Village Life: Wilbur the “Flint Strong” dog, tangled vines and a city’s fate
By Jan Worth-Nelson In a conference room at City Hall recently after a typically chaotic council meeting, Councilman Herbert Winfrey leaned across a table and said something that stuck in my brain. He said, “A city is what it accepts.” I’m still thinking about that. It’s a sunny Wednesday, late September, and the heat has finally broken. I’m in my upstairs office, the window to my left open to blessed fresh air for the first time in...
Detroit 1967: a movie, a book, and a searing memory of when the riots hit Flint
by Harold C. Ford “A riot is the language of the unheard.” –Martin Luther King “The officer hit him and said, ‘We’re going to kill all of you black-ass nigger pimps and throw you in the river. We’re going to fill up the Detroit River with all you pimps and whores’” –from The Algiers Motel Incident, John Hersey, 1968 1960s Mississippi? No, 1960s Detroit. During the evening/early-morning hours of July 25-26, 1967 law...
Essay: Protests carry forward spirits of two mothers and an old friend, still on the march
By Teddy Robertson I haven’t seen Judy for fifty years, but here she is on Facebook, standing next to a sign that reads: “I can’t believe I’m still protesting this shit.” Her face is not really familiar to me but it triggers the memory of another face—her mother. Of course, I might not recognize Judy herself after so many decades and never seeing her as a grown up. But when we were kids our mothers were in their prime. I...
Essay: Remembering the Selma March, the “grandest hour of the civil rights movement”
Editor’s Note: The Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March some 51 years ago was seen by many historians as the “grandest hour of the civil rights movement”. It’s also seen as the last major victory of the civil rights movement. Nearly 30,000 people marched to the state capitol building in Montgomery, Alabama petitioning the government for the right to vote that was denied to so many of America’s black...
Essay: For-Mar treehouse a childhood fantasy brought to life–by TV masters
By Robert R. Thomas Camping out is an honorable Michigan tradition. I have a photo of me at three years old in the wilds of West Branch holding a hatchet while standing in front of my father’s Marine Corps pup tent that always smelled of tropical mold, which made it all that more exotic as a camp. And it was very mobile. Spending much of my boyhood in the Genesee County countryside creating “camps,” which we kids also called...
Village Life: It’s been a little hard to write about nuthatches
By Jan Worth-Nelson I’d really like to go back to writing about nuthatches. A buddy of mine recently gently noted that my Village Life columns seem to have strayed from the easy-going neighborly flavor of my early years on the back page (or tucked into some weekend post online, like here and now). This observer was sitting in my sunroom, one of the best spots in our beloved house. So it made sense, when my friend stared out at...
The Latest Edition of East Village Magazine Is Available For Download Here (pdf)
