The Negro Leagues are widely credited with revolutionizing baseball.
The aggressive, scrappy, base-stealing style of play was an attraction for fans of all backgrounds. The league’s founder, Rube Foster, was largely responsible for introducing that mentality and bringing the league to its early success. After Foster passed in 1930, the league continued to innovate for nearly two decades. During that time, the league pioneered night games, fielded some of sports greatest players and broke the color barrier.
Bob Kendrick, the President of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, joined the show and details the Negro league’s lasting legacy in baseball, in sports and in American culture.
Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on demand.
WDET strives to cover what’s happening in your community. As a public media institution, we maintain our ability to explore the music and culture of our region through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.
Malcolm X was a leader during the Civil Rights Movement known for his more radical approach to advancing Black Americans rights. But he was also a young man that grew up in Michigan, known as Detroit Red.
Though most only recognize “Malcolm X,” he went by several names throughout his life. His birth name is Malcolm Little, which progressed to Malcolm X. He ended his life as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.
Who was Detroit Red and how did his name change reflect his personal transformation?
Dr. Tareq A. Ramadan teaches anthropology and near eastern studies at Wayne State University.
Dr. Tareq A. Ramadan is an anthropologist, historic preservationist, and interdisciplinary adjunct professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies at Wayne State University and at Henry Ford College. He’s also the co-founder of The Malcolm X House Historic Preservation Project along side Aaron Sims.
This month, Ramadan will take part in The Black Cannon’s program “Martin and Malcolm” where they will discuss the lives and legacies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
Tareq joined The Metro’s Tia Graham to discuss how Detroit Red became Malcolm X.
Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on demand.
WDET strives to cover what’s happening in your community. As a public media institution, we maintain our ability to explore the music and culture of our region through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.
For more than a century in the United States, Native children were forcibly removed from their families and sent to boarding schools. Designed to strip students of their languages, cultures, and identities, the schools were created through federal policy, supported by state governments, and often operated by religious institutions.
In Michigan, this system lasted longer than many people realize, with some open into the late 20th century.
There have been some moves to reconcile this, what many consider a genocidal policy of assimilation.
Leora Tadgerson’s work is pushing Michigan toward a reckoning led by Tribal nations. A citizen of Gnoozhikaaning, Bay Mills, and Wiikwemkong First Nations, Tadgerson is director of Reparations and Justice for the Episcopal Diocese of Northern Michigan. She also co-chairs the national Truth, Justice, and Healing Commission on Native Boarding Schools for The Episcopal Church.
Leora Tadgerson
She joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss the history and lasting impacts of Native American boarding schools in Michigan and what justice and healing looks like.
Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on demand.
WDET strives to make our journalism accessible to everyone. As a public media institution, we maintain our journalistic integrity through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.
In this episode of CuriosiD, listener Leah Warshaw asks the question:
“How did The Old Miami get its name?”
The short answer
The first Miami on Cass was the Miami Lounge, which opened in 1947. As the neighborhood took a turn for the worse in the 60s, the bar became the site of murder, prostitution, and other crimes that marred its reputation.
The bar switched owners several times but kept “Miami” in the name, for the most part. Shortly after The New Miami was burned down, veteran Danny Overstreet opened The Old Miami, with “Miami” standing for “missing in action Michigan”. Though it started as a place to serve veterans, it’s an inviting dive for everyone in the neighborhood today, with gems like a koi pond in its expansive backyard.
Danny’s wife, Julie, credits the use of “old” to Danny’s sense of humor. She runs the bar today.
Manager Dena Walker adds, “I mean what would you call it—the New New Miami?”
For more details on the history of The Old Miami and what to expect from today’s laid-back atmosphere, listen to the podcast above.
WDET’s CuriosiD series answers your questions about everything Detroit. Subscribe to CuriosiD on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Dr. Marita Gilbert The Associate Dean of Osteopathic Engagement & Community Practice at Michigan State University
This year the guest speakers are Dr. Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York, Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum (NLBM) and Mary Ann Pettway and China Pettway of Gee’s Bend Quilting Collective.
Dr. Marita Gilbert is the Associate Dean of Osteopathic Engagement & Community Practice at Michigan State University. She leads the lecture series. Dr. Gilbert joined The Metro to talk about the lectures this year, and the big question of who really influences history.
Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on demand.
WDET strives to cover what’s happening in your community. As a public media institution, we maintain our ability to explore the music and culture of our region through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.
Women have been at the forefront of civil rights and human rights movements throughout history. Yet, their stories are left untold and forgotten.
