The Mitten Channel

The KKK has been very active in Flint, Michigan since at least the 1920's.  Michigan has been a hotbed for white nationalist and KKK activity for 100 years.

This is a Radio Free Flint podcast essay on the history of the KKK, White Nationalists and other hate groups in Flint, Michigan.

The Klan organizes parades, picnics, social relief efforts and activities for children in Flint in years gone by.  The former Prosecutor (1993-2005) of the county where Flint is located shares stories of his battles with white nationalism in Flint.  He discusses the KKK activities in Flint in particular.  This podcast documents the connection between Flint, Detroit and Michigan and the many hate groups.   

Ryan Loree, a former member of a neo-Nazi group in Flint, the Rollingwood Skins describes the white nationalist group and its activities in Flint in more recent years. This podcast takes a shocking and revealing view of KKK and other hate groups activity in a typical industrial American town.

Join us on The Mitten Channel on Substack.

Subscribe at the Free tier for regular investigative essays and updates.

Or choose the Premium tier for deeper analysis, forensic breakdowns, and exclusive content for paid subscribers.

Visit TheMittenChannel.Substack.com and choose your tier today.

The Mitten Channel is a network of podcasts.  

👉Subscribe to The Mitten Channel

Join us for the full experience. Subscribe to The Mitten Channel on Substack to receive our latest narrative essays, audio stories, and deep-dive reporting directly in your inbox.

Explore Our Series:

• Radio Free Flint: Narrative storytelling and community perspectives on industrial resilience.
• The Mitten Works: Essential history and analysis of labor and economic policy.
• Flint Justice: Critical insights into the legal and institutional challenges facing our state.
  
  

Visit our Mitten Channel website for our complete library of podcasts, videos, and articles.

The Mitten Channel is a production of Radio Free Flint Media, LLC. © 2026 All Rights Reserved.

This Black History Month podcast is in honor of and dedicated to Evelyn Thomas Butts and her attorney Robert Segar of Flint, Michigan.  Evelyn Thomas Butts, an African American civil rights activist and politician in Virginia. She is best known for challenging the poll tax and took her case before the United States Supreme Court. Butts was part of the civil rights movement and later became an influential member of Norfolk politics. Robert Segar has been honored by the Michigan State Bar Association for being a Champion of Justice for his role in this case.  The understated attorney volunteered to take on a 1960's civil rights case to stop the poll tax in Virginia. see Harper v The Virginia Board of Elections, 383 US 663 (1966). Attorney Segar argued the case before the United States Supreme Court, then led by Chief Justice Earl Warren.  Arguing the case for the United States Government was the Solicitor General of the United States Thurgood Marshall.  The Jim Crow era poll tax was a voter suppression effort that had been in effect for nearly 60 years. In this podcast, Mr. Segar recounts his firms involvement in the civil rights movement in the 1950's and 1960's.  He discusses his involvement with the Lawyers Guild of America in helping with civil rights cases.  --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/radiofreeflint/message

Join us on The Mitten Channel on Substack.

Subscribe at the Free tier for regular investigative essays and updates.

Or choose the Premium tier for deeper analysis, forensic breakdowns, and exclusive content for paid subscribers.

Visit TheMittenChannel.Substack.com and choose your tier today.

The Mitten Channel is a network of podcasts.  

👉Subscribe to The Mitten Channel

Join us for the full experience. Subscribe to The Mitten Channel on Substack to receive our latest narrative essays, audio stories, and deep-dive reporting directly in your inbox.

Explore Our Series:

• Radio Free Flint: Narrative storytelling and community perspectives on industrial resilience.
• The Mitten Works: Essential history and analysis of labor and economic policy.
• Flint Justice: Critical insights into the legal and institutional challenges facing our state.
  
  

Visit our Mitten Channel website for our complete library of podcasts, videos, and articles.

The Mitten Channel is a production of Radio Free Flint Media, LLC. © 2026 All Rights Reserved.

Ryan Lo'Ree, is the former leader of the Rollingwood Skins a white nationalist gang. He participated in this interview. Flint has its share of radical white nationalist groups.

Ryan Lo'Ree is a man with a life story made for a television drama production. He has emerged from the rough and tumble eastside of Flint. He eventually became caught up in Michigan's criminal justice system and joined a local neo-nazi hate group.

Ryan finished a residential school for troubled kids, and eventually joined the U.S. Army. Upon his discharge from military service he was coaxed to join the Buick City Boot Boys who later became the Rollingwood Skins. He immediately used his military training to become a leader in the group dedicated to perpetuating the superiority of the white race.

