 My goodness. Today's topic is in keeping with what's going on in the world. Is this the beginning of the Civil War II? And so I have asked a dear friend, my new best friend, and you know I only talked to best friends, my new best friend is again a cousin. And this is a dear, dear, brilliant cousin. And he is the Reverend Nicholas Hood III. And he's in Detroit. So we are trying to ask people in different cities across the country, what's going on in their city? How is this all playing out? Is it really the beginning of the civil, another civil war? Are we in the middle of the civil war? Where are we? And where do we go from here? So, Nick? Aloha. Aloha. I'm so glad to see you. I'm so glad to see you too. He is, like I said before, he's one of the tons of cousins we have that we don't get to meet because we're thousands of miles apart. So Nick, tell us about Nick. Well, no, let me start from the beginning, how we are related. Nick's father and my father were brothers. That's as simple as I can get it. And we come from a long line of activists. Our grandmother, I don't know how old she was when she went to the march on Washington. And all of her children were raised to be activists, to be a part of the community. And I remember my Aunt Dolly told me when I asked her about living in Gary, and she said, any place that you live can be great if you take the time to make it so. Okay, that works. So back to Nick. So tell us about Nick, first of all. Well, Marcia, let me begin by saying thank you for inviting me to be on your program. Number two, I just have gotten to meet Marcia for those of you watching the program. I am 68 years old. I'll soon be 69 in October. But I've met Marcia not through ancestry.com or African American ancestry.com or any of the other DNA searches. But we have always been related. We just have not met each other. Yes. So your life for the last 50 years has been in Hawaii. And my life for the last 50 years has been in Detroit, Michigan. I was born in New Orleans and the segregated south, my father, your, he would be your uncle. My uncle, yes. Was a founding member of the SCLC. I don't know if you know that. Oh, no, I didn't. Yeah, he was the secretary of the New Orleans Improvement Association. And the SCLC was actually founded in New Orleans. A lot of people think it's an Atlanta operation because that's where Dr. King worked up to his death with his father. But actually Dr. King and leaders of the movement organized the SCLC in New Orleans. And your uncle was one of the original signers. Well, like I said, it makes sense that everybody that I know in this family is an activist of some sort. Yes. So I am really, really pleased since we've been talking with each other for the last couple weeks, it's been an absolute delight. And, you know, and so I'm honored to be on your program. And I don't know if your guests know anything about me. I'm the pastor of the Plymouth United Church of Christ in Detroit, Michigan. I'm a former member of the Detroit City Council for two terms, eight years. And I have my feet in activism, so to speak. I am really thrilled with what I'm seeing right now happening across America and parts of the world where, you know, your title is is this the what a second civil war? Yes, I'm not sure it's a civil war. But what I am sure of is that for the first time in a long time, progressives and people who want racial change in America are coming together across racial lines. And I like it that to me, what I'm seeing happening, the young people in my church call it alignment. And what they mean by that is young white folk, young Asian folk and folk of other ethnic persuasions are coming together really to support Black Lives Matter to profess that they don't agree with racism. They don't agree with the policies of many of their parents. And I think it's just absolutely tremendous. I never thought I would see at this stage of my life, young white people joining hands with young Black people, where the young white people were saying, we're sorry, you know, and we are standing with you when the quarterback of the New Orleans Saints, Drew Brees, can text out a racist rant. And then his wife follows it with a almost a dissertation, apologizing for not only what her husband said, but apologizing for white entitlement. I think it's a beautiful thing. So I'm not sure we're leading to a civil war. But there are a lot of opportunities for change that are happening. While I was waiting for your show to come on tonight, I was scrolling through the New York Times online version. And one of the articles I missed today is one that says that the military is considering a proposal to rename 10 bases, you know, training bases that are named after Confederate soldiers. And I was astounded. I didn't know that we had any of that. And, you know, from a, as I said, you know, I have a political background. I can understand your uncle, who was before me, my father, Nick Hood Sr., was a member of the Detroit City Council for 28 years. I cannot top that. But one of the things you learn in politics is how the process works. And I can only imagine, you know, with 10 military bases named after Confederate soldiers, some of whom I don't think were particularly distinguished, all of them were traitors. Every one of those 10 were traitors against