A Public Affair

On today’s show, host Allen Ruff is joined in the studio by Armando Ibarra to celebrate International Workers Day or May Day, a day that has long been one of working class mobilization. Initiated in Chicago in 1886, May Day commemorates organized workers’ strength against oligarchs of the past and present. 

While workers’ movements have made great gains since that first May Day, today’s plutocrats haven’t ceased in their efforts to take away workers’ gains. Across the country today, people are taking to the streets again, demanding dignity and fair treatment. Many events are organized to highlight the centrality of immigrant laborers to the labor movement, like the Voces de la Frontera Day Without Immigrants and Workers events. Ibarra also clarifies that we can’t talk about immigration without talking about American imperialism.

Ruff and Ibarra talk about the social terrain in Wisconsin, including how dependent the dairy and agriculture industries are on Latin American immigrant laborers without authorization. Despite this reality, these communities are heavily policed and viewed as inherently criminal. Ibarra reflects on the protests of 2006, when millions of people took to the streets in response to federal legislation that would have criminalized immigrants without proper authorization and those who aided them. 

Armando Ibarra is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the School for Workers. He’s the co-author of the award winning book, The Latino Question: Politics, Labouring Classes and the Next Left.

Featured image: a Worker’s May Day Rally in Chicago in 2018 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

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On today’s show, host Ali Muldrow is joined by four accomplished Black women who are or have been in public office and who serve in organizations at the executive level. Brandi Grayson, April Kigeya, Sabrina Madison, and Dana Pellebon are local leaders who bring years of expertise and care to their work. However, they face an inordinate amount of scrutiny in their professional and personal lives. 

Muldrow starts the show by reminding listeners of the words of Ida B. Wells, the investigative journalist and a founder of the NAACP, who said that the most dangerous thing a Black woman in America can be is successful. Today’s guests discuss the blowback they’ve received for their successes and how white supremacy is the common denominator driving the myriad ways they’ve been undermined over the years. 

They describe instances of not being treated with equal deference by the press, of being verbally attacked at public meetings and having no one stand up for them, of being harassed in their workplaces, of receiving death threats and more, all within a city that seems to pride itself on its so-called progressivism. Yet each stays at their work because uplifting Black women matters. 

Brandi Grayson is the Founder, CEO, and President of Urban Triage, an organization that empowers Black families to excel and believe in their ability to make a difference in their lives, their families and communities with hope, education, and action. She also owns her own business, Grayson Consulting, LLC.

April Kigeya is a Dane County Supervisor who also holds multiple positions in the community as a Recruiter for Exact Sciences and as a Special Projects Manager for the Foundation for Black Women’s Wellness. 

Sabrina Madison is a Madison Alder and a recognized leader in civic engagement, economic development, and community empowerment. She is also the CEO of The Progress Center for Black Women.

Dana Pellebon is a community activist who has been working against oppression in all forms for her adult life. She is the Executive Director of RCC Sexual Violence Resource Center in Dane County. 

Featured image of April Kigeya, Sabrina Madison, Ali Muldrow, and Brandi Grayson (Dana Pellebon, not pictured). 

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Fifty years ago today, on April 29, 1975, Bonnie Raitt gave a benefit concert with Mose Allison for WORT at the Capitol City Theatre in downtown Madison. This was a major event in the history of our station. On today’s very special edition of A Public Affair, WORT’s Production Coordinator Aaron Scholz is behind the mic to explain why. In addition to a special message from Bonnie Raitt, we hear four interviews with folks who helped coordinate the benefit show, were at the show, or were involved with WORT before we went on the air over six months later. 

In the first interview, Stu Levitan speaks with Glenn Silber about the genesis of the benefit concert. Silber is the director of the Academy Award nominated documentary, The War at Home. In 1975, he was working for a group called People’s Video who were the co-beneficiaries of the Bonnie Raitt benefit concert. Not only was the show a flash point in the history of WORT, it also coincided with the fall of Saigon, as Silber explains.

Next we hear from Don Alan, who was the MC for the concert and later WORT’s News Director. He went on to become the Program Director and Station Manager before he left in 1984 to move to San Francisco. Alan says that he got involved with the creation of WORT because radio was an important part of his life. Fifty years on, WORT still depends on the passion of its volunteers and staff to make great radio and serve the community. 

Mike O’Connor also spoke with Scholz about the nuts and bolts of getting WORT off the ground, including the initial start-up cost for the station of $3,200. Bonnie Raitt’s benefit concert raised one-third of this cost. O’Connor went on to help other community radio stations get their start and co-founded the National Federation of Community Broadcasters.

Our last interview is with Gil Halstead, a retired Wisconsin Public Radio reporter and a regular contributor to a wide variety of programs at WORT including World View, Labor Radio, and the Insurgent Radio Kiosk. Halstead tells Scholz about what it was like to attend the Bonnie Raitt and Mose Allison show. 

