Midday

Tom is joined in the studio now by Erricka Bridgeford, the co-founder of Baltimore Ceasefire 365, and Letrice Gant, the group's co-organizer.The group’s mission: the cessation of murder in Baltimore City for one weekend, four times a year.The first Baltimore Ceasefire weekend was held in August, 2017. The latest Ceasefire was this past weekend, Nov 1st to 3rd. At this writing, Baltimore police have reported that three men were shot over the weekend, one fatally.Since the death of Freddie Gray in police custody four and a half years ago, more than one thousand, five hundred thirty people have lost their lives to violence in our city. Ms. Bridgeford and Ms. Gant and Baltimore Ceasefire participants have acknowledged many of those victims, their families, and the people who made the decisions to kill them.This conversation was livestreamed on WYPR's Facebook page. Watch the video here.

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In 2016, following the election of Donald Trump, two former Capitol Hill staffers created a Google Doc, mostly for their family and friends, that outlined ways to oppose the Trump agenda. They called it the Indivisible Guide. Not too long after that Google Doc went viral, the Indivisible movement was born. The document was a how-to manual for getting the attention of legislators, and organizing effectively. Thousands of local, grassroots indivisible chapters formed across the country, including one here in Baltimore. Just as the Tea Party had transformed politics, years earlier, Indivisible activists sought to make themselves an unavoidable presence in the lives of Congressional Republicans and Democrats alike. The two staffers who wrote the Indivisible Guide, Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, have written a book called We Are Indivisible: A Blueprint for Democracy After Trump. Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin join me from the studios of NPR in Washington, DC.

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Today, we welcome back to Studio A the singer/songwriter SONiA disappear fear. A Baltimore-based, cause-driven artist, her songs explore the human spirit and address global humanitarian issues. She travels frequently to perform in cities around the world.Over the past 30 years, SONiA has shared the stage with many popular music icons, from Pete Seeger and Joan Baez to superstars such as Bruce Springsteen, Emmy Lou Harris, and Sheryl Crowe.The last time SONiA joined us here in the Midday studio was December 2018, and she’d just released the CD, By My Silence, a collection of songs heavily influenced by her recent travels in Europe. Her latest CD is a collection of songs from Small House, No Secrets, a musical co-written by SONiA and Jody Nusholtz. (Our theater critic, J. Wynn Rousuch, reviewed the musical here on Midday when it played at Fells Point Corner Theatre, as part of the Baltimore Playwrights Festival this past spring.)SONiA will be playing her only USA concert of the year in the Baltimore area on Thursday, November 7 at 7:30pm at The Gordon Center for the Performing Arts in Owings Mills, Maryland. For ticket info, click here. SONiA disappear fear joins Tom Live in Studio A to talk about her music and perform two songs: ----By My Silence---- and ----Washington Work Song.----This segment was streamed live on WYPR's Facebook page. Watch the video here.

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Tom's next guest today is the author of a fascinating new biography of Harriet Tubman, the famed 19th century anti-slavery activist, whose remarkable life story is also the subject of Harriet, the new film by director Kasi Lemmons that's hitting US screens today.Erica Armstrong Dunbar is a professor of history at Rutgers University. Her fascinating new Tubman biography is called She Came to Slay, and it's being published this month by Simon and Schuster.Professor Dunbar will be talking about the new book this Sunday at 1pm at the Brilliant Baltimore Festival, which combines the Baltimore Book Festival and City Lights. For details on her event, click here.Erica Dunbar joins us on the line from the studios of WHYY in Philadelphia.

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Yesterday, with only two Democrats voting against it, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution setting out the process for the next phase of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. This clears the way for public hearings to begin, which may lead to articles of impeachment that the House would vote on at some point, possibly in the near future, just as the presidential primary race gets into full swing. Impeachment isn’t the only issue occupying the House’s attention, although members of both parties and the President are clearly focused on it. But what of the other legislative business of the Congress? Will that come to a halt as the impeachment inquiry unfolds? Will lawmakers be able to avoid another shutdown of the federal government?Tom's first guest today is the House Majority Leader and Maryland's 5th District Congressman Steny Hoyer, who joins us on the line from Capitol Hill.