Eventually his life with the group led him to adult criminal court and a jail sentence. While serving his probationary term, he began to understand the error of his ways.

Eventually he organized a program in Genesee County to work de-radicalize young men who had been caught up in hate groups. Ryan Lo'Ree has organized by his count over 100 rallies across the country for the purpose of opposing hate.

Ryan's path toward rehabilitation eventually led him to run for public office in 2018. While unsuccessful in politics he has found his place in helping others across America to avoid the painful life of hate he previously led.

Join us on The Mitten Channel on Substack.

Subscribe at the Free tier for regular investigative essays and updates.

Or choose the Premium tier for deeper analysis, forensic breakdowns, and exclusive content for paid subscribers.

Visit TheMittenChannel.Substack.com and choose your tier today.

The Mitten Channel is a network of podcasts.  

👉Subscribe to The Mitten Channel

Join us for the full experience. Subscribe to The Mitten Channel on Substack to receive our latest narrative essays, audio stories, and deep-dive reporting directly in your inbox.

Explore Our Series:

• Radio Free Flint: Narrative storytelling and community perspectives on industrial resilience.
• The Mitten Works: Essential history and analysis of labor and economic policy.
• Flint Justice: Critical insights into the legal and institutional challenges facing our state.
  
  

Visit our Mitten Channel website for our complete library of podcasts, videos, and articles.

The Mitten Channel is a production of Radio Free Flint Media, LLC. © 2026 All Rights Reserved.

Daniel Clark, Professor of Business at Oakland University, establishes in his book; Disruption in Detroit: Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar Boom, that autoworkers and the auto industry experienced anything but stable prosperity during the so-called Golden Age of the 1950s.

Professor Clark draws on oral interviews with retired UAW members and archives of regional newspapers. Professor Clark's methods of research prove the mythology surrounding autoworkers during the postwar years was far removed from the lives these men and women actually lived.

It is a bedrock American belief: the 1950s were a golden age of prosperity for autoworkers. Autoworkers were flush with cash from high wages and enjoying the benefits of generous union contracts, The workers became the backbone of a thriving blue-collar middle class.

The popular narrative of a golden age is also a myth.

Professor Daniel J. Clark began his research by interviewing dozens of former autoworkers in the Detroit area. He found a different story--one of economic insecurity marked by frequent layoffs, unrealized contract provisions, and indispensable second jobs.

As Clark reveals, the myths--whether of rising incomes or hard-nosed union bargaining success--came later.

In the 1950s, ordinary autoworkers, union leaders, and auto company executives recognized that although jobs in their industry paid high wages, they were far from steady and often impossible to find.

------

To obtain a copy of Professor Daniel Clark's book Disruption in Detroit: Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar Boom, visit Illinois University Press.

Join us on The Mitten Channel on Substack.

Subscribe at the Free tier for regular investigative essays and updates.

Or choose the Premium tier for deeper analysis, forensic breakdowns, and exclusive content for paid subscribers.

Visit TheMittenChannel.Substack.com and choose your tier today.

The Mitten Channel is a network of podcasts.  

👉Subscribe to The Mitten Channel

Join us for the full experience. Subscribe to The Mitten Channel on Substack to receive our latest narrative essays, audio stories, and deep-dive reporting directly in your inbox.

Explore Our Series:

• Radio Free Flint: Narrative storytelling and community perspectives on industrial resilience.
• The Mitten Works: Essential history and analysis of labor and economic policy.
• Flint Justice: Critical insights into the legal and institutional challenges facing our state.
  
  

Visit our Mitten Channel website for our complete library of podcasts, videos, and articles.

The Mitten Channel is a production of Radio Free Flint Media, LLC. © 2026 All Rights Reserved.

Ang Adamzcik is executive director of Detroit, MI non-profit Arts & Scraps, whose mission is to use recycled industrial scraps to help people of all ages and abilities think, create and learn.

Arts & Scraps provides hands-on learning and creative experiences through programs at its facility and throughout Southeast Michigan with an emphasis in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education.

They provide a community space for creating, and operate a public store that sells recycled materials at low cost  to assist all economic levels. Arts and Scraps provides recycled materials for minimal cost to 3,300 organizations/classrooms annually, impacting 275,000 children while helping the environment by finding ways to reuse those materials.

