Asked about the appropriateness of hosting Farrakhan, who has been denounced by the Anti Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and politicians across the political spectrum, the spokesperson said, "As a public facility, TCF Center hosts organizations that comply with the standard contractual obligations presented to every event organizer." The spokesperson said that the TCF Center would make no further statements on the matter.
The five-member Detroit Regional Convention Facility Authority (DRCFA) board that oversees the TCF Center is appointed by the state of Michigan, the city of Detroit, and Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties. Representatives of the state of Michigan and city of Detroit did not respond to requests for comment on the matter. The media representative for TCF Bank, the corporation that recently purchased the naming rights for the TCF Center did not reply to an email seeking comment.
The 2019 Saviour's Day convention was held at Chicago's United Center. As The Script reported in February 2019, the United Center deleted all references to the 2019 convention on its website and its Twitter account shortly after the convention's conclusion. A review of the United Center's website and Twitter account showed that deleting reference to past activities hosted at the center was not the norm. The United Center did not respond to inquiries regarding hosting the event or the subsequent deletions.
The Nation of Islam's Saviour's Day convention has traditionally been a mix of Louis Farrakhan's positive messages of community and responsibility and promotion of conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic rhetoric. The 2017 convention (also at the Cobo Center) featured a symposium hosted by three 9/11 Truthers:
At the 2018 convention, Farrakhan said "the powerful Jews are my enemy" and "Farrakhan, by God's grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew and I'm here to say your time is up, your world is through." Last year, Farrakhan chided Jews for insisting on exclusive use of "The Holocaust" for the genocide of Jews by Hitler, saying, "[T]o them, the suffering of six million Jews is worth seven billion human beings on our planet."
Although Louis Farrakhan's Twitter account has apparently been frozen by Twitter, the Nation of Islam has been promoting the 2020 Saviour's Day convention at the TCF Center on its own account. While the TCF Center's Twitter account has not mentioned the upcoming event, the TCF Center website does list the event currently scheduled for February 20-23, 2020 as shown below.
The schedule for this year's Saviour's Day includes seminars and breakout sessions such as "The Black Man and Woman MUST Consider Separation Town Hall Meeting," "The Human Sex Trafficking Crisis," "Prison Ministry: Unjust Incarceration and the Death Penalty," and a documentary film, "Pushout: Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools." Farrakhan's keynote address on Sunday is entitled "The Unraveling of a Great Nation." While Farrakhan's keynote has been given at Detroit's Joe Louis Arena, adjacent to the TCF Center, in the past, the arena is currently bing demolished, so Farrakhan's address will be at the TCF Center itself in 2020.
