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Tag Archives: black power

Interchange – From Another Country: Bill Mullen on James Baldwin’s Revolutionary Life

The title of our opening song, performed by Deacon Tom Jones, from the compilation album Mississippi Saints and Sinners, “If I Had My Way I’d Tear this Building Down,” serves as an epigraph to Baldwin’s 1972 masterpiece, the essay collection No Name in the Street, which features heavily in our program today. Born on August 2nd, 1924 in Harlem James …

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January 17, 2020: Combat and Incarceration, Part One

This week starts our series of conversations with Valrice “Whop” Cooper, the legendary cornerman who learned his craft training prisoners in the Louisiana DOC’s boxing program. For this episode, we discuss his thirty-five-year prison term that began in 1976 at the age of 17, and how coming into contact with the Black Power movement- one of the first recognized prison …

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October 26, 2018: The Long History of Black Resistance and Mass Incarceration

In this interview, Elizabeth Hinton sketches the relationship between the civil rights movement, urban uprisings and the beginning of the “War on Crime,” with a focus on the Harlem Riot of 1964, and the1 965 Watts Rebellion, which was triggered by police brutality and became a key law-and-order talking point.  She then moves through a range of problems within the …

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August 24, 2018: The Real Dragon- George Jackson’s Legacy and the National Prison Strike

This week, we’re sharing selections from an historic interview with George Jackson, whose assassination on August 21, 1971, at the hands of San Quentin prison guards, remains a reference point for the US prisoners’ movement.  Indeed, Jailhouse Lawyers Speak called for the 2018 strike to begin on this date in his memory. George Jackson spent much of his life in …

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Interchange – Moderation In Dark Times: Aurelian Craiutu

We’ll open with “Tensions” by Charles Mingus, recorded in 1959 and released in 1960 on the album Blues & Roots. About the album Mingus wrote that it’s “unusual” presenting only one aspect of his musical world, the blues. “Some people, particularly critics, were saying I didn’t swing enough. [The record’s producer] wanted to give them a barrage of soul music: …

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Interchange – Becoming African in America: The Radical Politics of Fela Kuti

This is a special 90-minute show, live from The Atlas Bar, featuring the music and protest politics of Fela Kuti, the Nigerian multi-instrumentalist, musician, composer, pioneer of the Afrobeat music genre, and human rights activist. Fela Kuti died of complications from AIDS in 1997 at the age of 58 but his music has seen a resurgence even inspiring the perhaps …

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