Dr. Keisha N. Blain is a historian, speaker, advocate, and social justice activist who is a best-selling author. She is a professor of Africana studies at Brown University. Her most recent book “Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights” takes a historical look back at various civil rights movements and the Black women behind the scenes who created global change.
Dr. Blain spoke at Wayne State University as part of the university’s annual Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration. She joined The Metro to talk about the women who helped progress human rights, often leading to systemic change.
Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on demand.
WDET strives to make our journalism accessible to everyone. As a public media institution, we maintain our journalistic integrity through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.
The Trump administration wants American museums to be less critical of the nation’s history.
Yesterday, the Smithsonian Institution submitted documents about upcoming exhibitions and programming to the White House for a review of “improper ideology.”
What the president does next remains to be seen, but the effort to censor and rewrite history and culture raises important questions about American culture and history.
Listen to The Metro weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on demand.
Trusted, accurate, up-to-date.
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Like many of those who will recall memories of David Rambeau in the wake of the recent memorial, I remember my first days with him and so many subsequent unforgettable moments. A fresh one came to mind when I learned he had joined the ancestors on November the first, a birthday I share with my […]
The music landscape has changed a lot since the turn of the 21st century. Not just styles, but how we consume music. Nothing illustrates that better than the rise of the indie music scene.
DeVille talks with WDET’s Russ McNamara. Click on the link to listen or read selected excepts below.
Listen: New book looks at ’00s indie rock explosion
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
RM: So why write this book?
DeVille: There’s many different sort of through lines that are being traced here. One of them is technology. It’s a subject that I think is really complex and really fascinating, and it involves a lot of my favorite music ever.
This stuff that has been kind of chronicled and debated online for years in blog posts and social media posts and a lot of the documentation of it is starting to disappear, because websites just go offline, or people delete their social media accounts. And so I wanted to create a little bit more permanent record of some of these things that happened—some of the ways that these bands broke through, some of the conversations that were being had around this music.
One reviewer compared it to like a yearbook that you look back at and you get some fond memories, and you get some cringe, but yeah, it’s kind of like a history of my listening as an adult.
Russ McNamara, WDET: In the book, you mention the TV show ‘The OC’ which was a popular teen soap opera in the early ’00s. How much did that show’s soundtrack play into the rise in indie rock?
Chris DeVille, author of “Such Great Heights”: I was surprised as I was writing the book, how much it became like a shadow history of the evolution of the Internet over the last couple of decades. And you know The OC thing, it’s like they’re putting these bands in front of a much bigger audience. Like Death Cab for Cutie is like a fairly obscure band at the time, and then this character on this popular teen show is like making his whole personality that he loves Death Cab for Cutie.
Stereogum Managing Editor Chris DeVille
It’s like giant platform, but then they lose cool points with some people, as you know, sort of a more norm-y audience discovers this band, but it’s definitely, there’s no doubt that it was a huge like funnel, bringing a bunch of bands to a much broader audience
RM: What about the added accessibility of file sharing sites like Limewire and Napster?
CD: Whatever platform you were using to pirate music I think contributed to the accessibility of stuff. Stuff could blow up, even if it didn’t fit into a particular radio format, or it wasn’t getting past the MTV gatekeepers. It didn’t have to fit into any existing niche or existing format to blow up. It could just catch fire and go viral on these file sharing servers.
I mean, the same thing was still true when iTunes came in and kind of formalized and commercialized the process. You could still have a song that people would download it like crazy.
RM: Which indie bands benefitted the most from this setup in the early 00’s?
CD:Arcade Fire was definitely the biggest. The other dimension that I talk a lot about in the book, is Pitchfork. And just like the power that Pitchfork had to make or break someone’s career. If they gave something a 10.0 people were just going to jump on it and worship it. And if they kind of talked smack about a particular band or completely panned a band, then there were instances where that basically ended someone’s commercial prospects. And so like Arcade Fire were like the perfect storm.
RM: So where is indie rock at now? Is it dead? Does the genre really mean anything anymore?
CD: Over time, indie became like more of a genre, and then the genre itself started to change. But I think what we saw happen in the 2010s is sort of like the indie goes pop thing. It was like a bubble, and it really did pop. We still have these sort of like boutique pop stars like Clairo.
We had artists that came out of the indie world become pop stars of a sort because of stuff like Tiktok. Like Mitski is a good example of that where she’s coming from, from the indie rock infrastructure, and she is making music that jumps across genres a little bit.
