The Pacific Sentinel's Sarah Samms interviews Portland community leader Dre Miller to discuss gun violence and forward thinking approaches to community safety.

Kamala Harris is Joe Biden’s running mate in the 2020 election—she’s a Black woman who holds the distinction of being only the second African-American woman to be elected to the Senate, and the first South Asian-American senator in U.S. history. Her selection to be vice president is historic in many ways, and she stands as only the fourth woman to be nominated to a major-party ticket, after Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Geraldine Ferraro. Almost everyone knows who Hillary Clinton is, and most people are probably at least familiar with Sarah Palin. But Geraldine Ferraro’s groundbreaking 1984 run for vice president may be less familiar to younger people today, who didn’t live through that election.

Ferraro was the first woman to ever run on a major-party ticket, and her running mate Walter Mondale’s decision to choose her for VP was unprecedented. Despite this pick, the Mondale campaign lost in a landslide, and it wasn’t until John McCain’s decision to pick Sarah Palin in 2008 that another woman was nominated for vice president by a major party. Even though the Mondale campaign ultimately lost, Ferraro’s legacy reaches much farther than 1984. On the eve of the 2020 election, when the first woman in U.S. history may be elected to the executive branch, it’s worth looking back at Geraldine Ferraro’s experience on the campaign trail, and how the country reacted to a woman running for one of the most powerful positions in the country.

This is Collective Memory, a podcast on history, collective consciousness, and the forces that drive current events. I’m your host, Nick Gatlin. Today, we’re talking about Geraldine Ferraro.

Original cover art for this episode provided by Sam Garcia.

A transcript of this episode is available by request at pacsentinel.com

The filibuster has changed a lot since its introduction. The use of the filibuster has skyrocketed in recent years, and former President Barack Obama recently called it a “Jim Crow relic,” an obstacle to change. It was used throughout the history of the U.S. to block civil rights legislation, allowing a minority of segregationist senators to block any bill they wanted to. And it’s hugely consequential—it has influenced what legislation has passed out of Congress for over a century and a half.

This is Collective Memory, a podcast on history, collective consciousness, and the forces that drive current events. I’m your host, Nick Gatlin. Today, we’re talking about the filibuster.

Original cover art for this episode provided by Greer Siegel.

A transcript of this episode is available by request at pacsentinel.com

This is Collective Memory, a podcast about history, collective consciousness, and the forces that drive current events. I’m your host, Nick Gatlin. This episode is part three of a three-part series on protest, civil unrest, and police response in the United States. Today, we’re talking about two of the most disruptive incidents in Los Angeles history: the 1965 Watts Riots, and the 1992 Rodney King Riots.

Original cover art for this episode provided by May Walker.

A transcript of this episode is available by request at pacsentinel.com

We’re going to talk about a UAW strike in Flint, Michigan that rocked the world. We’ll discuss the importance of this strike, how people experienced it at the time, and its lasting effects on the American labor movement. We’ll also talk about the numerous tactics the state used to crush the strike, up to and including raids by police armed with tear gas and guns.

Original cover art for this episode provided by Greer Siegel. 

A transcript of this episode is available by request at pacsentinel.com 

This episode, we’re going to focus on one incident in the tumultuous Summer of 1967: the Detroit Race Riot. The riot—or uprising, as many call it—began with a police raid of an illicit bar on the city’s Near West Side, and ended with the U.S. Army and National Guard patrolling the streets, 43 people dead, 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 destroyed buildings. How did it get so bad? How did America react? And most importantly, what did we do afterward?

Transcript available at pacsentinel.com