517 Jackson Weekend 2026
Hakim Crampton drove past his grandmother’s house yesterday. It’s the address printed on his birth certificate, the house where he was born into a family that had come up from Memphis through Missouri and arrived in Jackson in 1964. His cousin’s grandmother lived on Robinson Street for over 70 years until the family lost it. His father passed away in a house three lots from where Crampton is standing now.
“The south side is our ancestral hub,” he says.
In 2019, Crampton threw a party here. He called it the Southside Summerfest.
Crampton is 53, a registered lobbyist in Michigan, an author of nine books, and a criminal justice reform consultant who works schools and nonprofits and reentry programs. After his family moved to Jackson, the crack epidemic that swept the United States in the 1980s swept through Jackson.
“When you’re a teenager and your friends start getting shot, I was one of those kids that didn’t know what to do,” he says.
He was arrested for the first time in sixth grade, sent to juvenile, and emerged a convicted felon at twelve years old. Unwelcome in schools, Crampton went to the streets instead.
At 19, he ended up in Milwaukee and was arrested after a fight at a liquor store. “During interrogation, detectives started playing games and tactics, asking us if we knew anything about any of the other crimes in the community,” he says. “One of them was a murder.” Detectives told each young man his friends had already confessed. None of them had. One friend broke after five days, told the detectives what they wanted to hear, and Crampton was found guilty of murder. He was sentenced to 45 years.
“I always knew one day I was gonna get out because I was innocent,” Crampton says. “I just never knew when.”
The Wisconsin Innocence Project eventually picked up Crampton’s case. With that, a group of students at the University of Wisconsin Law school provided legal services to help prove his innocence. Eventually, Crampton ended up in front of a parole chairman who knew the detective who had run the interrogation and understood exactly how those tactics could produce a case like Crampton’s.
“It took me 15 years to win my freedom and come home,” he says.
He came home in 2006. He came back to the south side of Jackson.
“I always had a sense of giving back to the community that I was raised in,” he says. “So that became my goal.”
In 2018, Crampton, along with Yhosef Ware and a team of Jackson artists created mural on a building along the south side corridor. In the centerfold of its design appear businesses that once thrived on this stretch: Ebony Records, Milky Way ice cream…
“We believed that the mural could be a centerpiece for the resurgence of the south side as a cultural institution,” Crampton says.
The mural grew into a festival, and the festival grew the way most community institutions grow: accidentally, then deliberately, then with a force its founders couldn’t fully predict.
In 2018, the mural reveal. 2019, the first year of the Summerfest. 2020, Covid. That year Crampton and Ware painted Black Lives Matter in graffiti on the street and so many people showed up that they realized they needed a bigger venue. In 2021, they ran a series of four festivals across the summer: Black Arts Fest, an entrepreneur’s festival, a Juneteenth celebration, Summerfest—one per weekend. The festival series continued for several years until last year, when they consolidated into a full three-day weekend at Exchange Park.
This year, the festival weekend is called the 517 Jackson Weekend.
Along with the events and activities attendees have seen in previous years, there are new additions this year, too: Friday night poetry, a comedy jam, a local authors expo, and the first-ever Black and Minority Business Awards.
(VIDEO FROM 2025)
“We’re going to bring the Black and minority business community together under the same roof on the same night to introduce ourselves to each other,” Crampton says. It’s his hope that the connection the Honors event makes helps connect businesses and entrepreneurs in ways that support each other throughout the rest of the year.
It’s his belief in the power of connection that led Crampton to start a newspaper. The idea began as marketing for Summerfest, then it turned into something else. Small businesses advertising in the journal. $75 for a quarter page. $300 for a feature. The paper goes throughout the 517 area and into Lansing. Some of those small businesses, Crampton says, started at a folding table in a parking lot and are now staple businesses in the community.
“That was the real goal of it,” he says. “To give the community the capacity to sustain themselves. The Southside Festival Series isn’t trying to be a central organization, but another opportunity among many opportunities. When you gather your business community together, your entrepreneurs, your startup companies, your cultural and your arts together, when you bring all those pieces together, you create a sustainable cultural institution that gives capacity for the community to thrive.”
Whether it’s a festival or a business honor, Crampton says he wants the work he and others are doing to remind the people of Jackson, and particularly those on the south side, to remember what they can accomplish.
“When you forget who you are,” Crampton says, “you don’t know what you’re capable of doing. And we are capable of doing so much.”
-Hakim Crampton
Jackson’s South Side Community
Southside Festival Series
517 Jackson Weekend
Southside Mural
1408 Martin Luther King Jr. Dr., Jackson, MI 49203
The Southside Mural, located at 1408 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive near Hampton Place Barbershop, is an 8×36 foot artwork celebrating Jackson’s history and community, unveiled in 2019. Created by local artists including Yhosef Ware, it depicts influential figures, local leaders, and youth, serving as a landmark along the MLK Equality Trail.
