We have taken up the question and the problem of freedom from various angles of regard, and today we move from an expansive metaphor—freedom as the wide, wide sea—to a material reality—freedom as the concrete act of unlocking the prison gate and walking out, free. We visit with Kathy Boudin, a social justice activist who spent 22 years in a New York State prison, and has, since her release in 2003, helped to organize a remarkable network and a wide range of projects to dismantle the system of mass incarceration.

We’re altering the framework for Episode Eleven because we’ve reached a milestone of sorts—a small milestone, to be sure, but a milestone nonetheless—and, therefore, this offering represents a kind of interlude, a time to reflect and recap, reimagine and rebuild. With ten episodes of Under the Tree live—a decathlon run—and a zillion episodes up ahead, let’s look back at where we’ve been, listen to a few excerpts, and then plunge ahead into a brief dialogue between Ayers, Alim, and Professor Stovall as we prepare for the road ahead.

Life begins in wonder, and so does art—authentic education, too, begins in curiosity, and proceeds through discovery and surprise. Emily Dickinson wrote that “Art lights the slow fuse of possibility,” reminding us that every human being is endowed with the powerful and unique capacity to imagine, and that the arts can help us unleash our deepest human hopes and aspirations, our wildest dreams. We begin to explore the arts and the serious work of making justice with our friend and comrade Lisa Yun Lee, Director of the National Public Housing Museum, Associate Professor of Art History and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a leading cultural activist who describes herself as “intellectually promiscuous.”

Reparations for America’s “original sin”—generational slavery—as well as the long and abiding afterlife of chattel slavery, including Black Codes, poll taxes, Jim Crow, the regime of lynching and white terror, pogroms, red-lining, segregation, voter suppression, and mass incarceration, has moved urgently into the forefront of the national agenda. Malik Alim and Bill Ayers focus their conversation on reparations as both a moral imperative and a multi-dimensional practical necessity before turning to Katherine Franke, a leading scholar on law and racial justice and chair of the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Her most recent book, Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition, takes a clear-eyed look at what might have saved us a century and a half ago, and what it will take to save us today.

Societies organize and build schools which are, of course, set up to serve the goals and interests of their hosts. Schools are both mirror and window: authoritarian schools serve authoritarian societies, and authoritarian nations create autocratic schools. We start this episode with a conversation between Malik Alim and Bill Ayers about the schools we need and the schools we deserve. We then welcome Kevin Kumashiro, author of The Seduction of Common Sense, Against Common Sense, and the forthcoming Surrendered, to help us explore the essential dimensions of an education for free people.

Americans are known across the globe for a singular lack of knowledge about who we are and where we’re located; we collectively have a thin knowledge of both history and geography. Making up less than 5% of the world’s people, we tend toward an exaggerated and narcissistic sense of our place in the larger scheme of things. In this episode we take a closer look at the link between freedom and patriotism, and note the retarding quality of an anemic flag-waving nationalistic loyalty. We’re joined by Prexy Nesbitt, a spirited internationalist and freedom fighter whose efforts over many decades have focused on labor and human rights, Black Freedom and the liberation of Southern Africa.

Malik Alim and Bill Ayers open with a spirited dialogue on the link between defunding the police, abolition, and a vision of a society free of prisons and armed agents of the state. We then turn to a conversation with Alec Karakatsanis, author of Usual Cruelty, a powerful unmasking and reframing of the myths of “the rule of law” and “law enforcement.”