the United States of America, because they fought against the United States of America. But I suspect that the reason why those bases are named after Confederate soldiers was appeasement. And part of what the young white people are saying today and young white, young black people are saying is this is not a time for appeasement. This is a time to really make things right. And so I think it's a great opportunity for America. Well, let me interject right here. The base of general John Bell Hood was our great, great, great grandfather. Yes. We are the descendants of Slade. We are descendants of the Confederate general John Bell Hood. And I've said it, everybody that knows me knows I've said it a thousand times. I don't have a problem with him being white. But I do have a problem because I'm a snob. I do have a problem with him being the idiot. He lost his whole tribe, his old troop, and they named the base after him. Now, how can you lose all your men? And then he left his wife with 10 children and just left her with these white children. Can you believe what a man he was and they named the base after him? I like this. No, well, yeah, and it goes along with what I was saying that you have soldiers who were traitors against the United States of America, and they're honored with military bases. And that's only one small example of the magnitude of what's happening now. The whole movement across the nation to defund the police is fascinating. But in a big city like Detroit, Michigan, a big part of what the police do is they pick up people with emotional and mental problems. And I watch them every day as I ride up and down the street, somebody is sitting on a curb or outside a bus stop, and the poor police have to stop and attend to these people. They end up taking them to the mental health ward as a minister. I've had to go to the emergency room a lot for the last 44 years, not as a patient, but as a pastor. And the parking lot is full of police cars. And when these young men and young women sign up to be police, I don't think they signed up to be mental and emotional health care workers. And so this movement to defund the police, I'm not sure if the people who are organizing it really exactly know what the end game is, where they're going. But one of the things that they are saying that I think is right, which is the police don't need to be mental health care workers. They need to focus on real crime. And so I think that that's going to be a good thing. I've been concerned with some of the voices I've heard from the police departments around the country particularly some of the police union leaders who seem to have a knee-jerk reaction to change, any kind of change. But I think that this is a good thing. And for the president on down, the white leadership in the Senate, in the House of Representatives, the United States Supreme Court, when they live, the young white people who are protesting, they see their sons and their daughters, kind of like in the middle and early 60s with the freedom riders. Black people were being killed in the South. They were being brutally treated in the South. But when young white people started getting beaten up and killed, all of a sudden America took another view. And so this is a tremendous opportunity for America right now. Well, when I said, is this another Second Civil War? A couple of years ago, I read an article written by an astrologer who said that the planets were aligning just as they were for the Civil War. And I didn't earmark the article so I can't quote who it was. And I kicked me a thousand times but not earmarking the article. So then last year I typed in, you know, about the alignment, 50 different articles came up about where things are going. And it all pointed to not a Civil War, but a revolution. And I think that's where we are. We are seeing when you see that many people in the street, even here in Hawaii, we had three days of protests. Every island, every island, thousands of people showed up in all kinds of colors. And the Hawaiians led one of the protest. And it wasn't really a protest because, I mean, come on, when you sit down on the grass with candles, that's kind of, anyway, it was beautiful, absolutely beautiful. And in South Korea, they filled balloons with some kind of message and sent them off to North Korea. And all around the world, people are into whatever it is, wherever they can, let me put it that way. And it's been just beautiful to watch. I've been been stuck to this television for two weeks now. My husband was in the Navy for 30 years. He's retired with Agent Orange, thank you, Uncle Sam, like everybody that went to Vietnam has Agent Orange. But being his age, he's 89, and having been through all those years in the Navy when it was segregated. His blood pressure was up, and it kept going up, up, up. And now this morning, he watched the funeral, of course. And then this morning, it was back down. So it was that emotional roller coaster he was on watching, going through all of this, which, you know, I think everybody did. And it's, it's exciting. And it's hopeful. Yeah, one of the interesting things about this protest movement across America is that it's not focused on one leader, not even one or two leaders. For instance, in Michigan, one, the protests here have been