313 Legends

Malik Kenyatta Yakini’s life is deeply committed to service: education, justice, and community.

Cofounder of the local nonprofit Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, Malik works to provide Detroit’s most disenfranchised residents with food security, justice, and sovereignty, as well as greater ancestral knowledge.

One of the first Black female psychiatrists in the United States, Jeanne Spurlock was an outspoken advocate for mental health who helped reshape the future of medicine.
That said, Jeanne Spurlock never intended to become a household name. She simply showed up because it was the right thing to do, forcing open doors that usually got slammed shut in the faces of Black women in medicine.

When Detroit burned during the summer of’ 67, Eleanor Josaitis didn’t run.

She leaned into the smoke, the grief, the racial wounds that the city kept trying to bandage over without ever truly healing.

She wasn’t a politician.

She was a suburban mom who decided that moral outrage wasn’t enough.

The only acceptable move was action.

Before Detroit became known for its Renaissance, it was defined by Dr. Charles H. Wright’s collection of stories, legacies, and voices long forgotten:

A man that recognized that erasure is a kind of death, who spent his entire life attempting to construct a monument against forgetting.

Before the Queen of Soul, there was the voice.

Reverend Clarence LaVaughn Franklin did not merely preach…he thundered, making pulpits quake and pews weep in Black Detroit.

Long before any cameras arrived, he was both a spiritual giant and a political force to be reckoned with.

In a Detroit era marked by robber barons, political machines, and backroom deals, Hazen S. Pingree emerged as a man on a mission.

He was not born rich.

He did not rise through charm or connections.

Quite the contrary, he was a Union Army veteran, a shoemaker turned businessman, and finally, Detroit’s most beloved Mayor – one who believed public service meant actually serving the public.