This month journalist Jemele Hill and fiancé Ian Wallace went back to her hometown of Detroit to celebrate their upcoming nuptials with close family and friends.
According to Detroit’s alternative newsweekly, The Metro Times, the lavish affair was held last Friday at the historic Fisher Mansion, a 16,000-plus-square-foot English Tudor Revival-style home that was built in 1922.
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“It means a lot,” Hill’s mother, Denise Dennard, told the paper. “The community is celebrating with us, friends, and family. It’s just good warm fuzzies all over.”
The theme of the evening was “Endless Love,” and the Motor city crowd was treated to what is described as a, “Motown and party anthem-heavy playlist.” At one point the deejay also couldn’t help but play Diana Ross and Lionel Richie’s 1981 chart-topping duet Endless Love as a nod to the couple.
“She could fit in my hand when she was firstborn,” mused Hill’s father Jerel Brickerson. “Now I can’t pick her up, but I’m really proud of her and I’m glad that she did it her way.”
“We’re all still friends, we all still hang out, we take trips with each other, we work out with each other, every time we see each other it’s laughs the whole weekend,” said Glenn Lott, the groom-to-be’s close friend and former college roommate. “Now, because we got married and some of our other friends are already married, we share that in common, to add on to the legacy of the friendship.”
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Last August, Hill, 43, left ESPN in an “amicable departure” due to a long-standing controversy sparked by her calling President Donald Trump a “white supremacist” on Twitter a year earlier. She moved on to become a staff writer for The Atlantic.
Then in December she took to Instagram to announce her engagement and her new lease on life to her supporters.
“I’ve called this my year of transition,” she wrote of the sweet image of Wallace proposing. “I left a job, started a new job, moved to a new city and now … I’m engaged to the love of my life. I’m overjoyed and immensely blessed.”