There’s a hunger for bands that have a little bit more of an edge to them, that are a little bit less smooth, a little bit willing to be weird or noisy. That’s what you see with a lot of the biggest indie bands today – ones that have gone against that sort of, like Spotify-friendly, passive-listening experience. There’s now a hunger for music that’s a bit more abrasive, something that will jolt people out of their stupor.
Music wants to evolve. It wants to find new audiences. And so the whole idea of like, gatekeeping and having the right audience versus the wrong audience, like, that’s something that factors into the book too.
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Over the holidays…we’re sharing some of the stories Detroit Evening Report hosts produced for the radio. Today…we hear a story from Nargis Rahman.
The state health department hoped to register 500 doulas in its doula registry by 2028. This fall, it had more than a thousand. That includes doulas across the state with various specialties and most are able to accept payment through Medicaid.
Nargis spoke to Dawn Shanafelt the Director of Maternal and Infant Health for the Department of Health and Human Services about the registry and efforts to export birthing assistance services in Michigan.
Outro: This is just part of Nargis Rahman’s interview with Dawn Shanafelt from the Department of Health and Human Services. You can her the full story at wdet.org.
The city’s 30 foot tall Kwanzaa Kinara join Detroit’s official Hannukah Menorah and Christmas tree in Campus Martius Friday, Dec. 26. This first day of Kwanzaa celebrates the principle Umoja or Unity.
If you missed the City’s Kinara lighting, there are Kwanzaa celebrations throughout the city until the holiday ends on New Year’s Day. The Redford Branch of the Detroit Public Library has festivities tomorrow, including arts & crafts and African dance and drumming.
For more information visit detroitpubliclibrary.org/events.
The Charles H Wright Museum of African American History will host Kwanzaa events through Monday. Festivities include performances, speakers, family-friendly activities, a vendor marketplace and candle lightings.
Each day’s schedule is a little different. Visit thewright.com/events/kwanzaa for more information.
Source Booksellers is hosting a virtual celebration of cooperative economics on the 29th with author Ben Passmore, who will talk about his book “Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance.”
The event is at 5pm. To register look for Source Booksellers on Eventbrite.
Listen to the latest episode of the “Detroit Evening Report” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.
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An area of very old trees at Independence Oaks County Park has been recognized as part of a national network of old-growth forests, drawing attention to both rare natural features and thousands of years of human history tied to the land.
Carol Bacak-Egbo is an Oakland County Parks historian. She says the newly designated old-growth forest lies within a landscape shaped by Indigenous peoples for 5,000 to 6,000 years. The park sits near historic Native American trail routes, and contains the headwaters of the Clinton River, once a major travel route for the Anishinaabe across what is now southeast Michigan.
“This history doesn’t start with log cabins and sawmills,” Bacak-Egbo says. “People lived with and cared for this land long before Europeans arrived.”
Even in winter, Independence Oaks’ old-growth trees tower above the landscape. (Photo by Amanda LeClaire, WDET News)
Artifacts indicate the area was likely used as seasonal camps rather than permanent villages. The park also contains one of only two remaining wild rice beds in southeast Michigan, a culturally and spiritually significant food source for the Anishinaabe.
The forest largely escaped widespread logging and farming in the 19th century, almost by accident.
In the early 1900s, a wealthy Detroit businessman purchased land around Crooked Lake but left it undeveloped. Later owners also did not farm the southern portion of the property, allowing the old-growth trees to remain intact.
Park naturalist Kegan Schildberg says the designation supports efforts to protect remaining natural areas in Oakland County, which has developed rapidly during the last century.
Bacak-Egbo encourages visitors to view parks as places where natural and human history intersect.
“When people walk these trails, they aren’t just connecting with nature,” says Bacak-Egbo. “They are walking through the same forest people walked through hundreds and even thousands of years ago.”
WDET strives to make our journalism accessible to everyone. As a public media institution, we maintain our journalistic integrity through independent support from readers like you. If you value WDET as your source of news, music and conversation, please make a gift today.
The first floor of the historic Leland House in downtown Detroit felt as cold as the street outside. That’s where Dianne Lamb stood on a recent morning, bundled in a hooded winter coat, her breath visible in the unheated air. She’d slept two hours and was worn out from packing. For the past 12 years, […]
On Nov. 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior, killing its entire crew of 29 and becoming the largest shipwreck in the Great Lakes. The tragedy was immortalized in a Gordon Lightfoot ballad, and in the decades since a number of theories have been put forth about what caused the ship to […]
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