Jemele Hill pays tribute to Detroit teachers and mentors who ‘really made an impact on me’
This daughter of Detroit’s west side, who has climbed far since her 1993 commencement at Mumford High, salutes the city as a propulsive launchpad in two interviews published this week.
“We invented grind culture,” says Jamele Hill, a former Free Press sportswriter who’s now an entertainment entrepreneur in Los Angeles. While co-hosting two popular Spotify podcasts, she started The Unbothered Network in 2021 to create content aimed at Black women. Three years earlier, she co-founded a film and TV production company with a hometown name: Lodge Freeway Media.
Hill links her multi-venture pace to growing up in a “a city of hustlers.”
The 47-year-old journalist-turned-mogul, promoting her 2022 memoir “Uphill,” spoke recently with Detroit writer Paris Giles for an Hour Detroit feature — and with Atlanta freelancer Clarissa Brooks for a cover story at NewsOne, a new digital magazine. Each conversation has shouts to people and pure Detroitness that shaped her. She tells Giles:
My work ethic, toughness, and even the chip that I carry on my shoulder are all things that just became embedded in my DNA from growing up in the city.
Here are more hometown hugs from the interviews posted March 13 at Hour and a day later at NewsOne:
Detroit is ‘embedded in my DNA’
The city taught me so much. Detroit is a very resilient place. . . . The resilience you learn in Detroit is something that’s almost untouchable elsewhere.
In Detroit, I learned how to fight for myself. I was very rooted and baked into my identity in Detroit. It taught me a sense of self.
And, you know, it’s a city of hustlers — everybody knows this. One job is like no job in Detroit. We invented grind culture and didn’t realize we invented grind culture. So my work ethic, toughness, and even the chip that I carry on my shoulder are all things that just became embedded in my DNA from growing up in the city. [Hour]
No one from Detroit is any stranger to having to work hard, having to hustle. It’s just kind of built into our bones [NewsOne]
Why Detroit breeds ‘pride and affection’
Because of the crime rate and the infiltration of drugs, people considered Detroit to be a dangerous, unworthy place. And because we knew that’s how people thought of us, it only made us want to put on for the city even harder and love it even harder.
So when people meet people from Detroit, the level of pride and affection we have in our city, I feel like it’s different. I know everybody is proud of where they come from, but we probably take it to an annoying level, different level. Detroit is definitely in the building, OK? . . .
I just think that the pride and affection we have right in our city is very unique because we’ve had to withstand some really challenging times. We have been the butt of national jokes many, many times and moments. And it only makes us love on Detroit harder because we know we need it. [NewsOne]
‘Teachers who really made an impact’
I run into people all the time, Black folks, who talk about how when they grew up, they didn’t have any Black teachers. And that was so stunning to me because Detroit is Blackity Black-Black-Black. All my teachers were Black. . . .
Black History Month wasn’t a big deal because Black History Month happened eight months out of the school year (laughs). Because you have Black teachers, they understand the importance of Black history all the time. And that’s because they took the additional step of making sure that we knew that learning about, you know, Black cowboys and Black farmers and the impact that Jim Crow had on them. . . .
I was so grateful for the teachers that I had. They all saw something in me that I didn’t even see in myself. That’s why I intentionally, in the acknowledgments in my book, thanked several of the teachers who really made an impact on me. I thought it was really important that they knew that what they poured into me, it bore really good fruit. [NewsOne]
In “Uphill,” she thanks “a fifth-grade teacher named Mrs. Johnson, whom I felt very close to” and a high school journalism instructor and Mumford Times adviser named Mrs. Platt. “Her pushing me to apply for the Free Press’ high school journalism [summer apprentice] program during my junior year changed my life.” Two years later, she was a Michigan State University journalism student.
Coleman Young — ‘a real source of pride’
When I was a kid, we had a mayor named Coleman A. Young, and he was the city’s first Black mayor. And Coleman Young was a real source of pride for a lot of us because not only did he look like us and act like us, he didn’t code-switch either.
And he was so unapologetic about how he chose to lead in that position that it was very inspirational and aspirational for a lot of us who were watching at the time. [NewsOne]
Detroit mentors: Rob Parker, Bryan Burwell
Rob Parker [and] the late Bryan Burwell [are among] people who were either able to give me a piece of advice, handhold me through something or just listen and be a sounding board. So I’ve been very fortunate to have a lot of people who helped me nurture my career. [NewsOne]
Parker, who was a Detroit News sportswriter for nine years and later a WXYZ sportscaster, now co–hosts “The Odd Couple,” a three-hour weeknight talk show on Fox Sports Radio.
Burwell, a Detroit News sports columnist who moved to USA Today in 1992, died from melanoma in 2014 at age 59.
