we've been here maybe about two or three years into the Howell area.

So I'm learning about the history of Howell, which is a little bit different than what I was expecting.

But I think that especially seeing stuff like this in Howell of all places has been a really, really great opportunity.

- I've been visiting some of the smaller Prides in Michigan as I can.

- [Chris] Michigan State University historian and professor, Tim Retzlof, is one of the foremost authorities on LGBTQ+ history in Michigan.

- It's just really inspiring to see smaller communities coming out, kind of from the grassroots, kind of showing support and community and love.

And the diversity that you see at the smaller Prides, you know, it's genuinely heartfelt.

(crowd cheering) - [Narrator 4] Howell Pride has support among city officials.

Mayor Bob Ellis has been a champion for the event since the beginning.

- I've been a member of the Diversity Council for years.

And one year I gave a big speech at the event, but every year I've marched in it and been here to support everybody.

- So this is the first time I've got to be part of this event.

I've got friends who are part of the Pride community.

I've got cousins, friends.

And just want to be here to show my support for them and also for everyone else in the community.

We do have a history here that we're working to overcome.

We want everyone to understand that Howell is a great place to be, it's a great place to live, it's a great place to visit.

We're doing our best to support everyone.

- [Chris] This is also the first year that the Howell Police Department have been official participants in the event.

- Okay, that's awesome.

- Up until this year, we have not had a presence of law enforcement at Pride.

And that's been an ongoing discussion with our committee.

Not all marginalized communities feel comfortable with law enforcement presence.

And so for us it was, it needed to be a very intentional decision.

And this year, as safety gets heightened, you know, with everything that's going on in the country, we wanted to reach out specifically to law enforcement this year and engage them in our security measures.

We felt that if there's a way to bridge the gap, to address fears, misconceptions, real fears or misconceptions, that really bringing the law enforcement, City of Howell Police into the fold, like, that's gonna be our opportunity to maybe make those connections for folks.

- I'm happy that we've been welcomed to this event to be a part of it.

Us being a part of the community is important.

Not just us being here for law enforcement and so that they know that we're here to be their protect and serve, if you will.

- Yeah.

- It just takes time to get that trust and relationship with everybody.

- [Chris] Howell Pride was also about connecting LGBTQ+ people in Livingston County and beyond, with important resources that they may need but may not know how to find.

Among the organizations who had booths at Howell Pride to do community outreach, Stand with Trans.

- We educate, empower, and celebrate trans youth and help educate their families and learn acceptance and things like that.

We do that through a variety of ways, like our community support groups, our ally parents, and through like our volunteers, we also just launched our first ever mental health services in-house.

So I'm actually one of the therapists and we see folks ages nine and up.

And you don't have to be queer, LGBTQ.

You just have to need a therapist.

Representation is always important, especially in smaller rural communities, given the statistics of, you know, youth suicides and self-harm and mental health, depression and anxiety.

We're here to provide hope and sustain that hope.

- Especially as a trans non-binary person myself, I think that seeing that I'm not alone even in places like this, and especially after learning the history and how scary that can be as someone who's living here, I think that seeing all these people here, seeing the range of ages as well, seeing older people that live here, younger people that live here, who are all coming together and making sure that I feel safe and I'm able to make sure and help that they feel safe as well.

- I love how communities, even in marginalized communities, even in small communities where there might not be many people, I love how they can come together and do kind of events like this.

It's always great to have a community to be able to be a part of.

♪ It's forever long time club ♪ ♪ Pink pony club ♪ - [Zosette] It was 43 years ago this month that Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, was beaten to death in Highland Park.

The case marked the beginning of the modern Asian American civil rights movement.

This week, a secondary street sign bearing Chin's name was unveiled at Cass and Peterborough in Detroit's Chinatown district.

"One Detroit"'s Bill Kubota and I were there for the ceremony.

(gentle music) The kiosk that marks what was once Detroit's Chinatown's still stands.

And this week another marker to be unveiled.

- I think about the message today and why the street naming is so important.

We need to keep telling and retelling the story of Vincent Chin.

(crowd cheering) - [Zosette] Local Asian American groups pushed for the street naming, getting help from Detroit City Council person, Gabriela Santiago-Romero.

- While a small token of recognition, it's my hope that the secondary street sign helps us do just that.

May his name and every time we read it and hear it, serve as a reminder of what we have to overcome together and what we have overcome.

- We're here for remembrance of this Vincent Chen.

An individual who was very much like many of us growing up in Detroit.

He was a typical 27-year-old Chinese American, a draftsman, a waiter in a Chinese restaurant, working his way through school.

- [Zosette] In 1982, anti-Asian hostilities had risen in Detroit as Japanese imports displaced US-made vehicles.

That's when Vincent Chin was killed with a baseball bat.

Judge Charles Kaufman handed down a sentence requiring no prison time for the two men involved.

Nationwide, Asian Americans were alarmed, and so were others like Mayor Mike Duggan, who was in law school at the time.