If you want to share your experience of the Bonnie Raitt benefit concert, you can email Aaron Scholz at [email protected]. 

Featured image: poster for the 1975 concert featuring Bonnie Raitt and Mose Allison.

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On April 17, a record breaking number of child care advocates marched on the Wisconsin state capital and sent a message to legislators that the state needs to invest $480 million in childcare. According to the Institute for Research on Poverty, without this investment, 1 in 4 childcare providers in the state could shut down. 

To shed light on these changes, host Douglas Haynes is joined by Corrine Hendrickson and Ruth Schmidt, two child care professionals and advocates. Schmidt says that Wisconsin is one of six states that doesn’t put state money into childcare, the only support comes from federal block grants. To address this, advocates are asking for Governor Evers to make an investment in child care in the upcoming budget. 

Schmidt says that free market principles don’t apply to childcare. And there’s a double standard when it comes to how industries are treated: manufacturers in Wisconsin are given a tax break and the state invests $2.5 billion annually in its prison system. But child care workers are underpaid and overworked. Hendrickson says that it’s possible to treat childcare workers this way because feminized labor is devalued in our society.

Unlike K-12 schools or higher education, child care isn’t run like a system. In many respects, it’s good that childcare isn’t run like a system because it allows childcare programs to be community and culturally responsive. But without a concerted investment, Hendrickson says she’ll have to raise her rates. 

You can learn more about child care issues from Raising Wisconsin and A Day Without Childcare on May 12. 

Corrine Hendrickson is a childcare provider in New Glarus. She is a co-founder of Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed, or WECAN, a grassroots advocacy organization aimed at increasing public investment in early childhood.

Ruth Schmidt is the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association. 

Featured image of kids at daycare via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

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In late March, the climate advocacy group Greenpeace was ordered to pay $660 million in damages to Energy Transfer, the oil company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. The grassroots protests against DAPL in 2016 and 2017 were organized by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and Indigenous water protectors. Greenpeace peacefully supported the protests but was charged with defamation by Energy Transfer. 

On today’s show, host Esty Dinur is joined by Cody Hall who reminds listeners of what happened at the Standing Rock protests and No DAPL movement against the incursion of the Energy Transfer oil pipeline. Hall says that the state’s focus on Greenpeace rather than the Indigenous activists is a strategy to control the narrative and send a message to other organizations that they can be targeted. Hall also says that the ruling erases how Standing Rock was an Indigenous-led movement of more than five hundred Indigenous groups. 

The North Dakota ruling in favor of Energy Transfer could have far reaching effects on first-amendment rights and is an alarming instance of a corporation using a lawsuit to intimidate activists. Greenpeace is appealing the verdict. This Wednesday, the organization, Independent Trail Monitors, asked the United Nations to investigate the verdict because of due process violations and attacks on free speech and Indigenous rights.

Cody Hall is a Lakota leader who participated in Standing Rock. He has been interviewed and quoted by media outlets including CNN, Al Jazeera, The Intercept, and Deadspin. He has also been a radio guest for Native American Calling. He founded the Oceti Sakowin Sports Council and the 7 Flames Lacrosse team and makes his home in Kansas City where he raises two daughters while also working towards the elimination of tribal appropriated names and images at one of the largest and oldest school districts in the Midwest.

Featured image of a pipeline protest via Leslie Peterson on Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

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On today’s A Public Affair we’re honoring the life and legacy of Robert McChesney who passed away on March 25. In addition to being a renowned academic and activist who fiercely advocated for independent media, McChesney was also a host on this show. In this episode from 1997, he interviews Allen Ruff about his first book, “We Called Each Other Comrade”: Charles H. Kerr & Company, Radical Publishers. 

Featured image: photo of Bob McChesney.

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Continuing our April theme of talking with poets and artists about the role of art in times of political turmoil, today host Ali Muldrow is joined by three local poets in the studio to talk about their craft and their work in the community.

juj e lepe, Jonny Teklit, and Andrew Chi Keong Yim talk about the competitiveness and performance of slam poetry, how art takes on a greater meaning in moments of social and political upheaval, how to address both human rights violations and joy within their craft, and the storytelling of astrology. All three poets are focused on writing poetry about their families and they share selections of their poetry on air. As they are all poised to graduate this May, they amplify each others’ work with tenderness and humor.

juj e lepe is a first generation Mexican-American poet from Stockton, California. Their poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Harbor Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. They are currently an MFA candidate at UW-Madison. 

Jonny Teklit is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He is currently a second-year MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is working on his debut collection. He has an animal fact for any occasion.

Andrew Chi Keong Yim was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. He was awarded the 2024 New Voices Award in Poetry from Washington Square Review, selected by Terrance Hayes. His poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2024, 32 Poems, Washington Square Review, Bat City Review, and AAWW’s The Margins. He has been a public school teacher in Boston and New York City, and has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and with the Wisconsin Prison Humanities Project.