Arts and Scraps also connects the private and educational sectors by recruiting and recycling 28 tons of material.  The non-profit assists in training disabled people to gain employment skills.

------

• Learn more about Arts and Scraps by visiting their website: https://www.artsandscraps.org/about .
• Visit their social media pages located on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

------

The introductory music "Flint River Blues" is courtesy of singer-songwriter Colton Ort The outro song "Flint, Michigan" is courtesy of singer-songwriter Antje Duvekot

------

Join us on The Mitten Channel on Substack.

Subscribe at the Free tier for regular investigative essays and updates.

Or choose the Premium tier for deeper analysis, forensic breakdowns, and exclusive content for paid subscribers.

Visit TheMittenChannel.Substack.com and choose your tier today.

The Mitten Channel is a network of podcasts.  

👉Subscribe to The Mitten Channel

Join us for the full experience. Subscribe to The Mitten Channel on Substack to receive our latest narrative essays, audio stories, and deep-dive reporting directly in your inbox.

Explore Our Series:

• Radio Free Flint: Narrative storytelling and community perspectives on industrial resilience.
• The Mitten Works: Essential history and analysis of labor and economic policy.
• Flint Justice: Critical insights into the legal and institutional challenges facing our state.
  
  

Visit our Mitten Channel website for our complete library of podcasts, videos, and articles.

The Mitten Channel is a production of Radio Free Flint Media, LLC. © 2026 All Rights Reserved.

In May 1927, one of the deadliest acts of mass violence in American history unfolded in the quiet village of Bath, Michigan.

Over the course of several weeks, Andrew Kehoe, the treasurer of the local school board, secretly wired the Bath Consolidated School—and his own farm—with hundreds of pounds of dynamite. On the morning of May 18, just one day before graduation, a series of explosions tore through the school building, killing 45 people and injuring dozens more, most of them children.

Kehoe was a respected member of the community. His violence was not impulsive. It was deliberate, methodical, and hidden in plain sight.

The bombing also killed Kehoe’s wife, Nellie, and ended with Kehoe himself detonating a truck packed with explosives and scrap metal, killing several more villagers before taking his own life. At the time, the crime seemed beyond comprehension—an isolated horror without precedent.

Nearly a century later, it reads differently.

In this episode, we are joined by John Smolens, award-winning author and longtime chronicler of Michigan life, to discuss his historical novel Day of Days, published by Michigan State University Press. The novel revisits the Bath School bombing not as spectacle, but as lived trauma—tracing how a single morning can permanently alter the moral landscape of a community.

Through the voice of survivor Beatrice Turcott, who recalls the bombing decades later from her deathbed, Day of Days examines how collective trauma endures long after the dead are buried and the wounded appear healed. Smolens explores how memory, silence, and resilience coexist in the aftermath of violence—and how reckoning with the past becomes necessary for surviving the present.

The Bath bombing is often described as an anomaly. This conversation asks a harder question: whether it was instead a harbinger—an early warning of a form of violence that America would come to know all too well.

Join us on The Mitten Channel on Substack.

Subscribe at the Free tier for regular investigative essays and updates.

Or choose the Premium tier for deeper analysis, forensic breakdowns, and exclusive content for paid subscribers.

Visit TheMittenChannel.Substack.com and choose your tier today.

The Mitten Channel is a network of podcasts.  

👉Subscribe to The Mitten Channel

Join us for the full experience. Subscribe to The Mitten Channel on Substack to receive our latest narrative essays, audio stories, and deep-dive reporting directly in your inbox.

Explore Our Series:

• Radio Free Flint: Narrative storytelling and community perspectives on industrial resilience.
• The Mitten Works: Essential history and analysis of labor and economic policy.
• Flint Justice: Critical insights into the legal and institutional challenges facing our state.
  
  

Visit our Mitten Channel website for our complete library of podcasts, videos, and articles.

The Mitten Channel is a production of Radio Free Flint Media, LLC. © 2026 All Rights Reserved.

Veteran broadcaster David O. Norris looks back on a career that helped put Flint on the map as the “Country Music Capitol of the North.”

Norris shares behind-the-mic memories from decades in public and country radio, including his long association with Maybelle Carter and the The Carter Family.

He also tells a remarkable story from the IMA Auditorium: during Johnny Cash’s final tour stop in Flint, an irate fan jumped onstage and tried to start a fight an incident witnessed by Maybelle Carter, with Norris serving as the program announcer. What happened that night became the start of a lifelong friendship.