- And it hit me particularly because one of Judge Kaufman's colleagues on the Wayne County Circuit Court was my father, who was also a judge.

I called him that night so angry.

And of course my father felt he discredited everybody on the bench.

But he said to me, "Don't discount the role of the prosecutor.

The prosecutor fled the case down, and it didn't bother to show up the day of the sentencing."

- Justice for Vincent Chin.

- [Zosette] the Vincent Chin case United Asian Americans in a fight for justice.

- The protest spread from the Asian American community to everybody.

And Bill Kehela resigned the next year under that protest.

And a new prosecutor, John O'Hare, got elected in 1984.

And one of John O'Hare first hire was a young graduate at University of Michigan Law School, was me.

(crowd laughing) - [Zosette] The Chinese population left this neighborhood decades ago, but Sandy Fatt still remembers.

- All sets of my grandparents came over from Canton, China when a missionary from Central Methodist Church came to Canton and welcomed the Chinese people to come to Detroit.

- [Narrator] Sandy Fatt said this photo was taken in 1942.

- This is my mom's mom and this is my dad's mom.

We have identified 17 of the 22 women and we're trying to identify the last five.

So these women were all, you know, fixed up marriages, and they came and followed their husbands here from Canton, China.

- [Zosette] Two years ago, one of the last historic Chinatown structures that had served as a community center was demolished.

That made headlines.

Long vacant, some wished it could have been preserved.

Last year, better news, a million dollar Chinatown theme street scape improvement project was announced, expected to start soon.

- They're gonna start building it out to really improve the public look and feel of this space.

And then leveraging this cultural heritage of the neighborhood.

And have it be, you know, sort of a foundation for what can come next, in a broader sense.

And really that's the open question.

It's like, what do we want to see next?

- [Zosette] There's room for more housing and businesses here, while the Detroit Chinatown Vision Committee wants to see some Pan-Asian restaurants in the future.

The former Chung's restaurant closed for several decades, now renovated, looking for tenants according to our reporting partner "Bridge Detroit."

- I just felt that it was- - [Zosette] Matt Hessler, he preserved the Chinatown signpost, commissioning the banners on display after he bought one other surviving Chinatown building 10 years ago from the Chinese Merchants Association.

- We ended up going to the closing with two old Chinese people who sort of said, "What are you gonna do with this place?"

And I said, "I'm gonna fill it full of businesses."

You know?

- [Narrator] One of those businesses, The Peterborough, a Chinese restaurant, in business nine years.

- We know it's not gonna be the epicenter of a Chinatown, but we wanna preserve the history of what was historically Chinatown in Detroit.

And there's no reason why it can't be something like Greektown which celebrates Greeks, or Cork Town, which is Irish.

Like, we gotta we gotta build this area up.

- [Zosette] Let's turn now to an event happening this weekend that celebrates the arts.

The GhostLight Arts Initiative is holding its first gala on Sunday, June 29th at Detroit's Garden Theater.

The nonprofit organization promotes creative, performing and media arts as a means for social progress.

Its flagship event is the annual Obsidian Theater Festival, "American Black Journal" host and "One Detroit" contributor, Stephen Henderson, spoke with the organization's executive director, John Sloan III; and the gala's two honorees, Detroit cultural arts producer Njia Kai, and history-making tenor, Dr. George Shirley.

(upbeat music) - So I'm not sure most people know about this effort of yours, John.

Tell us how you got started with it.

- Well, I mean, this really for me is the culmination of a lifelong struggle, right?

My love and passion for the arts and this burning desire that was implanted into me to make the world better when I leave it than when I found it.

And I've always believed the arts can be that, right?

We can use music, theater, dance, opera to show us who we have been, who we are, and who we can become.

And so the GhostLight Arts Initiative is my way of trying to make that impact.

I moved back home from New York on tour about seven years ago and launched this effort about five years ago now with the festival, the Obsidian Theater Festival, as the kind of jewel of our programming.

- Yeah, GhostLight, tell me where that name comes from.

- So a ghost light stands on a stage, right?

Whenever you walk into any theater, there are no windows because you wanna be able to control the light at all times.

And so the ghost light sits right at the edge of the stage.

And it's there when the theater is dark.

It's meant to shine a light, to provide a path, keep people from walking over the edge.

(Stephen laughing) And artists can be a little superstitious.

And so the lore is that the ghost light also keeps away all of the negative energy.

So you're walking into a space that is ready to create.

- So these two honorees this year, tell me what it is about them that you think aligns with GhostLight.

- They're the best of who you wanna be.

As directors, as artists, but more importantly as people.

And what is, what was really important to us is to not just do a gala event, to celebrate who we are, but to do an event to celebrate where we want the city to go and how we want that to move.

And you can't do that without honoring individuals that have contributed so foundationally to where we are.

- Yeah.

- I know distinctly that both of these individuals have made me a better artist, but have more importantly made me a better person.

And there is a joy, I think, in being able to honor both of those things together.

