Madison BookBeat

Stu Levitan welcomes Danielle McGuire, author of the ground-breaking and award-winning book, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance–a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. Danielle clicks on two criteria, as a double alum of the UW and a past presenter at the Wisconsin Book Festival.

It was a little before midnight on September 3, 1944. A 25-yo black woman named Recy Taylor, and two friends were walking home from church in rural Abbeville Alabama when a carload of six white boys with guns & knives kidnapped her, blindfolded her and drove her to a wooded area outside of town, where they raped her repeatedly for more than 3 hours.

Because Recy Taylor’s family and friends knew local law enforcement would not take the matter seriously, they contacted the NAACP office in Montgomery, Local president E. D. Nixon assigned his best investigator, a woman who had once lived in Abbeville before commencing a career in black activism. Her name was Rosa Parks.

What Rosa Parks did before and after she got to Abbeville, and the overwhelming impact of sexualized violence on the civil rights movement is the business that occupies Danielle McGuire in this important book. As it has occupied her since she got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Afro-American Studies here in the late nineties before getting her Ph D from Rutgers.

Danielle McGuire is a native of Janesville Wisconsin who’s been thinking and writing about the role of race in modern America since she read Jonathan Kozol’s book Savage Inequalities as a high school junior in 1991. Her work has had an impact. At the Dark End of the Street won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians and the Lillian Smith Award from the Southern Regional Council. Her Journal of American History essay, “It was Like We Were All Raped: Sexualized Violence, Community Mobilization and the African American Freedom Struggle,” won the A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize for best essay in southern women’s history and was reprinted in the Best Essays in American History. Perhaps most important, her work led to a formal apology from the State of Alabama to Recy Taylor and her family.

Danielle is the editor with John Dittmer of Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement. She is currently at work on a book about the 1967 murder of three young black men in the Algiers Motel in Detroit which, like At The Dark End of the Street, will be published by Knopf. She lives with her husband, two children and a lhasa-poo in metro Detroit.

I had the pleasure of talking with Danielle McGuire on an earlier version of this show, and it is a new pleasure to welcome her now to Madison BookBeat.

Airdate - July 6, 2020

Stu Levitan welcomes UW Professor Emeritus Dennis Dresang, author Patrick J. Lucey:  A Lasting Legacy. It’s the first biography of the late Governor of Wisconsin, and it’s just out from our good friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

Patrick Joseph Lucey was the great-grandson of an Irish immigrant who made his way from County Cork to western Wisconsin in 1862. One hundred years later, Pat Lucey was a trusted friend and advisor to the President of the United States, one of the founders of the Wisconsin Democrat Party, on his way to becoming an influential Governor, American Ambassador to Mexico, and candidate for Vice President. Pat Lucey died in 2014 at age 96. Who Pat Lucey was, and what he accomplished, is the business that occupies Dennis Dresang in this interesting and insightful account of a life well-led.

Dennis Dresang is professor emeritus of public affairs and political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, former chair of its Department of Political Science and founding director of its La Follette School of Public Affairs. For his research and public service on pay equity for women, he received distinguished service awards from the Women's Political Caucus and the Wisconsin Equal Rights Council.

In addition to this biography of Pat Lucey, he is the author of three books and numerous articles on politics, personnel management and public administration. And if all that were not enough, he is also a former Treasurer and VP of the Wisconsin Student Association, delegate to the National Student Association and in 1963 was crowned King of the Military Ball.  It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, my friend Dennis Dresang

Airdate - Sept. 14, 2020

Stu Levitan welcomes Madison’s own Harvey Briggs, co-author of a book that, frankly, may be just a little outside the traditional interests and experiences of the average WORT listener. The book is Rolls-Royce Motor Cars: Making A Legend, a richly illustrated up-close and personal look at the most prestigious motor car in the world, published today by ACC Art Books.

John Lennon had a Rolls-Royce, a 1965 Phantom V Touring Limousine which he had painted a bright yellow floral design around the time of Sgt Pepper. It’s now valued at about $7 million. Jennifer Lopez owns a silver Ghost, as does Justin Beiber. Jay Z and Beyonce own a Phantom 8 and Silver Cloud 3 respectively. Well, you get the idea.

But it’s not who owns a Rolls-Royce that interests Harvey Briggs – it’s who builds them, and how they go about it. Those are the stories he tells in his first book, written with British author Simon Van Booy.