nonviolent. Two, for the most part. Number two, it's hard to nail down who actually is the leader or leadership. We have protest movements spanning from Detroit, Michigan, all the way to Howell, Michigan, maybe farther than that. And the leadership is comprised of people in some instances, they may not even know each other. But what they do know is that they want change in America, and they want racial change. You know, you can spin the death of George Floyd any way you want to. I read from some conservative pundits that George Floyd was not a good person, this or that. But regardless of what kind of person he was, he was a human being. And no human being deserves to die on a chokehold under the knee of a police officer. And so you have young people across the racial spectrum who have come together to say that black lives matter. They are important. Black people are just as important as white people. And we're going to keep working until real change comes in America. For those of us who lived through the civil rights movement, there was the, you know, Martin Luther King began his involvement in 1955, December to 1956, December in Montgomery, Alabama with a bus boycott. And the conclusion of that was the integration of the bus lines in terms of where people could sit. And then that propelled him to the leadership of the SCLC. And there were identifiable endpoints. You had the civil rights legislation of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And those were concrete events that not just black people, but white people could look at and say, there's a victory. It was substantial change and improvement from what existed prior to that. But Dr. King realized that even with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that America still was segregated in terms of economic disparity. And, you know, his point was, what good is it if you can eat at a lunch counter if you can't afford a hot dog? And so it's interesting that Dr. King at the time of his death in 1968 was in the process of organizing a poor people's campaign and the poor people's march. And it's unfortunate that he was killed right, you know, before that march. And I wonder sometimes right now what America and the world would be like in Dr. King lit. But what we're seeing now are the grandchildren of the movement, the civil rights movement. And, you know, I think something good will come out of this. Oh, of course it will. I mean, it's already, we've already seen good. And just as a caveat to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, our Hawaii freshman congressman, Gil, Tom Gil, was a freshman congressman. And he wrote Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. He was the floor manager for the Civil Rights Act. I think, now this is my theory, that LBJ selected him to be the floor manager, A, from Hawaii, he couldn't go home. So he had to stay there. When everybody else got to go home for the weekends, he had to stay. That's number one. And number two, he was as tall and as big and as arrogant as LBJ. So they went, you know, eye to eye. And so the day of the march on Washington, the president said this, what's not, I mean, it was Kennedy told all the Congress do not go, because they were scared it was going to be arrived. But he took his children and he went. And anyway, he came back and so now they're going to pass the bill. He's worked the floor and he had three Southern congressmen and told him, Tom, I love you, I want the bill to pass, but I can't vote for it. So we're going to not be there for the floor vote. He went to his grave. No matter what I did, he went to his grave and wouldn't tell who those three people were. He promised we wouldn't and he didn't. But, you know, I just have to give that caveat to out to Tom. He worked so hard for that bill here, as well as in Washington. So we just need to add that little piece to it. Well, politics can make for strange bedfellows. And one of the things politicians understand is that they may not be together on today for a vote, but they will need each other tomorrow. And so I understand that very clearly, you know, what you're saying. You know, I saw that on a local level in Detroit, but I think that what's going on now is great. And I just put that leadership in the protest movements that identify goals so that they know when to turn it off. But they're moving in the right direction. And we have several young people in my church who participated in the marches in Detroit. And I had a Zoom conversation with them two Fridays ago to talk about, you know, how do you score a movement? When do you decide to get involved in a movement? When do you know when it's right? When do you know that maybe you're uncomfortable with it? And how to maintain your integrity within a protest movement? I mentioned to you before, it wasn't really a protest movement, but I think it was in the 90s, there was an anniversary of the overthrow of Queen Lily Kukalani. Lily and my wife. Yeah, we traveled to Hawaii and visited, I think, seven islands with many activists from the United Church of Christ and the predecessor church, the Congressional Church in Hawaii. And it was interesting to watch the protest movements there. They reminded me of the same kind of movements we have in the mainland. And so we're all united in a lot of ways. And