-----

Special thanks to David O Norris, Rachel Cole, the late Scott McKinstry.

The song Ruuged Road was written and performed by Rachel Cole of Nashville, Tn.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

The Mitten Channel is a network of podcasts.  

👉Subscribe to The Mitten Channel

Join us for the full experience. Subscribe to The Mitten Channel on Substack to receive our latest narrative essays, audio stories, and deep-dive reporting directly in your inbox.

Explore Our Series:

• Radio Free Flint: Narrative storytelling and community perspectives on industrial resilience.
• The Mitten Works: Essential history and analysis of labor and economic policy.
• Flint Justice: Critical insights into the legal and institutional challenges facing our state.
  
  

Visit our Mitten Channel website for our complete library of podcasts, videos, and articles.

The Mitten Channel is a production of Radio Free Flint Media, LLC. © 2026 All Rights Reserved.

Wayne Kramer is an American guitarist, singer, songwriter, author, producer, and film and television composer. He was co-founder of the Detroit rock group MC5, and Rolling Stone named him one of the top 100 guitarists of all time.  Wayne was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan.

Wayne Kramer has written a memoir, The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the Mc5, and My Life of Impossibilities.

The MC5 recorded and performed the song "Kick Out the Jams, which became an anthem for the protest movement of the 1960s. Along with that, came a passion for rock and roll and social & economic justice.

Wayne is now touring again! Check out the story in the Metro Times.

Join us on The Mitten Channel on Substack.

Subscribe at the Free tier for regular investigative essays and updates.

Or choose the Premium tier for deeper analysis, forensic breakdowns, and exclusive content for paid subscribers.

Visit TheMittenChannel.Substack.com and choose your tier today.

The Mitten Channel is a network of podcasts.  

👉Subscribe to The Mitten Channel

Join us for the full experience. Subscribe to The Mitten Channel on Substack to receive our latest narrative essays, audio stories, and deep-dive reporting directly in your inbox.

Explore Our Series:

• Radio Free Flint: Narrative storytelling and community perspectives on industrial resilience.
• The Mitten Works: Essential history and analysis of labor and economic policy.
• Flint Justice: Critical insights into the legal and institutional challenges facing our state.
  
  

Visit our Mitten Channel website for our complete library of podcasts, videos, and articles.

The Mitten Channel is a production of Radio Free Flint Media, LLC. © 2026 All Rights Reserved.

Jack Lessenberry and Flint area Detroit Tiger fans share their special memories of Ernie Harwell in this tribute podcast.

Award- winning journalist Jack Lessenberry, formerly of Michigan Public Radio, was a personal friend of Detroit Tiger broadcaster,

Ernie Harwell was a Michigan cultural icon. He has a special place in the hearts and memories of Tiger fans.

We invited Flint area fans to recount their favorite memories of Ernie.  Included on our guest list are"

• Sue Meisner-Kelly a retired Flint Community Schools teacher,
• Dave Cobb a Flushing resident and retired GM employee, and
• Jeffrey Natchez a Flint area Optometrist who was drafted by the Detroit Tigers and played in their minor league system for a number of years.

Ten years ago in Ernie's final farewell to his fans he said, “I deeply appreciate the people of Michigan. I love their grit, I love the way they face life, I love the family values. And you Tiger fans are the greatest fans of all. No question about that.”.

Ernie Harwell may be gone but his legacy still lives in baseball fans everywhere especially in Flint and Detroit.

------

#ernieharwell #detroittigers #sportsbroadcaster

Join us on The Mitten Channel on Substack.

Subscribe at the Free tier for regular investigative essays and updates.

Or choose the Premium tier for deeper analysis, forensic breakdowns, and exclusive content for paid subscribers.

Visit TheMittenChannel.Substack.com and choose your tier today.

The Mitten Channel is a network of podcasts.  

👉Subscribe to The Mitten Channel

Join us for the full experience. Subscribe to The Mitten Channel on Substack to receive our latest narrative essays, audio stories, and deep-dive reporting directly in your inbox.

Explore Our Series:

• Radio Free Flint: Narrative storytelling and community perspectives on industrial resilience.
• The Mitten Works: Essential history and analysis of labor and economic policy.
• Flint Justice: Critical insights into the legal and institutional challenges facing our state.
  
  

Visit our Mitten Channel website for our complete library of podcasts, videos, and articles.

The Mitten Channel is a production of Radio Free Flint Media, LLC. © 2026 All Rights Reserved.