- Yeah.

Wow.

Njia that... (panel laughing) Are you gonna get a better testimony than that anytime soon?

- He's hired.

(panel laughing) - I'm leaving.

(panel laughing) - Njia, talk about your work and how it, you know, aligns with what John is trying to do and talking about, but also about the journey, right?

The struggle of an artist over a long period of time.

An African-American artist, an artist who's a woman in a city like Detroit.

This is a singular story, I feel like, in America.

- Wow, I'm humbled of course, by the selection and by the reasoning that has been shared here.

I've basically been doing what Njia wanted to do.

I've basically been doing what I like to do.

And I'm so grateful that what I like to do is actually a contribution and has provided service, example, opportunity for a lot of artists here locally as well as from other spaces.

I do believe that arts are critical to development, to human development.

And so not having that is not an option.

And I don't see where human beings allow that to happen.

And, you know, even just looking at hip-hop and techno and how these young people said, oh, okay, there's no arts in the schools.

We're not getting opportunity to put our hands on musical instruments.

The opportunities have been taken from us, so we're just gonna figure out how to scratch and bang and make it happen.

- [Stephen] We're gonna make noise on our own.

- We're gonna make it happen.

Because there's something in all of us that wants a avenue of expression.

And for a lot of us who consider ourselves artists or who grow up to find out that we are artists, it's compelling.

You gotta do it.

- Dr. Shirley, you are also, I mean, just an icon.

I mean, the both of you really stand out on the local landscape in terms of arts, and in your case, also arts education.

Talk about GhostLight and receiving this honor.

- One of the great things about, one of the blessings being a teacher that you never know who's gonna walk through your door as a student.

And a few years back, this young man came in (Stephen laughing) who was a student at Michigan in the music theater, musical theater curriculum, and opened his mouth and out came this roaring lion bass voice.

I thought, "Okay.

Okay."

- That's pretty good.

Right?

- Okay.

Well, and to see him go from Michigan and do the part of the lion (laughs) on Broadway.

And to have this wonderful career and then form GhostLight.

Going beyond just being on stage but giving back to the community, to young artists what he was gifted with, what he was born to do.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

Yeah.

- That for me is just as exciting.

Maybe even more so.

- [Stephen] Yeah, I was gonna ask you- - And standing on stage doing something myself.

- Yeah, I mean, because you do both, you know, I always wonder, which is more fulfilling.

But it seems clear to you.

- I started teaching music, choral music in the Detroit public schools 1955 when I graduated from Wayne.

Started teaching at Miller High School.

And I've often said I had my job.

I mean, I didn't ask for it.

And my supervisor, a little feisty Irish woman named Marvel O'Hara went to the Board of Education when she found out there was an opening at Miller High School for an emergency substitute.

I hadn't graduated yet.

I didn't ask her to do this.

I didn't know, but she went to the Board of Education and they gave me the job.

I hadn't, well, where did that come from?

And so I had my job.

My future wife and I are planning on getting married in August of 1956.

- [Stephen] Wow.

- And Uncle Sam sent me a letter in May of 1956 saying, "You're going to be married to me in June."

- [Stephen] (laughs) Right.

- Now Korea ended, the draft is still alive.

And I said, "What is this about?"

The Army's the last place I wanna go, but I had to go.

I believe in a higher intelligence, has created everything.

Life works in mysterious ways.

For me to go into the Army was a curse, (Stephen laughing) but it turned out to be a blessing.

- Yeah.

But eventually brought you back.

- Because it was a place that I was convinced to consider becoming a professional singer.

- [Zosette] There are several other events taking place over the weekend in Metro Detroit as we get ready to say goodbye to June.

From festivals and fireworks to theater productions and concerts, there's quite a selection.

Here's Haley Taylor from 90.9 WRCJ with today's "One Detroit Weekend."

- Hi there.

I'm Haley Taylor from 90.9 WRCJ with a roundup of events to help you end June with a smile.

Through June 29th, "The Wiz" is lighting up the Fisher Theater.

It's a re-imagining of the "Wizard of Oz" with soulful music, stunning costumes and powerful performances.

And now through June 29th, the Livonia Spree continues at Ford Field with rides, live music, fireworks, and tons of local food.

It's a great way to celebrate Summer with family and friends.

Over in Howell, the Michigan Challenge Balloonfest floats into town, June 27th through 29th.

The festival features balloon launches, a balloon glow night, and plenty of live entertainment performing securely on the ground.

The Trenton Summer Festival also runs June 27th to 29th, bringing vintage market vendors, crafters, food trucks, and live music to the heart of downtown Trenton.

And if you want to celebrate the 4th of July, a little bit early Independence Fest in Clarkston kicks off June 28th, filled with a classic car show, kid zone, concerts and fireworks at Clinton Wood Park.

And there's of course so many other things for us to do.

So stick around to see a few more suggestions.

Have a great weekend.

(upbeat music) - [Zosette] 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.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer 1] 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.

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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.

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