In this fourth episode of Simply listen: women in dialogue, composition student Soomin Kim talks with pianist Althea Waites, who earned her master-of-music degree from the Yale School of Music in 1965. In 1982, The San Bernardino Sun said Althea “has made the performance of music by Black women composers one of her ‘crusades.’” “I learned not to let anybody else determine what I should be, what I should do,” Althea said in that interview. “Nowadays, they call that ‘women’s liberation.’ In the past, it was just survival, the ability to do and think for oneself.” Soomin talks with Althea about her experiences as a woman of color at Yale and beyond, her 1993 recording Black Diamonds: Althea Waites Plays Music by African-American Composers, her history of and approach to activism, and the idea, in Althea’s words, that “art makes us fully human.”