(sirens blaring) - Coming up on One Detroit, a PBS documentary Chronicles the civil uprisings of 1967 and the Presidential Commission investigating what happened, why, and the possible solutions.

Plus, our One Detroit political contributors give their take on President Biden's historic decision to not seek reelection.

Also ahead, (tranquil ambient music) the artist known as BLKBOK talks about his neoclassical sound and Detroit upbringing.

And we'll tell you what's happening around town this last weekend in July.

It's all coming up next on One Detroit.

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(upbeat ambient music) - [Zesette] Just ahead on One Detroit, our political contributors weigh in on President Biden's decision to end his bid for a second term and how it's impacting the Democratic party.

(tranquil ambient music) Plus, neoclassical piano Prodigy BLKBOK talks about his unique style of music and growing up in Detroit's rich music environment.

And Dave Wagner from 90.9 WRCJ shares some ideas on how you can spend this weekend and beyond in metro Detroit.

But first up, (sirens blaring) a look back at the summer of 1967 when Detroit and several other major cities erupted in uprisings by black residents protesting police brutality, racial injustice, and social and economic disparities.

The story of that violent summer and the Presidential Commission appointed to come up with the root causes and solutions is told in a documentary titled "The Riot Report" airing on Detroit PBS on Friday, July 26th at 8:00 PM.

One Detroit contributor and American Black Journal host, Stephen Henderson, sat down with the film's co-producer and writer, Jelani Cobb, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School.

(tranquil ambient music) - It has been 57 years since that summer of '67, which of course we know really well here in the city of Detroit, but it wasn't just Detroit.

There were a number of cities around the country that experienced the same kind of unrest that we did here.

Let's start with why we look back at this now and what we hope to learn from looking back that far into the past to try to understand, I guess, where we are today.

- You know, I think that that's really it.

When you say trying to understand where we are today.

The fact of it is that when we look at the underlying conditions that we're associated with the onset of these disturbances, and you know, that's very different than everything that preceded it.

Sometimes, we paid attention to the explosion.

- Mm-hmm.

- But tended to overlook all the things that preceded it.

So when we look at those things holistically in context, you know, we very often see similar circumstances, we see reasons to think about the same sorts of questions.

And we have not yet arrived at a place where the kind of investigation and thoughtfulness and all the kind of inquiry that followed 1967, we've not yet reached a place where those things are no longer relevant.

- Yeah, yeah.

The conditions that lead to it, let's start kind of there unpacking.

Here in Detroit, the uprising as we call it now.

- Mm-hmm.

- It really is inspired directly by police brutality, by a disrespect, a universal disrespect for African American citizens by the police.

It also gets framed though, of course, as the result of economic conditions and the sort of overall misery that African Americans are experiencing nationwide.

But talk about how that, again, is not just about Detroit, but about where we were.

I mean, this is two years after the passing of the Voting Rights Act, this is three years after the passing of the Civil Rights Act.

And in some ways it should have been a more hopeful time for African Americans than at many times in American history, but it wasn't.

- No, because just to go back to what you mentioned, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Watts exploded five days later.

You know, the tremendous uprisings we saw, it was largest in the country up to that point.

Just five days after the Voting Rights Act was signed.

What you saw in the 1960s was an attempt to implement programs that could generate hope at a rate that would outpace circumstances that were generating despair.

- Hmm.

- And so it is almost like you have something that catches on fire in the kitchen and you try to put it out, you try to beat out the flames and all those things before it can spread everywhere else.

And the Civil Rights acts and the reforms that you saw were an attempt to respond to something that had already reached nearly critical mass.

- Yeah.

- One of the important things about putting Detroit in context in 1967 is, you know, first on the level of the policing, you know, in Detroit, in Newark, in Watts, in Harlem, we could just kind of walk through all of those major uprisings.

They all come out of instances of police use of force, excessive use of force.

And it would be tempting to think of these as police problems.

But the fact of it is that, the inquiry and the Kerner report and the various other kind of municipal level investigations found was that the police were just the spark.

