BLACK HISTORY MONTH
Students led effort to rename school in King’s honor ROOTS. B1
Michigan Chronicle
Vol. 81 – No. 22 | February 7-13, 2018
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Dennis Edwards, Temptations lead singer, remembered By Steve Holsey When Dennis Edwards was asked to join the Temptations in 1968, replacing the incomparable David Ruffin who had been let go, he, like the group, was facing a huge challenge. But with raw talent and unyielding determination, Edwards succeeded. The transition was made smoother by the implementation of a new sound as crafted by producer-writers Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong. While the songs were as soulful as ever, there was a “psychedelic” edge to
Dr. Curtis Ivery — Kory Woods photos
WCCCD makes milestone achievements, breaks ground for City Center Dennis Edwards hits like “Cloud Nine,” “Run Away Child, Running Wild,” “Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World is Today),” “Psychedelic Shack,” “Papa was a Rollin’ Stone” and one of their greatest achievements during this era, “I Can’t Get Next to You.” Dennis Edwards passed away on Thursday, Feb. 2, one day before his 75th birthday. He was at one time married to Ruth Pointer of the Pointer Sisters. They had a daughter, Issa. Fairfield, Alabama-born Edwards, who was in and out of the Temptations on three occasions, joined the legendary quintet in time to participate in two television specials with Diana Ross and the Supremes, “TCB” and “G.I.T. on Broadway.” During one of the periods when he was not in the group, he had a major hit with “Don’t Look Any Further” featuring Siedah Garrett. In the 1990s, he formed a group called the Temptations Review featuring Dennis Edwards. Originally, the group was called Dennis Edwards & the Temptations, but this was changed following a legal challenge by Otis Williams, co-founder of the Temptations.
By Roz Edward Managing Editor
The Wayne County Community College District campus in the city’s downtown is expanding following a groundbreaking Thursday, Feb. 1, for a $25 million campus building that will focus on health, wellness and education. The City Center project, on Fort St. and Howard, is the final construction project in the district’s 20-year “Pathways to Transformation” strategic plan. The building will sit next to the WCCCD Downtown Campus and is expected to be complete in spring 2019. City Center when completed will provide space for disciplinary meetings, teaching and interaction between students and their instructors that today’s programs in higher education demand. It’s a hybrid facility that consolidates workforce development and training programs for staff and students. But the climate was not so warm, nor the outlook so sunny before Dr. Curtis Ivery took the helm. In fact, when Ivery arrived in Detroit in 1995, the forecast for WCCCD (then Wayne Community College) was bleak. The community college had had a revolving door of presidents, with few of them having tenures longer than four years. When Ivery arrived at WCCCD, he was the third chancellor in five years. “In the mid-1990s, WCCCD was op-
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erating with tremendous instability. We had an unsustainably low student population, a revolving door for top administrative talent, a lack of transparency and clunky, inefficient administrative functions,” said Dr. Ivery The District needed a strong visionary to steer the college towards growth, and to become an institution that provided an open door to higher education in innovative ways for a broad range of communities. They found that in Dr. Ivery. “After my first interview, I knew that this was a mission that had to be fulfilled. WCCCD is too important to our region, to
our state, to our students, some of whom would not be able to start their college education without the District,” he continued. A little more than 20 years later, WCCCD has expanded its footprint out-county, built state-of-the-art facilities and increased student enrollment from 12,000 students to more than 70,000. No small feat, and Dr. Ivery accomplished these important improvements without having to increase tuition. “We laid out a series of transformative promises that aimed to ensure fiscal
ever on the question of justice and sought out more avenues to challenge and change the status quo.
In conducting an interview with the author of two definitive books on the life and times of civil rights icon Rosa Parks, attorney Gregory Reed compiled a collection of personal letters and shares conversations with the woman many called “the mother of the civil rights movement.”
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She later went to work for then state Rep. John Conyers and got back in the game. Reed recalls the climate in 1987, when the sense of urgency that fueled the civil rights movement began to wane. And while planning an MLK event, he mentioned to a fellow organizer that Mrs. Parks was taking the bus to get to the meeting being held at the Music Hall. They determined then and there to buy Parks a new car. The pair tapped on the shoulders of prominent black Detroiters like O’Neil Swanson to make a contribution and get her the car, which was later unveiled on the Music Hall stage.
And even though the freedom fighter from Alabama went on to continue the quest for equality, she was often ostracized by her peers and some relatives for taking a stand instead of a seat that day on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Long before the historic bus boycott, Parks was heavily involved in investigating sexual assault and rape cases against black women. Later, she and her husband, Raymond Parks, became intimately involved in the case of nine African American teenagers, ages 13 to 19, accused in Alabama of raping two white American women on a train in 1931 — the Scottsboro Boys.
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Rosa Parks, mother of the civil rights movement, was a militant By Roz Edward
Grand reopening of McDonald’s ushers in new sleek look and technology
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But it was on Dec. 1, 1955 when a defiant Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery. It wasn’t her intention to start a movement that day; she didn’t get dressed thinking “today is the day I launch a revolution.” It was simple, she just
didn’t think a woman should be forced to stand so a man could sit down. After all, its common courtesy for a man to make the gesture and give up his seat. But what you may not have known is that Parks had had another racially charged exchange with the white bus driver. A week before, he had insisted that she follow the practice of blacks paying to ride the bus in the front of the bus, then getting
off the bus and entering by the back door of the bus. Sometimes the bus driver would pull off and leave the tired and humiliated worker to get to their destination any way they could. So when she and her husband were forced to move from their Alabama home and arrived in Detroit, Parks still wearing the Scarlet Letter of “activism,” she was more resolved than
Reed recalls one of his favorite excerpts from his second book, “The Reflections by Rosa Parks.”: “If you want to be respected for your action, then your behavior must be above reproach. I learned from my grandmother and my mother that one should always respect oneself and live right. … If our lives demonstrate that we are peaceful, humble, and trusted, this is recognized by others. If our lives demonstrate something else, that will be noticed too.”