KPFA - Making Contact

Today’s episode is preempted by special KPFA Winter Fund Drive programming.

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On this special fund drive show, Brian Edwards-Tiekert talks with David Walker about Frederick Douglass and about the history of the Black Panther party.

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Today, we continue celebrating Black history and heritage with a special encore episode honoring an often forgotten civil rights figure, Bayard Rustin. The organizer of the 1963 march on Washington, Rustin was a trusted advisor to labor leader A. Phillip Randolph and to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As a gay man, a pacifist, and a practitioner of nonviolence, Rustin dedicated his life to racial equality, economic justice, and ending warfare. This episode combines film excerpts, insightful interviews, and speeches from this important contributor to the civil rights movement, who envisioned and organized for the best future.

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When Oklahoma passed a law limiting discussion of race in classrooms, Tulsa activist Kristi Williams rallied the community to create Black History Saturdays. Now, she says entire families are learning who they are by knowing where they come from.

GUESTS:

Kristi Williams – Tulsa activist and Founder of Black History Saturdays

Bracken Klar – Co-Executive Producer of Focus: Black Oklahoma, Vice-President of Tulsa’s Tri-City Collective

Carlos Moreno – member of Tulsa’s Tri-City Collective, journalist and author of The Victory of Greenwood and A Kid’s Book About the Tulsa Race Massacre

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Black Wall Street, or the historically Black neighborhood Greenwood, Oklahoma is the site of a once prosperous, thriving, Black community. It is also the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, a violent attack waged by white supremacists, killing hundreds of residents and leveling homes and businesses.

In this, second episode of our three-part Black History Month series, we discuss how the community rebuilt. In fact, Greenwood’s economic heyday came 20 years later, in the 1940s. Then came the 1950s-60s, when Urban Renewal projects gave the city of Tulsa federal funds to buy out Black landowners. This loss of ownership undercut Greenwood’s very existence. Now, Greenwood Okies, pulling from their history, are building Tulsa’s future, despite continued discrimination.

Guests:

Bracken Klar – Co-Executive Producer of “Focus: Black Oklahoma,” Vice-President of Tulsa’s Tri-City Collective

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In the first of our three-part series leading up to Black History Month, we discuss how journalists and historians today are covering the Tulsa Race Massacre. We hear from KalaLea, host of the critically acclaimed podcast Blindspot: Tulsa Burning. This series tells the story of the rise of Greenwood, a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, also known as Black Wall Street.

We also hear from Bracken Klar and Carlos Moreno of Tulsa’s Tri-City Collective and the radio show Focus: Black Oklahoma, produced in partnership with KOSU. They discuss current efforts to better understand not just the tragedy of the event but also the success of the neighborhood before and after the attack.

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Oppenheimer swept the Golden Globes, but what did it leave out? We talk with Myrriah Gómez, author of the book Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos, about the impact of nuclear colonialism on New Mexico. Then we dig into how nuclear testing during the Cold War led to dangerous and lasting contamination in the Marshall Islands and San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood.

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The problem in America is, America’s been in denial about its problems. And that’s a problem.

America doesn’t have a race problem, in reality we’ve had catastrophes visited on Black people. Catastrophes visited on Indigenous brothers and sisters. Catastrophes visited on Latino brothers and sisters. Catastrophes visited on working people. Catastrophes visited on women of all colors. We can go on and on.

This week on Making Contact, we bring you a talk from noted author, scholar, and self-described intellectual freedom fighter, Dr. Cornel West speaking at the Guild Theater in Sacramento, California in 2023. In his discussion, West uses America’s music legacy as a way to explore catastrophic conditions brought on by our denial of the funk, seen through the impacts of racism on the nation’s health.

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On the forefront of the next labor revolution, we visit a coffee shop in Maine called Little Dog whose workers are starting to organize a union. Then we talk to Robert Chala from the UCLA Labor Center about the rise in unionization efforts among service workers.

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