Podcast Episodes

Plessy AND Ferguson—Activism and the Fight for Justice and Equal Rights

Episode 261

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a mixed race shoemaker in New Orleans, was arrested, convicted and fined $25 for taking a seat in a whites-only train car. This was not a random act. It was a carefully planned…

Published on 5 months ago

Pie Down Here: Listening Back—Alabama Sharecroppers and Communist Organizers,1930s

Episode 260

Pie Down Here — Produced by Signal Hill

In the 1980s, when Robin D.G. Kelley was 24 years old, he took a bus trip to the Deep South. He was researching and recording oral histories with farmworkers an…

Published on 5 months, 3 weeks ago

A Tribute to George Foreman: An Unexpected Kitchen—The George Foreman Grill

Episode 259

In 2004, we opened up a phone line on NPR asking people to tell us about their Hidden Kitchens— secret, underground, below the radar cooking, and how people come together through food. One caller tol…

Published on 6 months ago

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston - Revisiting Manzanar

Episode 258

In 1981 The Kitchen Sisters interviewed Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston for a story about life on the homefront during World War II. Jeanne told stories of her childhood growing up in Manzanar, a hastily bu…

Published on 6 months, 2 weeks ago

The Tom Luddy Connection: The Man, The Movies, The Rolodex

Episode 257

Tom Luddy was a quiet titan of cinema. He presided over the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley for some 10 years, co-founded and directed The Telluride Film Festival for nearly 50 years, produced some …

Published on 7 months, 1 week ago

House/Full of Black Women

Episode 256

For almost a dozen years, 34 Black women gathered monthly around a big dining room table in an orange house on Orange Street in Oakland, CA — meeting, cooking, dancing, strategizing — grappling with …

Published on 7 months, 2 weeks ago

Spotlight on Black Pet Care Entrepreneurs

Episode 255

Lured in by a blackboard sign on the street in Davia’s neighborhood announcing “Spotlight on Black Entrepreneurs,” we enter the creative and growing world of Black-Owned Pet Businesses. Lick You Sill…

Published on 8 months ago

The Anti-Inaugural Concert: Leonard Bernstein, Richard Nixon and the "Plea for Peace" music of 1973 Inauguration

Episode 254

Lady Gaga, Marion Anderson, Beyoncé, Frank Sinatra, Pete Seeger, Maya Angelou — musicians and poets have been powerful headliners at inauguration ceremonies across the years signaling change, new beg…

Published on 8 months, 2 weeks ago

A Breach Repairer's Song – The Power of Music in Social Movements

An introduction to the new podcast, A Breach Repairer's Song, produced by Nice Sound Company, hosted by Yara Allen and Rev. William Barber. 

A Breach Repairer's Song is an immersive series soundtracki…

Published on 8 months, 4 weeks ago

Edna Lewis: Christmas in Freetown

Episode 253

Edna Lewis was a legendary American chef, a pioneer of Southern cooking and the author of four books, including The Taste of Country Cooking, her memoir cookbook about growing up in Freetown, Virgini…

Published on 9 months, 1 week ago