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Episode 55: Heather Booth
With Love at the Center More than a destination, freedom is a constant struggle, a verb as well as a noun. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous assertion that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice may be true, but only if, as he demonstrated with his entire being, we organize and fight to…
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Episode 54: Zayd Ayers Dohrn
Mother Country Radicals We are impatient with radicals who summon up the imagined “good old days” when every campaign was inspired and every action a success—all of it wrapped in the gauzy glow of nostalgia. There’s nothing more depressing than longing for a ship that’s already left the shore. But there are occasions when a…
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Episode 53: Dorothy Burge
Stitch by Stitch: The Threads of Abolition, Pt. II Picking up where we left off in our last episode, we visit with the incomparable Dorothy Burge, activist, story-teller, educator, art-maker, quilter extraordinaire—and a pillar of the abolitionist movement. Mama Dorothy sat down with us at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago a few days before she…
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Episode 52: Dr. Sharbreon Plummer and Rachel Wallis
Stitch by Stitch: The Threads of Abolition Stitch by Stitch is a gathering of artists and activists, quilters and abolitionists to be held in Chicago on July 15, 16, and 17. We’re honored to sit down with two of the Stitch organizers—Dr. Sharbreon Plummer, author of Diasporic Threads: Black Women, Fiber, and Textiles, and Rachel Wallis,…
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Episode 51: Stacey Sutton
Fight/Build! Maroon Spaces and Real Black Utopias We take a turn toward worker cooperatives in this episode, and what is variously called the solidarity economy, community wealth-building, or economic democracy. We explore the power of learning participatory democracy through struggle and collective action with a brilliant scholar/activist/teacher and guide, Stacey Sutton, an Associate Professor in the…
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Episode 50: Searching for the Ghost of John Brown
For this special episode we change things up a bit and journey to the high peaks of the Adirondack Mountains, to the town of North Elba, and to the home and final resting place of the abolitionist John Brown. We come to celebrate one of the greatest freedom fighters in US history, to honor his…
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Episode 49: Wayne Au
The Dialectic of Freedom Everything’s in motion, everything in flux, nothing and no one stays the same: the young become the old, stories get retold, and the blowtorch of history illuminates the path ahead. That’s the way of time—the center cannot hold, and everything that is solid melts into air. I pause and sit down with…
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Episode 48: Tara Betts
I Have a Story to Tell I remember when in 2003 Ruth Simmons, the first Black president of an Ivy League school, launched an investigation into Brown University’s toxic ties to slavery. That illuminating and inspiring effort began with questions: What do we know? Who is visible in history? What stories are missing or suppressed?…
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Episode 47: Xavier McElrath-Bey
A Child is a Child is a Child A Child is a Child is a Child The Convention on the Rights of the Child requires governments to adopt laws, policies, and practices that protect the rights of children and enhance their healthy development. The Convention was adopted by the United Nations on November 20, 1989, signed…
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Episode 46: Renaldo Hudson & Alice Kim
From Death Row to Life! The criminal punishment system is institutionalized dehumanization. It’s organized violence congealed, concentrated, and out of control. The everyday disposal of living human beings is normalized in these spaces—in the name of humanity and solidarity we refuse to become accustomed, and we resist accommodation. We’re joined in conversation with two dazzling…
Under the Tree Podcast
A seminar on freedom with Bill Ayers
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Under the Tree Podcast 