Black History Podcast

George Crum - "Leaving Crum(b)s Through History"

October 16, 2017 00:00 - 26 minutes - 11.2 MB

In the United States, potatoes are the second most consumed item, just behind rice. But when potatoes are thin sliced, fried and salted, they go from being the number two consumed food to the number one snack food of choice. George Crum, also known as George Speck, was born in 1824 in Saratoga Springs, New York to a Native American mother and African American father. When he was a young man, Crum worked as a guide in the Adirondack Mountains and an a Native American trader. Eventual...

Curt Flood - "Finding Freedom in Sport"

October 09, 2017 07:29 - 27 minutes - 18.8 MB

“I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. I believe that any system which produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the laws of the United States." Curt Flood was born in Houston, Texas on January 18, 1938, but raised in Oakland, California. In 1956, at age 18, Flood was signed to the Cincinnati Redlegs baseball club, but was ultimately traded to the St. Louis Cardinals in December 1957. Fo...

Francois Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture - For Liberty of Haiti

October 01, 2017 00:00 - 46 minutes - 31.8 MB

Toussaint L’Ouverture’s father was a man named Gaou Guinou, the son of the King of Allada, a west African kingdom located in present-day Benin. L’Ouverture’s father was captured during a war, and subsequently sold into slavery. L’Ouverture’s mother was named Pauline, Guinou's second wife, and L’Ouverture was the oldest child between the married couple. L’Ouverture started life as an enslaved person, and ended as a free man. The Haitian Revolution lasted from approximately 1791 to ...

1966 - The Bayview-Hunter's Point Riot

September 09, 2017 08:05 - 35 minutes - 24.5 MB

On September 27, 1966 a riot broke out in San Francisco's Bayview-Hunters Point, a black neighborhood, when a white police officer shot and killed a seventeen-year-old African American teen, Matthew Johnson, Jr. By the 1960’s, the Bayview-Hunter’s Point neighborhoods were populated predominantly with African Americans and other racial and ethnic minority groups, essentially being isolated from the more desirable San Francisco area. In 1964 and 1965, black neighborhoods in Philadelphi...

Jean-Michel Basquiat - "The Original Social Graffitist"

May 29, 2017 00:00 - 30 minutes - 20.7 MB

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960 in Brooklyn, New York. His ethnic background was Hatian, through his father, and Puerto Rican, through his mother. Basquiat had an interest in art that was developed from his mother’s insistence, and encouragement; but he learned to draw just by teaching himself through practice. By the age of 11, Basquiat was fluent in Spanish, French and English. At 15, Basquiat ran away from home, and slept on park benches in Manhattan’s East Vil...

The Diaspora - From Plymouth to Revolution

April 17, 2017 00:00 - 31 minutes - 72.1 MB

Prior to the Pilgrims arriving to to Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620, people of African descent had been in the United States, since at least 1619. In addition, one of the early settlers of Plymouth Colony was in fact a black man. By the 1640s black Pilgrims were serving in the Plymouth Colony militia. Free African colonists worked hard trying to build a future for their children, but it was nearly impossible, as opportunities for blacks to move up in society were few and far betwee...

Crispus Attucks - "Sacrificed for American Freedom"

April 07, 2017 00:00 - 20 minutes - 47.4 MB

Crispus Attucks was the first casualty of the American Revolution when he was shot and killed at the Boston Massacre, also known as the “Incident on King Street”. Some reports say Attucks was a leader, and instigator of the event, and over the centuries debate rages as to whether he was a hero and patriot, or a rabble rouser. Either way, Attucks is immortalized in African American history and American history as “the first to defy, and the first to die”. Crispus Attucks will always ...

Hannibal Barca - "The Greatest Military Commander in History"

November 14, 2016 00:00 - 31 minutes - 21.9 MB

Carthage was founded in 814 B.C. For most of its history, Carthage was on hostile terms with the Greeks in Sicily and especially with the Roman Republic. These hostilities would culminate in the Greek-Punic Wars (Carthage and Greece) lasting the span of about 375 years, and the Punic Wars (Carthage and Rome) lasting about 115 years. Carthage is known as present day Tunisia at the northern-most tip of the continent of Africa. Hannibal’s father was Hamilcar Barca, who was the leading C...

LeRoy "Satchel" Paige - "A Timeless Talent"

April 07, 2016 00:00 - 44 minutes - 31.7 MB

Leroy Robert Paige was born somewhere around July 7, what we believe to have been 1906 in Mobile, Alabama. Leroy started off scouring local alleyways and cashing in the empty bottles he’d find on the street. His mother sent him to earn money as a child carrying luggage for businessmen at the local train station to the nearby hotels, where he earned the nickname "Satchel". At the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law-Breakers in Mount Meigs, Alabama, Satchel would learn and ...

The Congolese Holocaust

March 08, 2016 04:28 - 49 minutes - 68.1 MB

After the Berlin Conference of 1884 the 905,000 square miles of the Belgian Congo [now the Democratic Republic of the Congo] became the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium. His genocidal exploitation of the territory, particularly the rubber trade, caused many deaths and much suffering. Murder, rape and mutilation were common.

Kathleen Cleaver - A Living Liberator

February 15, 2016 02:17 - 40 minutes - 27.7 MB

Kathleen Neal was born on May 13, 1945 in Memphis, Texas. With two parents who were college graduates, it wouldn’t be tough to see the important role that education and higher learning would go to play in her life; and also the intellect that she would go on to display in her activism work. Her father joined the Foreign Service and the family would spend the next several years in India, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Philippines. These experiences abroad in countries populated mainly ...

