Commentary: Bent but not broken–remember Flint’s history of fighting back
By Ted Nelson This is a lightly edited transcript of Ted Nelson’s speech at the Flint Institute of Arts on Oct. 21, 2018 When the makers of “JFK: The Last Speech” arrived in Flint to shoot scenes for their award-winning documentary movie recently shown at the Flint Institute of Arts (FIA), they were eager to take what Jan [Worth-Nelson, EVM editor and Ted’s wife] and I now sadly refer to as the “ruin porn” tour...
For a Las Vegas native, difference between virtual and real hit home
By Dylan Doherty I was hesitant when my fiancée, Kelsey Ronan, suggested I write for East Village Magazine. Unlike her, I was not born in Flint, Michigan, or even the Midwest. I didn’t have the fascination and dedication to the city where I spent twenty years of my youth that Kelsey displayed for Flint. Instead I thought of my home town as a black hole, a negative space bending all surrounding architectural and cultural ideas towards...
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...
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