Featured image: photo of host Ali Muldrow with juj e lepe, Jonny Teklit, and Andrew Chi Keong Yim outside the WORT station by Sara Gabler/WORT.

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On today’s Earth Day edition of A Public Affair, host Patty Peltekos speaks with artist and writer, Julia Bourdet, about her decarbonized journey across the US. With a sketchbook in hand, Bourdet spent seven months traveling by boat, train, and bike from Europe and across the continental US. Along the way she met with environmental activists and Americans of all walks of life during the presidential election cycle of last Fall. 

Bourdet says that traveling is an experience of self-discovery and that bicycling, in particular, is a form of freedom for her. She was inspired to take this trip by the female cyclists in her life and the “shifters” movement in France, those people who embark on living a more sustainable lifestyle. 

What started out as an individual journey of self-discovery transformed into a vision of community, for Bourdet. She learned about the lives and livelihoods of laborers on cargo ships, and the multifaceted reasons people in the US choose to bike: from being nature lovers, sports enthusiasts, commuters, and tourists.

To find out more about Julia’s journey across the US, you can attend her talk, “Two Wheels, Many Stories,” this Sunday, April 27 at 11am at the UW-Arboretum. The event is part of the Nelson Institute’s Earth Fest and is co-sponsored by European Studies and Madison Bikes. 

Julia Bourdet is a graduate of the École Estienne. After a career in advertising, which she quickly rejected for its values, she worked for the press (Fluide Glacial) and publishing (Stock). In 2022, she released her first graphic novel, adapted from a book by Didier Decoin, novelist, screenwriter, and president of the Goncourt Academy, “Le Bureau des Jardins et des Étangs,” which was selected for the ELLE readers’ comic book prize. She has designed numerous book covers and illustrations. 

Featured image courtesy of Julia Bourdet.

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In the spirit of Earth Day, today’s show features an artistic wake-up call about the climate emergency. Host Douglas Haynes is joined by Madison artist, TetraPAKMAN, to talk about his role as artist in residence at the Madison Public Library. His current installation “Wake Up!” and exhibit “Doing Something” are on display at the Central Library through this week. 

They talk about the meaning of “hacking,” the role of humor in communicating difficult subject matter, the recyclability of tetra pak material, and how people are manipulated by corporations and the media about what’s actually happening to our planet. For instance, consumers are sold the lie that natural gas is “clean energy.”

For TetraPAKMAN, art can inspire the viewer’s curiosity and it can also be confrontational and make people uncomfortable. He says that “art is bigger than anything because it’s something we’re making.” In his current exhibit, TetraPAKMAN’s takes bed sheets and paints numbers and dates on them corresponding to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 

TetraPAKMAN was one of the Madison Public Library’s firsts artists in residence in 2013. His practice is focused on community-generated social sculpture projects. His work is about the future, and the challenges we face today as a community. He explores the role of art as a mechanism to generate awareness about the climate crisis.

Featured image: remix of a photo of Douglas Haynes and TetraPAKMAN outside the WORT studio by Sara Gabler/WORT. Photo by Chali Pittman/WORT.

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This Spring, Fred and Germaine Pidgeon have reason to celebrate. On May 3, the Friends of Powers Bluff are hosting a Spring Gathering and Homecoming at present day Powers Bluff County Park in Arpin, Wisconsin, also known as Skunk Hill or Tah-qua-kik. This area was originally home to the Potawatomi, Ho Chunk, Ojibwe, and Menominee People. After years of work by the Pidgeons, the land is being preserved, and this will be celebrated with presentations, walks, crafts, and giveaways. 

The Pidgeons tell host Esty Dinur about the historical and traditional importance of this land, the generations of Native children from this area who were taken and put into boarding schools, the Religious Crimes Code of 1883 that forbade Indigenous people from practicing their traditions and religions, the goblin ferns that grow at Skunk Hill, the work of cataloging the burials at Sunk Hill, and the harmony they want to build in the world.

Later in the show, we’re also joined by Paul DeMain who talks about all the environmental protections that Trump is ending through executive orders and threats to the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and many more.

The Friends of Powers Bluff Spring Gathering & Homecoming will be held on Saturday, May 3 from 10am-3pm. Parking at 7073 County Rd N (1 mile west of Arpin). Shuttles will be available.

Paul DeMain is a citizen of the Oneida Nation and a long time and well known environmental activist. He is speaking with us today from Madeline Island where he participates in environmental organizing for the regional community based organization, Communities United by Water.

Fred Pidgeon is the caretaker of the Skunk Hill Project. He is a descendent of Blackhawk, Redbird, and Red Cloud on the Ho Chunk side, and a descendent of Potawatami chiefs, Wahpausee, Shabonnay, and Nesakah. 

Germaine Pidgeon is Fred’s wife and teammate. She is a graduate of Carroll College and has used her education to research the history of Skunk Hill. 

Featured image: a map of petroforms on Skunk Hill, courtesy of Fred and Germaine Pidgeon.

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