Thomas Sankara - The African Che Guevara

January 11, 2016 00:00 - 47 minutes - 109 MB

Burkina Faso is a landlocked country in West Africa surrounded by six (6) countries. As of 2014 the population of the country hovered just over 17.3 million. Not a tiny country, but definitely not very large either. Originally known as the Republic of Upper Volta, Sankara renamed the country “Burkina Faso” in August of 1984. Thomas Isidore Noél Sankara was born December 21, 1949 in Yako, Burkina Faso as the son of Marguerite Sankara and Sambo Joseph Sankara. In high school, Sankar...

Emily Morgan - "Yellow Rose of Texas"

January 06, 2016 00:00 - 33 minutes - 23.2 MB

There are three (3) historical documents that support the existence of an Emily Morgan in connection with the time period immediately surrounding the independence of Texas. Emily ended up catching the eye of Mexican General Santa Anna, and against her will was forced to her tent and kept there for his amusement and entertainment. The legend goes, Santa Anna was so enthralled with Emily’s beauty that he was literally caught with his pants down when Sam Houston and troops rode into t...

Vincente Guerrero - "The First Black President in North America"

December 30, 2015 00:00 - 30 minutes - 27.9 MB

Vicente Ramón Guerrero Saldaña (Spanish: [biˈsente raˈmoŋ ɡeˈreɾo salˈdaɲa]; August 10, 1782 – February 14, 1831) was one of the leading revolutionary generals of the Mexican War of Independence. He fought against Spain for independence in the early 19th century, and later served as President of Mexico. Of Afro-Mestizo descent, he was the grandfather of the Mexican politician and intellectual Vicente Riva Palacio. In November 1810, the revolution for Mexican independence from Spanis...

George Alexander McGuire - "God and Christ are Black"

December 17, 2015 00:00 - 32 minutes - 29.8 MB

George Alexander McGuire was born on March 26, 1866 at Sweets, Antigua, in the Caribbean West Indies. As a child, he studied in local grammar schools on the island, then continued on at the Antiguan branch of Mico College for teachers and eventually at the Moravian Miskey Seminary in the Danish West Indies. McGuire pastored a Moravian congregation at Frederikstad, St. Croix, but when he came to the United States in 1894, he chose to be confirmed in the Protestant Episcopal Church. ...

Susie King Taylor - "Fearless in the Face of Calamity"

December 01, 2015 00:00 - 33 minutes - 31 MB

Susie King Taylor was born a slave, the first of nine children at Grest Farm (35 miles south of Savannah) in Liberty County, Georgia on Aug. 6, 1848. Her mother was a domestic servant for the Grest family. At the age of about five she had mastered the skills of reading and writing. Taylor soon became a skilled reader and writer. Those abilities to read and write proved invaluable to the Union Army as they began to form regiments of African American soldiers. Two days after Fort P...

Marcus Garvey & The Pan-African Movement [UPDATE]

November 23, 2015 00:00 - 34 minutes - 31.5 MB

**UPDATED EPISODE** Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr. was born on August 17, 1887 in Saint Ann’s Bay, Jamaica to Marcus Garvey, Sr. and Sarah Jane Richards. After studying at Birkbeck College in London, in 1914 Garvey, and his first wife - Amy Ashwood Garvey - would organize and start the Universal Nego Improvement Association (the "UNIA") as a "social, friendly, humanitarian, charitable, educational, institutional, constructive and expansive society, and it being founded by persons desirin...

Seneca Village - Eminent Destruction for Progress?

November 19, 2015 00:00 - 34 minutes - 32 MB

Seneca Village may possibly have been Manhattan, New York’s first stable community of African-American property owners ; and it is considered by historians as well to be one of Manhattan’s earliest communities of African-American property owners. Located from 81st to 89th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, the village is a terribly important part of the history of New York City.

The Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes

November 09, 2015 00:00 - 31 minutes - 28.7 MB

With certainty, we can only date Black hockey to the early 1870’s, yet we know that hockey and Black history in Nova Scotia have parallel roots, going back almost 100 years. The Colored Hockey League was like no other hockey or sports league before or since. Approximately half the players in the Coloured Hockey League were from families who came to Canada during the American Revolution; and another quarter had relatives who came across the border through the Underground Railroad. Pr...

Esther Jones - "Boop-Oop-A-Doop"

November 02, 2015 00:00 - 31 minutes - 28.6 MB

Betty Boop is one of the most iconic cartoon characters of all time, a virtual sex symbol created during a time where bold women were often frowned upon. The character’s signature vocals stood out, but she wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for a Black woman in Harlem who inspired the style. Those famous words “Boop-Oop-A-Doop” that are so famously associated with Betty Boop, and the girlish “booping” style, were first sung and performed on stage in the Harlem Cotton Club by a jazz singer...

Haile Selassie & Modern Rastafarianism (pt. 2)

October 27, 2015 00:00 - 45 minutes - 41.5 MB

Rastafari is a belief which developed in Jamaica in the 1930s, following the coronation of Haile Selassie I as Emperor of Ethiopia in 1930. Its adherents worship Haile Selassie I, emperor of Ethiopia (ruled 1930–1974), much in the same way as Jesus, or as God the Father. Members of the Rastafari way of life are known as Rastafari, Rastas, or simply Ras. The name Rastafari is taken from Ras Tafari, the title (Ras) and first name (Tafari Makonnen) of Haile Selassie I before his corona...