The day before Halloween is referred to as Mischief Night in many parts of the country, but in Detroit, it used to be called Devil’s Night.

For decades, that night filled many with fear, as neighborhoods with abandoned homes or businesses prepared themselves for possible arson. City of Detroit Historian Jamon Jordan joined The Metro on Wednesday — the day before Halloween — to share more about the history of Devil’s Night in Detroit and how community members came together with the city to put an end to it.

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Throughout the U.S. there’s always been pranks connected to Halloween — draping toilet paper on trees, throwing eggs at cars, and other mischief that didn’t cause the most damage. 

In the 1980s there were about 800 fires around Halloween, Jordan said. Community groups and the city took steps to wipe out Devil’s Night, oftentimes doing patrols the day before Halloween and enforcing youth curfews. In the ’90s, the community and city started doing joint patrols and renamed it Angel’s Night. 

“So these things begin to work in concert with one another, and there’s thousands of people who begin to volunteer. By this point, with so many people out on the street with eyes on almost every neighborhood, especially the vacant houses in the neighborhood, it begins to make it have an effect on stopping the fires,” he said. “Within a few years, the fires really go way way down and then eventually we don’t even talk about Devil’s Night…”

Use the media player above to hear the full conversation with Jordan.

More headlines from The Metro on Oct. 30, 2024:

• Yesterday, a poll by The Hill showed Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of Donald Trump by five points. But polling has generally been very tight, and most political scientists believe this election could easily go either way. To discuss why the election is so tight in Michigan and how voters are feeling right now, we were joined by Matt Grossman, head of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research. 
• In the latest spooky episode of CuriosiD, WDET’s Jeff Milo looked into chilling rumors that the Detroit Public Library’s Main Branch on Woodward might be haunted by ghosts. 
• Early voting is underway in Michigan, and we’ve heard from some of you that with more than 20 Detroit Public Schools Community District Board candidates vying for three seats, people are feeling overwhelmed with all the choices. To help us break down the race we’re joined by Chalkbeat Detroit Bureau Chief Lori Higgins.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 11 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand.

Tejano music, or Tex-Mex music, is a blend of different sounds and instruments from Mexico and other countries — like Poland and the Czech Republic. 

Martin Solis helped make Tejano music popular in Detroit with his band Los Primos. 

As a self-taught musician, he started playing the Bajo Sexto, a Mexican 12-string instrument from the guitar family, and developed his own unique musical style.

Solis wasn’t born here, but Detroit was his home. And the history of Southwest Detroit can’t be told properly without the inclusion of Martin Solis and Los Primos. Solis is the first person from Michigan to be inducted into the Texas Conjunto Music Hall of Fame in San Benito, Texas, and the Tejano Roots Hall of Fame in Alice, Texas.

Martin Solis’ son, Frank Solis, is a local historian who’s preserving Tejano music in Detroit. He joined The Metro to discuss his father’s legacy.

Subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

There were few recordings of Los Primos, but Frank found some lost treasures while cleaning out his father’s attic. He uncovered a bag of cassettes, filled with rehearsal recordings of the band.  

“(Jack White), he’d hear these Mexican bands, and that was my dad,” Frank said. “So he assigned his brother to clean them up with an engineer. They cleaned up the tapes, and the album came — his first and last album.”

Use the media player above to hear the full conversation with Frank Solis about Tejano music in Detroit.

More headlines from The Metro on Oct. 10, 2024: 

• A local author wants to spread the joy of reading, writing and stretching imagination. Mianne Adufutse is a graduate of Columbia College of Chicago where she studied fiction writing and poetry. Adufutse joined the show to discuss her new book, “Garbage Dump” – a dystopian fictional story set in Detroit. 
• The Tigers are red hot. They beat the Houston Astros in the wild card round and now lead the Cleveland Guardians 2-to-1 in the American League Division Series. The Tigers could win the series and move on to the next round if they win today at Comerica Park. Detroit Free Press Sports Columnist Shawn Windsor joined the show to talk about the team’s unpredictable run. 
• The holiest day of the year for the Jewish people starts tomorrow night. Yom Kippur goes from sunset to sunset and is marked by fasting, prayer and atonement. For Jews observing the holiday, that means apologizing directly to those they’ve wronged over the year. Professor and writer Susan Shapiro joined the show to talk about apology, forgiveness and why those two things are important to everyone, everywhere. Shapiro’s most recent book is titled “The Forgiveness Tour: How To Find the Perfect Apology.”

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 11 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand.

Art is one of the oldest forms of storytelling, but a lot of Black stories get overlooked, particularly in Detroit. 

Subscribe to The Metro on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Black Artists Archive (BAA) aims to ensure all people’s stories are preserved. The Detroit based-initiative fosters creativity, exhibition, learning, and the preservation of Black art history and visual culture.

BAA Founder Dr. Kelli Morgan joined The Metro on Monday to discuss how the organization is preserving history in the city. 

Use the media player above to hear the conversation with Morgan.

