Before the 1967 Newark Rebellion, Mayor Hugh Addonizio was getting ready to sign off on a project that would have used one-hundred-and-fifty acres of the city's central ward to erect a state of the art medical school. WBGO's Ang Santos took a stroll with Junius Williams, the director of the Abbot Leadership Institute at Rutgers-Newark, who says that plan would have destroyed the heart of the Newark community. Junius Williams: We’re standing in front of what is called the Stanley S. Bergen

Attorney and Essex County College professor Linda McDonald Carter is tired about reading how terrible things were for those who lived in the Scudder Homes projects in the 1960's. Carter and four of her closest friends from that neighborhood came into WBGO to talk to News Director Doug Doyle about their lives before and after the 1967 Rebellion. Linda McDonald Carter's "community brothers" joined her in the WBGO studios. Yusuf Abdur-Mutakabbir, Reggie Reid, Leon "Pop" Lassiter and Sidney H. Smith

The campaign to close one of New Jersey’s most infamous juvenile detention centers was marked with a rally earlier this week, outside the gateway to a facility that many say is the beginning of the state’s school to prison pipeline. "It’s pretty much like a house of horrors, from the abuse from the guards, to the lack of medical attention, to the lack of educational programming, it was literally hell on earth.” Eric Kussman, now 37 years old, spent two years as a teenager inside New Jersey’s

Television personality, pop culture commentator and adjunct professor Lisa Durden was recently fired by Essex County College after an appearance on Fox News' Tucker Carlson show. WBGO Media Fellow Al Antomattei invited Durden to come into WBGO to talk about her case. Durden says she was unfairly dismissed and that she never associated herself with Essex County College when she was defending a Black Lives Matter event that was held for only people of color. Durden, who has been a regular

To start off, the title of the course was titled “Global Citizenship in a Global World”. Entering the course, I believed that we will be discussing different figurative role models in history, that has made significant change in the world. I was wrong, to a certain degree. I was blown away by the history that was embedded in the city of Newark. Professor Junius Williams, who was a major activists during the Newark Riots, spearheaded the class, with his fabulous stories of his experiences not

Twenty-three-year-old insrumentalist composer Rachel Flowers has spent the entirety of her life developing an ear for music. Born 15 weeks premature, Flowers lost her eyesight at birth. Lorenzo Destefano’s new film ‘Hearing is Believing’ takes us into Rachel Flowers’ world. “We shot for 52 days over almost a two-year period. It got bigger than we expected. It’s about a little girl, in a little town, in a little house, but we found a big story there we feel,” said Destefano. “We call her hyper

Saxophone legend Sonny Rollins is attaching his legacy to Harlem in a big way. He’s donated a life’s worth of writings, recordings and other materials to The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. Rollins recently sat down with Jazz Night In America’s Christian McBride and NPR’s Audie Cornish to talk about it.

Summer movies are about heroes. And in this hyper-sharpened environment of the performance arts, apparently it takes one to know one. This is the season of Hollywood hero movies, which… I mostly skip. What’s Tom Cruise in the Mummy got to say to me? Worse, last week he said he was going to do a Top Gun sequel. He’s 54 now. He was 23 the first time out. What will they call this one, Shogun… or No Gun? Then there’s Transformers: The Last Knight, which I recall vigorously defending first as a toy

Not every New York theatre is a grand palace. WBGO theater critic Michael Bourne is staying busy after the Tony Awards. You can hear his stories of watching productions in places like churches and warehouses by clicking the link above.

Life-long Newark resident Richard Cammarieri was a teenager in the city's central ward in 1967. "There was a sense that things were quite inferment throughout the 60's if you were paying any attention at all," Cammarieri said. "My father worked in a town not too far from Newark. I recall drving with him one day to work. It was probably the second day. Because we were white, we were able to pass through the road blocks and cross checks without any problem. Other cars being stopped had black