there are a lot of people who want to see good. They want to see peace and justice and equality in the world. And it all starts locally, you know, all politics is local. And so I really appreciate the opportunity to be on your show. I'm not sure what I can add in terms of the movements that are happening in Michigan right now. But what I do know is that something positive looks like it's on its way. Well, just your presence and the ability to talk to somebody in other cities, like last week, we talked to another cousin in New York, Sheila. And little Dolly said she was gonna listen today and she's in Gary. And wouldn't you know that we would get trucks going by right at this moment? Hopefully you can hear. I can hear the trucks. I can hear and see you very well. I can hear. I can't even hear. You can't hear? Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, I don't hear the trucks. Oh, great. You know that would happen right now. But again, it's such a pleasure being able to talk to you to share and all of these things when we can do this again, when we have time. I thank you for your daily prayers. I look forward to it every morning. And I look forward to your aloha. And sometimes with a photograph of a flower. I love it. Yes. Well, thank you. I started that several years ago because a friend of mine has terminal cancer. And he has been through 90 sessions of chemo. He's been through everything you can imagine, but he hangs in there. So I started doing that to send him a flower every morning. And now I'm up to 40 people every morning. It takes me a while to get all those people. And now I hear from people when they say, I didn't get my flower. What's wrong? Are you okay? So I'm glad you enjoy it. And I think we're out of time. Eric, do we have any time left? He's not listening. Two minutes. Oh, good. Good. Great. Okay. So real quick, where do we go from here? Well, Marsha, I would encourage you and your guests in Hawaii and those who are, you know, part of this program looking at it around the world to realize that every person can make a difference in the world. It doesn't take much. And if you start in your neighborhood, Tip O'Neill, the former speaker of the house, said all politics is local. And some of the greatest leaders I've ever met are just block club leaders. And right in Hawaii, I think it's very possible for people to look at how the society is working and to ask a simple question, can it be made better? And things are made better not because politicians have the answer, but politicians are very, very practiced at listening to just ordinary people. They want to know, what do the people on the ground say? What do they think? And that's why in this movement right now, when we have young people saying black lives matter, all lives matter, defund the police, reapportion some of the monies for police departments, for mental health and other social services. That doesn't mean to eradicate the police, but it means to just, you know, reposition how our expectations of the police. And, you know, that's coming from the ground up. And what that should tell all of us is that you've never done so much, accomplished so much that you can't make life better. And so I am very, very enthused. I'm encouraged by what I see. And I pray for the day in our lifetime when we'll see justice rolling like waters, when poor people and hungry people are fed, when they're thirsty, are given drink. I look forward to that day. I look forward to the day when every person who wants work can get work. I talked to a young couple by Zoom a couple hours ago in pre-marital counseling and they're trying to decide whether or not to get married because neither of them has a job. And I told them, I said, look, when my wife and I got married 44 years ago, my church paid me as an assistant minister $10,000 a year before tax. I said, you know, more important than money is love. But young people need to hear that from somebody. And for me, it was encouraging talking to the young couple because it's a realization that life goes on. So Marsha, I want to thank you for inviting me to be a part of the program and our lives go on. Well, now, one little, another caveat. You mentioned your wife and his wife is a federal judge. So starting out 44 years. She's the chief federal judge for the Eastern District of Michigan. That's a big deal. That's a big deal. And that's something, that's by statute. You cannot politic to be the chief judge of a federal district. It's the judge who is the oldest active judge under 70 years of age. That's how you get to be the chief. Yeah. That's how you get to be chief. Just live long enough. You got to live long enough and be in your right mind. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, and she's sure. She's really sure. Yes, she is. Yeah. She holds me to task. And your camera person on Sundays. During the week. Yeah. She does these little Facebook and YouTube videos. They're spiritual videos. And she, she gets a big kick out of pushing the button, the on and off switch. But she doesn't do it on Sundays. Sundays. I've got a whole team of people. Got a whole team. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. And we'll do this again. Thank you. And Aloha to everyone. And thank you so much. And we will see you next time. Aloha to you.