More headlines from The Metro on Sept. 30, 2024: 

• For Freedoms is hosting a conversation called “Pollution Has No Boundaries: Where Do We Go From Here?” on Monday night. The event aims to bring people together to share their personal climate stories and envision steps toward a cleaner environment. Community organizer and activist Theresa Landrum and Filmmaker  Wesaam Al-Badry joined the show ahead of the event to share more.
• It’s been gray for the last few days. And because of climate change, this season has also been unusually warm. Former WDIV Meteorologist Paul Gross joined the show to discuss what kind of weather patterns to expect this fall. 
• It’s now been a few years since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. While cases are going around in parts of the Midwest, it’s hard to know by how much since Michigan and other states no longer track the virus. Dr. Paul Kilgore is the director of research in the department of pharmacy practice and the co-director of the Center for Emerging and Infectious Diseases at Wayne State University. He joined the show to discuss the importance of flu and COVID-19 vaccines this fall.

Listen to The Metro weekdays from 11 a.m. to noon ET on 101.9 FM and streaming on-demand.

WDET’s CuriosiD podcast answers your questions about everything Detroit. Subscribe to CuriosiD on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, NPR.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

For the past decade, CuriosiD has captivated WDET listeners with its unique take on Detroit-centric stories. But what does it take to bring an episode of this beloved series to life?

CuriosiD is a listener-focused podcast about Detroit, where listeners guide the content by asking questions that we provide the answers to.

“Our listeners write or call in with questions they have about Detroit or the metro area,” explains WDET reporter and CuriosiD host Amanda LeClaire. “They’re just curious about things.”

The process begins by exploring a continually evolving list of listener-submitted questions. LeClaire says she carefully selects the most compelling topics for each episode.

Each question requires extensive research. In some cases that means examining hard to find historical and archived documents, or researching Nike missile sites from the 1950s.

Sometimes that means physically investigating locations on-site, like visiting Detroit’s underground steam tunnels.

“It takes a great deal of time, energy, and planning,” LeClaire says. “We’re always thinking about how to keep the high level of creativity and thoughtfulness that CuriosiD is known for.”

Former CuriosiD producer and host Laura Herberg agrees.

“CuriosiD actually takes a lot of work,” she said. “The stories sound light-hearted, but they’re little mysteries that can take a lot of time and energy to tell well.”

WDET’s Pat Batcheller, a frequent contributor, recounts one of his favorite episodes, which answers the question of how the Detroit Lions chose the iconic Honolulu Blue as a team color.

“George Richards, the original owner of the Lions, saw the hue of the ocean in Hawaii and said, ‘That’s the color I want for my team,’” Batcheller said. To tell the full story, Batcheller consulted football historians and even tracked down historical recordings of the team from the 1930s.

The digital side of storytelling also plays a significant role in CuriosiD’s success, leveraging the power of social media to reach new audiences — and new potential questions from listeners. WDET Digital Manager Dave Kim says one of his favorite social videos for the series was about the origins of Superman ice cream, which became a hit on TikTok and Instagram Reels.

Whether it’s unraveling the history of Detroit’s Boston Cooler or exploring who Lewis Cass was, CuriosiD remains committed to bringing listener questions to life.

Batcheller emphasized that it’s the listeners who keep CuriosiD moving forward, calling it “an opportunity for our listeners to have an impact on what we do and guide our journalism.”

Since the series launched in 2014, CuriosiD has produced 70 episodes, with more in the works.

Listeners are encouraged to continue sending their questions, because the future of CuriosiD is in your hands.

We want to hear from you! 

Do you have a question about Detroit? Let us know here or fill out the form below.

More from CuriosiD:

• Who was Thomas Mollicone? The story behind the naming of an east side Detroit park
• What is the history behind the Belle Isle Boathouse?
• What happened to Detroit jazz venue Strata Concert Gallery?

The landscape of voting in Michigan has evolved significantly, with expanded early in-person voting, enhanced absentee ballot tracking, and permanent absentee ballot registration now available.

As voters prepare to head to the polls again in November, a new monument in Detroit commemorates the long journey toward voting rights for all.

The dedication ceremony for the Civil Rights Monument took place at Viola Liuzzo Playground, located at the corner of Winthrop and Trojan on Detroit’s west side. The monument honors Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit woman inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who traveled to Alabama to participate in the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965. Tragically, Liuzzo was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Lowndes County. Before her departure, she asked her friend, Sarah Evans, to care for her five children if anything happened to her—a promise that Evans kept.

The monument features images of Liuzzo and Evans with the inscription “Sisters in life…Sisters in struggle,” and on the opposite side, it lists the names of Detroiters who answered Dr. King’s call to support the Selma marches, including notable figures like Rosa Parks and John Lewis.

Dorothy Dewberry Aldridge, a civil rights activist and historian, described the monument as a “teaching monument,” intended to educate the public about the events of 1965.

Collette Mezza, also a member of the Viola Liuzzo Park Association, emphasized the significance of each name on the monument.

“They each have their own remarkable story, and what inspired them to go down to Selma in 1965, and many of them are still alive and many of them continue their activism like Dorothy,” Mezza said.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who attended the ceremony, said everyone today has an opportunity to continue the fight for voting rights.

“Let us all recommit to continuing on that legacy as a new generation of foot soldiers who are marching forward for democracy teaching about the past and being clear-eyed about the present challenges and the work we must do to preserve that sacred promise of democracy for everyone.”

The event concluded with a ceremonial march around the park, echoing the marches of 1965 and honoring those who fought for voting rights.