You know, the economic conditions, the disparities in health, disparities in education, the disparities in employment, the disparities in overall life possibilities, that was what was driving, the reason that the police tended to spark this was that if you have an uncaring at best, hostile at worst government, what part of that government has physical contact with you?

- Right, right.

- Well, the police do.

- Mm-hmm.

- Terrible housing is depressing, it's impacting your health and all these other kind of things.

But the people who are designating housing in these ways, you know, you don't see them and they certainly don't touch you.

This poor education, the useless system, there doesn't have generally physical contact with you.

- So it's 2024, lots of things have changed since 1967, some things haven't.

What would you want people to take away from watching this documentary now about what do we do?

How do we move forward in a way that makes sense?

- Yeah.

Not very long ago we were asking in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, we were asking the same questions that we had been asking across the country in 1967, 1968.

And it's not like these were bookends.

It's not like George Floyd's death was the first time this came up.

This could have been brought up in 1980 in Miami, where there were the uprisings that came as a result of Arthur McDuffy being killed, the motorcyclist who was beaten to death by Miami PD.

We could have had this conversation certainly in Los Angeles in 1992 when we saw the Rodney King video.

We could have had this conversation in Ferguson, and I'm skipping over very many instances.

- A lot of instances, yeah.

- All these places, lots of other episodes.

And so what we were trying to do was highlight that there had been a moment where we thought seriously about solutions and that we don't have to reinvent the wheel to say, "How do we address these things?"

They were really great, viable and important suggestions that came out of the efforts of this commission.

And the commission report was kind of orphaned at birth that the moment it was released, Lyndon B. Johnson recognized that it was politically radioactive.

- Yeah.

- That Republicans in Congress would have no part of it, that Democrats would feel squeamish about it.

And that he could feel, I mean, one thing about Johnson was that he did have an uncanny sense for the political temperature.

He could feel that it was getting colder, you know, and that all the events that culminated in the election of Nixon, or could you say it was getting hotter depending on how you think of those things, that all the things that that culminated in the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 were on the table already by the time that report came out.

That's when suburbs begin.

- [Zosette] And you can see Stephen Henderson's full conversation with Jelani Cobb on onedetroitpbs.org.

- Creation of suburbia.

- Turning now to President Joe Biden's historic decision to no longer seek reelection.

The president has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.

One Detroit contributors, Nolan Finley of the Detroit News, and Stephen Henderson of American Black Journal offer their opinions on what lies ahead for the presidential race.

(tranquil ambient music) - Steven Henderson, we certainly are living through an extraordinarily political stretch.

I've never seen anything like it, I imagine you haven't either.

Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race, and sort of handed things over to his vice president.

I think once the democratic leadership last week started openly pushing Joe Biden out the door, that there was no way he could survive.

I don't believe this was his decision though.

Do you?

- Oh, I think it was his decision.

I think he has over time come to the idea that this is just too much.

And it probably started even before the disastrous debate performance.

This idea that you could run for an office that for the next four years would require you to be at the top of your game every day.

You know, it just wasn't realistic.

And like I have been saying since last fall, I never thought this was much of a serious bid by the president anyway.

I think he knew that this was not possible.

I think the question now is, if this was always the plan, why didn't he do it last fall?

If he had given Kamala Harris, you know, the last eight or 10 months to be able to build more of a coalition and the support for her, this election might even be over.

- Or other candidates, Steve, I mean, had he got out in December or January even before the primaries got undergoing in earnest, I think you could have expected a number of Democratic candidates in the race.

- Absolutely.

- And to go through that sort of test by fire that the primaries are designed to provide.

And you might have had a stronger democratic candidate or a candidate in a stronger position at this point, and to sort of just drop Harris on the American public three weeks before the Democratic convention and try to switch from, you know, the months and months of propping up Joe Biden and defending him against all the folks who were saying, "Hey, something's not quite right here."

Now they've gotta drop that, and you say, "Yes, we're all a gung ho about Harris."

I think had they had a competitive primary process, you know, you'd see a real difference in where the race stands now.