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Following Parliament’s rejection of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Brexit proposal this week, the EU has once again deferred Britain’s deadline to leave, granting a 90-day extension until January 31.At the center of the Brexit turmoil is the island of Ireland. The sovereign Republic of Ireland is of course a member of the EU, and Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom. Twenty-one years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, which brought a fragile peace to the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, new conflict over a possible customs border has energized calls for a united Ireland. Across the Irish Sea, there is also growing support for a second referendum on Scottish independence. NPR’s London Correspondent Frank Langfitt joins Tom Hall from Belfast with the latest.

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Now, on this Halloween edition of Midday, a conversation about a trope that has long been part of movies and pop culture. We’re talking about the scary psychiatric asylum.Tom is joined by Dr. Troy Rondinone, who has researched and written about what that trope has meant for the stigmatization of mental illness. Rondinone is a historian and a professor of history at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven. And he is the author of a new book called Nightmare Factories: The Asylum in the American Imagination.

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It's Thursday and our theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck joins Tom in the studio us for another of her weekly reviews of the Maryland stage. Today, she tells us about Thoughts of a Colored Man, the powerful new work by playwright Keenan Scott II that's getting its world premiere at Baltimore Center Stage (in a co-production with central New York's Syracuse Stage).Set on a single day in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, Thoughts of a Colored Man explores seven variations on the theme of black male identity, using a blend of language, music and dance. Directed at Baltimore Center Stage by Steve H. Broadnax III, with choreography by Millicent Johnnie, the play features an allegorically-named cast of male characters, performed by actor Jerome Preston Bates as Wisdom, Brandon Dion Gregory as Passion, Forrest McClendon as Depression, Reynaldo Piniella as Lust, Jody Reynard as Happiness, Ryan Jamaal Swain as Love, and Garrett Turner as Anger. The play's two female roles are performed by Ashley Pierre-Louis and Hollie E. Wright. Thoughts of a Colored Man continues at Baltimore Center Stage through Sunday, November 10.

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Tom's guest today is Ophira Eisenberg, the host of NPR’s nationally syndicated comedy trivia show Ask Me Another, which we all listen to Saturday mornings here on WYPR. That show is just one facet of Ophira Eisenberg’s multi-faceted career. She’s a frequent host and contributor to The Moth Radio Hour, and she’s a frequent headliner in comedy venues across the United States, Canada, and Europe.She’s in Baltimore for a one-night standup gig at the Gordon Center for the Performing Arts in Owings Mills tonight, starting at 7:30, but right now, Ophira Eisenberg joins Tom in Studio A! Listeners are welcome to join us as well.The conversation is being livestreamed on WYPR's Facebook page. To watch, click here.

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Today, a conversation about diversity in the news media with Dorothy Butler Gilliam, a journalist who has spent a lifetime breaking down barriers. She has been a journalist for more than six decades. She started in the Black press, working in Louisville, Memphis and Chicago.And then, at the age of 23, she became the first woman of color to be a reporter at The Washington Post. When Ms. Gilliam was hired by The Post in 1961, there were only two people of color in The Post newsroom. Both were men. And of the small handful of women who were reporters, all were white. And they were mostly restricted to writing about so-called “women’s issues.”Dorothy Butler Gilliam began to change all of that. She started her career at The Post as a general assignment reporter, not a women’s reporter. She later worked as an editor and a columnist, as well.Ms. Gilliam helped others break down barriers too. In the mid 1990s, she served as the president of the National Association of Black Journalists, and for decades, she worked with young journalists of color to cultivate their careers. Some of those she helped eventually joined her as journalists at The Post.Her new memoir is called, Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist's Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America.She will be appearing tonight at the Enoch Pratt Central Library in Baltimore as part of the Brown Lecture Series. The event begins at 7 pm.

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