Harvey Briggs is an Emmy Award-winning writer and editor, former name partner in the Madison advertising agency of Lindsay, Stone and Briggs. A native of Detroit Michigan, he comes by his interest in automobiles organically, as the great-grandson of Walter Briggs Sr., manufacturer of automobile bodies, owner of the Detroit Tigers and namesake of Briggs Stadium. Harvey is currently the VP of the Midwest Automotive Media Association, and since 2016, the editor/publisher of the website RidesAndDrives.

Two disclosures before we start. First, Harvey and I have been friends for about 20 years or so and used to collaborate on the scripts for the musical comedy Nakoma neighborhood puts on every year. More recently, I have been the music editor for the aforementioned rides and drives website. That position is unpaid, but has given me the opportunity to drive some nice cars while attending concerts and festivals around the country. And after I am properly vaccinated, I hope to do so again.

It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, my friend Harvey Briggs.

Airdate - Dec. 7, 2020

Stu Levitan welcomes Sarah Kendzior, author of Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America, just out from the good people at Flatiron Press.

Sarah is the first author to appear in a brand-new category of guest, author whose book tour event in Madison was canceled. Sarah was to have had an event at A Room of One's Own tomorrow - and if you’ve lost track of days, that would be Tuesday, April 14. That of course was not to be, so I am very happy to be able to give her a virtual platform here in Madison for her very important new book on the transnational crime syndicate of authoritarian kleptocrats currently masquerading as the United States Government.

Sarah Kendzior is the author of the 2018 New York Times -seller The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America, a collection of her op-ed columns for Al Jazeera English. She is also a columnist for the Globe and Mail of Toronto, author of numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, and the co-host with Andrea Chalupa of the weekly podcast Gaslit Nation, which covers corruption in the Trump administration and the rise of authoritarianism around the world. Needless to say, they have plenty of things to talk about.

Since Madison is a university town, we should properly address her as Dr. Kendzior, in that she has a PhD in anthropology from Washington University in Saint Louis, following her Master’s degree in Central Eurasian Studies from Indiana University.

Sarah is a native of Meriden CT but has lived most of her adult life in the heart of flyover country, the aforementioned St. Louis MO, where St. Louis Magazine profiled her as one of the city’s 15 inspirational people under 35, and in 2017 named her the city’s best journalist.

She is also to my knowledge my first guest whose favorite band is Guns and Roses. So notwithstanding that we have wildly divergent taste in music, it is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, Dr. Sarah Kendzior

Stu Levitan welcomes Ursula Lawrence, television comedy writer, union organizer, recreator of the French Republican Wall Calendar, and so truly a daughter of Madison the great radical newspaper Take Over ran a contest back in the day to help her parents choose a name. Of course, they picked one on their own. She attended Communist summer camp, was a member of Madison West High School Class of 1996, around the time she was also spending time right here at WORT, working on the In Our BackYard news program. She graduated from Oberlin College, got a fellowship to pursue but did not complete a doctorate in Sociology at the University of Michigan, spent a decade in Brooklyn writing and working for the Directors Guild and Writers Guild before moving to Los Angeles for four years. But all that sunshine got too much and she came back home where we are now having the Madison BookBeat Zoom call covering the shortest distance ever, as there are only two houses between us here on the west side of Madison. It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat my friend and neighbor, Ursula Lawrence.

Stu Levitan welcomes a special guest for a special topic on this day after Bob Dylan’s 79th birthday.

We’re joined by The Rev. L. J. Sloman of the Last Exit Before the Freeway Church of God, as seen on WMTV’s The Weekend Starts now with Ben Sidran, a/k/a UW graduate student Larry Sloman, a/k/a Ratso, to talk about a book, and album and a movie. The book is On the Road with Bob Dylan, his epic account of Dylan’s 1975 tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue. The critically acclaimed album is Stubborn Heart, from which that brief snippet of Dylan’s Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands was borrowed, and which includes 8 Ratso originals. The movie is Martin Scorcese’s fascinating and fanciful Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story,” in which he has a featured role – as he did in Dylan’s own movie about that tour, Reynaldo & Clara.

As to Bob Dylan, he is, without question, the greatest singer-songwriter since Homer. And his live performances on that 1975 tour were among his most intense and electrifying in a 60-year career of intense and electrifying performances.

As to Larry Sloman, he has had a career path I both envy and appreciate. A native New Yorker, he made phi beta kappa and graduated magna cum laude from Queens College in 1969, with a degree in sociology. To avoid the draft, he joined Volunteers in Service To America, the domestic peace corps, and was assigned to Milwaukee, where he worked with Father James Groppi’s welfare mothers, and sometimes their daughters.