As it is, I mean, Harrison, this early polling is about where Biden was, sort of deadlock with Donald Trump.

- Well, the Reuters IPSIS poll has her up four.

There was another poll I saw earlier this week that's 44, 42.

I mean, the significance here is not the number, it's the positioning.

So Donald Trump may go down in history as the first presidential candidate to actually drop numbers after the week of his or her convention.

That's a huge momentum builder for the parties every time that you get this push from getting everybody together, having the presidential and vice presidential nominees on stage making their case to the American people, and you come out with the wind at your back.

Instead, what they face now is a candidate who is much more able to articulate what she wants to do.

She's much more popular than they imagine that she might have been.

And their key argument, which was that Joe Biden was too old to be the president, now is the argument that will be used against their candidate, Donald Trump is in his late 70s, not the sharpest guy in the world, rambling on speeches and losing his place.

That argument now turns right back on him.

- In fairness, Steve, I mean, the Republicans did have a good convention, they accomplished the things they set out to accomplish and they had momentum coming out, which was stopped sort of in its track by this unexpected announcement.

And of course all the attention then, all the coverage turned to Harris.

- I don't think that was an accident, by the way.

- No, I think it was very much intentional.

I'm surprised it didn't happen Thursday night during Trump's speech, but, you know.

So there was this sort of threw up a stopper.

I think it's gonna take a week or two to sort out.

I've always been surprised by the polls in this election, even when after the debate, the gap between Trump and Biden never grew that much.

I mean, so we're going to see over the next week or two how many of these voters are persuadable.

- Yeah.

- And that how Biden is gone, do they necess, I mean, Harris, comes with their own baggage.

You know, not being Biden it puts her in a good position right now, but that may not last long.

- So, but if you look at the things that you have as a candidate in front of you, the tools that you have to build support, one is the convention, that's still in front of her.

- Mm-hmm.

- She'll have four days on national television to introduce herself in a different way, to build support.

And then the vice presidential pick, that's the other big tool that you have.

Trump squandered his by picking JD Vance, who is a more bizarre candidate than I even imagined he might be.

He doesn't have a great track record to begin with.

If you look at the people that they're thinking about on the democratic side, they have a much better position possibility to give the campaign even more momentum.

If you pick a Mark Kelly, if you pick a Rory Cooper, again, that's gonna send independence, and again, it's independent women who will decide this election, it will send them into the democratic camp.

Donald Trump has really maxed out with his support.

His numbers have not moved significantly in more than six months.

The idea that, the question becomes what is the thing that he can still do that brings people to his side?

It's not gonna be, look at Kamala Harris, we don't like her.

He's going to have to sell the American public on himself in some way that he hasn't.

It's only gonna get more interesting.

- Yep.

- We got three weeks or so to the Democratic Convention.

We'll see what happens.

- We will.

(tranquil ambient music) - The musician known as BLKBOK is a piano prodigy from Detroit who is capturing the nation's attention with his unique blend of classical and contemporary sounds.

American Black Journal guest host, Trudy Gallant-Stokes spoke with a talented musician whose real name is Charles Wilson III about the meaning behind his professional name and his upbringing in Detroit.

(tranquil ambient music) - You were a child prodigy at eight years old.

Tell me about that when you really felt this need to pursue the music career.

And I understand your parents were a major influence.

- Yeah, my parents were such an influence on me.

I started at around age four, and just had a knack for the instrument.

I come from a family of musicians and entertainers, so I guess a lot of that played into it.

But I just kept practicing.

I had a great instructor that lived in Lathrup Village and I would go every Saturday and take lessons with him, Mr. Toma Schwartz.

And it just became something that I just fell in love with, I'd say around maybe age 12 or so.

And then it just became, this is what I wanna do for a living.

So I've been doing it ever since.

- So what were the kind of unique ways that I heard about that your parents used to encourage you when you were practicing and kind of feeling your way through?

- A lot of love, but also some intimidation.

One of the rules.

- That's not the part I read about.

(both laughing) - A little bit of intimidation.

