African Americans–Civil rights–History

  • Ralph Ellison testimony

    Actuality of Ralph Ellison’s testimony before the Senate subcommittee on executive reorganization examining social conditions in Black Harlem. The committee was chaired by Senator Abraham Ribicoff, former governor of Connecticut.

  • Adam Clayton Powell testimony

    Actuality of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell’s testimony before the Senate subcommittee on executive reorganization examining social conditions in Black Harlem. Powell titled his testimony “Solving the Black urban crisis.” Within the speech, Clayton explains the term that he has coined, “Black power.” The committee was chaired by Senator Abraham Ribicoff, former governor of Connecticut. Bad…

  • Equality and governmental action

    Justice Arthur J. Goldberg delivers the fifth annual James Madison Lecture on February 11, 1964, in which he talks on the role of the judicial system in defending American civil rights. The introduction by Alan Kohn of NYU Law School is not present on this tape. This program is copyrighted by the New York University…

  • Whatsoever a man soweth

    This is a documentary on the Mississippi Civil Rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, prior to the discovery of their bodies in Mississippi in 1964. The documentary begins with Dale Minor narrating the dragging of the Mississippi as they search for the missing bodies. Much of the program revolves around the Council…

  • Conversation with Ishmael Reed

    Eleanor Sully talks with Ishmael Reed, author of “The Free-Lance Pallbearers” and “Yellow Back Radio Broke Down,” about his own work in relation to the tradition of black writing in America. Possibly first aired during Sully’s “New Writers” series on KPFA.

  • Otis Brown Jr. of Indianola, Mississippi

    This is an autobiographical statement from a young Southern Black organizer on his experiences in the Civil Rights movement. Otis Brown, Jr. was one of eleven children born in Indianola, Mississippi. Brown was born August 3, 1945, and he got involved in the civil rights movement in 1965, attending and then teaching at the Freedom…

  • On busing : Richmond School Board, December 18, 1968

    A recording of the dramatic meeting of the Richmond Unified School Board in which compulsory busing of pupils to improve racial balance is debated and finally approved in a 3 to 2 vote. The Board’s decisions was reached after the district attorney of Contra Costa County issued an order that the school district produce, within…

  • Free and brave / James Baldwin.

    James Baldwin talks about American history from the Negro view. Recorded by Lorenz Graham at the Second Baptist Church in Los Angeles.

  • The church and Berkeley School integration

    This is a special radio panel discussion regarding the role of organized religion in the decision by the Berkeley Board of Education to integrate the city’s elementary schools beginning in September 1968. The panelists are the Reverend James Comfort Smith of the St. John’s Presbyterian Church, Reverend Paul Schaffer of the Lutheran Church of the…

  • X-ray procedures and Black people

    Chester Aaron, chief technologist of the X-ray department at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, discusses the common practice of giving Blacks heavier exposure during X-ray procedures. The interviewers are Dennis Lawrence, producer of KPFA’s “Science Report,” and Don Porsche, news director at KPFA.