After a year in VISTA, he accepted a fellowship from the National Institute for Mental Health and came to Madison for his Master’s in Deviance and Criminology, which, as he notes has informed his work ever since.

But more importantly, while here he also became music editor of the Daily Cardinal. Which helped him sell a story to Rolling Stone, after which he wrote for it some more, and then broke big news with a preview of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks album. From there, he got the Rolling Stone gig to cover the Rolling Thunder Revue– at least for a while -- and then wrote the book which Bob Dylan himself calls “the War and Peace of rock and roll.”

Then five years as Editor-in-Chief of High Times magazine, six as Executive Editor of National Lampoon, and a literary career that now includes Steal This Dream: Abbie Hoffman and the Countercultural Revolution in America, Reefer Madness: The History of Marijuana in America, The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of : America’s First Superhero, and Thin Ice: A Season In Hell With the New York Rangers. And best-selling collaborations with radio personality Howard Stern, boxer Mike Tyson, magician David Blaine, Red Hot Chili Peppers singer Anthony Kiedis, and Peter Criss of Kiss. Various side projects, including producing the award-winning music video of Dylan’s song Jokerman. And now he’s a recording artist, as well. As I said, envy and appreciate.

It is a great pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat the legendary Larry Ratso Sloman.

Stu Levitan welcomes Madison native and retired Milwaukee Fire Captain Gregory Renz, author of the award-winning debut novel, Beneath the Flames, and an actual hero.

Guilt. Inner peace. Racism. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Farms and station houses, rural Wisconsin and inner city. Lust and love. Family. Failure. Redemption. These are the themes and settings that occupy Greg Renz in Beneath the Flames, the story of a young dairy farmer and volunteer firefighter from rural Wisconsin and the angry young Black girl he meets and tries to befriend when he becomes a firefighter in inner city Milwaukee.

The occupation was successful; since its publication in 2019, Beneath the Flames has received the gold medal in the Readers’ Favorite International Book Awards, Midwest Book Award, Best Book Award from American Book Fest, and the Public Safety Writers Association award. Needless to say, I’ll say it anyway, it’s a really good read.

Greg Renz was born and raised on Madison’s far east side, and is a Purgolder, East High Class of 1969. He took a BS degree in Zoology from the UW-Madison in 1976, and three years later, after a somewhat ironic stint at Oscar Mayer, began a 29-year career with the Milwaukee Fire Department, including three years at Fire Station 5, at 13th and Reservoir, in the core of the inner city – an experience which directly inspired Beneath the Flames. In 2006, he was inducted into the Wisconsin Fire and Police Hall of Fame for the dangerous, even a bit reckless, rescue of two young boys in 2004. He retired in 2008, moved to Lake Mills, and set about turning his experiences and imagination into prose. It was not a quick or easy process, but the effort was worth it.

It is a pleasure to welcome to Madison Bookbeat, Capt. Greg Renz.

Stu Levitan welcomes Madison native and former WISC TV sports reporter and anchor Jessie Garcia, in a conversation about her book Going For Wisconsin Gold: Stories of Our State’s Olympians, from our good friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

The spine-tingling thrill of victory. The mind-numbing agony of defeat. All on the world’s greatest athletic stage. In the 118 years after the first modern Olympics in 1896, there were more than 400 Olympic athletes with Wisconsin ties. In 2014 alone, more than 35 of the 230 athletes representing the United States were bound to the Badger state in one way or another. Several Wisconsin Olympians are known around the world as among the greatest – or in fact, the greatest – ever to compete in their sport. Some are remembered only in their own small town. Jesse Garcia has focused on 22 of the most captivating stories; some of them you know, many you don’t.

Jesse Garcia’s story is pretty captivating, too. She was born in Madison in 1970 to a Jewish mother from Long Island and a Catholic Mexican-American from Chicago who met while working for Volunteers in Service to America, the so-called domestic peace corps. Her mother turned her on to newspapers at a very early age; a few years later, it would be her step-father, Howard Landsman, who instilled in her a love of sports.