You know, one of the rules was, "If you don't practice, you don't eat in my house."

So I ate a lot when I was a kid, so that means I practiced a lot.

- So tell me about your first piano.

What was it and how did you get it?

- Oh wow.

The first piano, I don't know how my parents found it, but I think they paid about a 100 bucks for it.

And it was a Grinnell Brothers, which is a company from Detroit.

- Absolutely.

- And it was huge, it was a tank, it was massive.

But my dad kind of stripped it apart, some of the pieces apart and painted it black and put it in the music room in our house, and that's how my sister and I learned off of that huge Grinnell Brothers piano.

- Then you moved on and obviously growing up influenced by hip hop.

So tell me about that balance, that combination between the hip hop and the classical.

- Well, it was really, it was really quite interesting because my friends would be, my friends, I would hang out with them all the time, so we would be listening to all kind of different music.

But then there were certain points, like I said, I would have to practice, so I would have to leave and depart from that energy and go and play Bach or Beethoven.

And for me, my listening was very, it was a little bit of everything, all genres.

One of the things my mother used to always say, she said she would never worry about me listening to hip hop because I would listen to Ice Cube and then I would listen to Tina Turner and then I would listen to Tchaikovsky.

So she never worried about what I was digesting because I was digesting all of it.

- The whole genre.

And like you said, your name is pronounced Bach, even though you spell it B-O-K. - That's right.

- But tell me how that is an homage.

- Well, it's a little bit of an homage to Yohan Sebastian, who for me was one of the first major, he shaped how we do classical music and he was very much a renegade.

But my name comes from B-L-K being black, which is all colors combined, which is inclusive.

And then BLK is from my father's wisdom, which is, everything will be okay, but you gotta be okay with everything.

- So who were your Detroit influences?

- Oh, well, I came up in the Detroit jazz scene.

So a lot of my instructors and teachers were the masters of the time, which, Teddy Harris and Marcus Belgrave and Charles Bowles and all the guys that were the amazing jazz masters in Detroit were my instructors and very much like other fathers or other uncles to me.

So I definitely came up in a great community.

There's no better place to play music than Detroit.

(tranquil ambient music) - [Zosette] The last weekend of July is here and there are plenty of outdoor events taking place throughout Metro Detroit.

So whether you're in the mood for art, music, food, or even kayaking, you can find it as we close out the month.

Here's Dave Wagner of 90.9 WRCJ with today's One Detroit Weekend.

- Hi, I am Dave Wagner with 90.9 WRCJ here with some events happening across metro Detroit.

As we round out the month of July.

Through July 27th is Sterling Fest in Sterling Heights where you can enjoy carnival rides, live music and art fair, food, kids activities, and more.

And Friday, July 26th, you can kayak with Outdoor Adventure Center educators around Bell Isle.

Go to Flynn Pavilion in Bell Isle Park where you'll get the equipment you need, receive some instruction, and then head on on the waterways, enjoying the beautiful scenery around Bell Isle.

It's just $27 per person.

Also, Friday and Saturday is the Summer Beer Festival at Riverside Park in Ypsilanti's historic depot town.

Tickets start at $60 the day of the event at the door, and includes 15 sampling tokens for people 21 and over.

Then Saturday and Sunday is the Arab and Chaldean Festival in Hart Plaza.

This two day celebration includes live music performances, dry goods, vendors, folklore dancers, a fashion show, and admission is completely free.

Also, Saturday, July 27th and Sunday the 28th is the Orchard Lake Fine Art Show highlighting a multitude of artists in West Bloomfield.

And don't forget, (tranquil ambient music) there's always so much more to do around metro Detroit.

So stick around for a few more events and have a great weekend.

- [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 - From Delta Faucets (tranquil ambient music) to Bear 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 PBS.

(tranquil ambient music) - DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit PBS.

Among the state's largest foundations committed to Michigan focused giving, we support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Learn more at dtefoundation.com.

- [Narrator] Nissan Foundation, and viewers like you.

(tranquil ambient music)