Urban Roots: Reclaiming Indianapolis’ Black History
Today we head back to Indianapolis with the podcast Urban Roots. In the 1950s and 1960s, Ms. Jean Spears was a young mother and burgeoning preservationist. She saved antiques from houses about to be demolished; she bought a home in a white slum and renovated it; later on, she did the same with a historic home in the black neighborhood near Indiana Avenue. In the eighties, she and some neighbors started digging into this black...
A Making Contact Pride Show!
To celebrate Pride Month, we have a special show featuring stories from the Making Contact archives. We’ll revisit the Stonewall Uprising with the 1989 audio documentary Remembering Stonewall, and then head to the gay rodeo with producer Vanessa Rancaño in a story from 2014. Remembering Stonewall: The Birth of A movement (1989) Narrated by Michael Schirker Produced by David Isay Distributed by Pacifica Radio Archives “All...
Staying in the Fight with Ijeoma Oluo, from In the Meanwhile
In this special guest episode from the podcast In the Meanwhile, co-hosts Marcus Harrison Green and Nora Kenworthy sit down with author and activist Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race; Mediocre: the Dangerous Legacy of White Male America; Be a Revolution) for a searching conversation about movement work, harm, belonging, and the radical choice to stay. Together, they explore the personal cost of speaking truth, the wounds...
Indigenous Intervention: Using Culture in Indigenous Substance Abuse Treatment (Encore)
This episode was originally published as Culture & Spirituality As Substance Use Treatment in Indigenous Communities. In the late 1990s, psychologist Dr. Joseph Gone, a professor and member of the Aaniiih Gros Ventre tribe, returned home during his doctoral training to the Fort Belknap Reservation in north central Montana. There, he set aside Eurocentric concepts of psychology he was learning in school and instead asked tribal...
I Am Not Your Negro: James Baldwin
Master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished, Remember This House. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin’s original words and flood of rich archival material. I Am Not Your Negro is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter. It is a film that questions black representation in...
Remembering Fred Hampton (Encore)
This episode originally aired in 2019. Our radio adaptation of the film, The Murder of Fred Hampton, produced by filmmakers Mike Gray and Howard Alk, provides a glimpse into the life of Hampton and the Illinois Black Panther Party. On December 4th, 1969, exactly 50 years ago, Black Panthers Fred Hampton, age 21, and Mark Clark, age 22, were shot to death by Chicago police. In an infamous moment in Chicago’s history and politics,...