Jessie is our second straight guest who is a graduate of East High School, following last week’s appearance by Greg Renz, but the first Purgolder to have worked as a hostess at the old Ella’s Deli on East Washington Avenue. She went to Boston University, where she became assistant sports editor of the campus newspaper, and one summer got an internship at the sports department with the Madison CBS affiliate, WISC-TV, ch 3. After graduating in 1992, they hired her as a part-time sports reporter – Madison’s first female sports reporter. Less than a month later, when sports director Van Stoutt fell ill, she was pressed into service to become the first female sports anchor in the state of Wisconsin. Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, some sports fans let her know they were not happy hearing their sports news from a young woman.

Well, they were in a minority, because after two years at Channel 3, she stepped up to the Milwaukee market, covering sports for 23 years at WTMJ. Among her duties – hosting both the Mike Holmgren and Mike McCarthy Shows – again, becoming the first woman to host an NFL coach’s show. Those experiences provided the material for her first Historical Society Press book, My life with the Green and Gold: Tales from 20 Years of Sportscasting." During much of that time, and for a little bit afterwards, she was also a journalism instructor at several universities, including Marquette and UW-Milwaukee, while also writing and producing corporate and video documentaries and doing audio narrations. Two years ago this month, she returned to WTMJ as Broadcast Director. Which is why we’re taping this conversation on Sunday morning, because she’s real busy on Monday. It is a pleasure to welcome to MBB, Jessie Garcia.

Welcome to a special Martin Luther King Day episode of Madison BookBeat, where our topic is one of Wisconsin’s greatest civil rights leaders, the late Lloyd Barbee. Our guest is his daughter, Daphne E. Barbee-Wooten, editor of Justice For All Selected Writings of Lloyd A. Barbee, from our friends at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

Lloyd Augustus Barbee was an attorney, a state legislator, and the man who fought and won a 12-year fight to desegregate the Milwaukee public schools.

He was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on August 17, 1925, and he joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) when he was just 12 years old. Barbee served in the navy during WWII. In 1949 he graduated from the all-black Lemoyne College with a B.A. in economics. Later that year, Barbee moved to Madison to attend the University of Wisconsin Law School, but dropped out after his first year because of the racism he encountered among his peers and professors. He eventually returned to the university, however, and received his law degree in 1956.

He was elected president of the Madison branch of the NAACP in 1955. In 1958, he completed a study outlining discriminatory housing practices in Madison. In 1960, as chair of the Mayor’s Commission on Human Rights, he got the Air Force to stop using segregated housing lists for personnel stationed at Truax Air Base. In 1961, he raised funds for a film by UW-Extension instructor Stuart Hanisch exposing racist landlords in Madison – a film the university sought, with some success, to suppress. That same year, he conducted his first civil rights demonstration in support of open housing at the Wisconsin State Capitol. In 1962, as president of the state NAACP, Barbee released the draft of a tough human rights ordinance for Madison banning discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations – an ordinance Madison adopted in 1963,the first fair housing code in the state. But by then, Barbee moved to Milwaukee at the urging of national NAACP leaders, to confront the de facto segregation of the city’s public schools.

In 1964 Barbee organized and led an alliance of civil rights activists dedicated to ending de facto segregation in Milwaukee called the Milwaukee United School Integration Committee (MUSIC). When MPS refused to modify its school policy, the NAACP organized boycotts of MPS schools and operated "freedom schools" in their place. After a year of high-profile MUSIC demonstrations with no positive changes in school board policy, Barbee decided that the only way to enact change would be through the legal system. On June 17, 1965, Barbee filed a federal lawsuit, Amos et al. v. Board of School Directors of the City of Milwaukee, charging the Milwaukee School Board with unconstitutionally maintaining racial segregation in its schools.

Finally, in January of 1976, Federal Judge John Reynolds ruled that Milwaukee Public Schools were indeed segregated unlawfully, prompting the Wisconsin Legislature to enact a school integration program. Although Barbee won the case in 1976, he spent the next several years dealing with appeals, new trials, and work to enact a viable plan to desegregate the school system. Though not perfect, the court decision began to address schooling issues in Milwaukee.

Stu Levitan welcomes Madison’s own Mary Lang Sollinger, founder and former owner of The Peacock clothing store on State Street, activist and community organizer, former mayoral candidate, Democratic fundraiser extraordinaire and now author of the award-winning From Inspiration to Activism: A Personal Journey Through Obama’s Presidential Campaign, published by the good people at Little Creek Press from just down the road in Mineral Point and recently named the Non-Fiction Book of the Year by the Chicago Writers Association. Madison BookBeat airdate on WORT 89.9 FM, January 25, 2021.