This audio project is a supplement to the Catalyst Project Anne Braden Anti-Racist Training Program. These audio pieces are meant to be used in conjunction with the program’s political education reader. Too often radical history is kept from the people. Here you can hear the powerful voices and thoughts of people involved in the historic movements for racial and economic justice.
Hopefully you will find them inspiring and share them with your family, loved ones and communities.
As you listen, keep in mind some overarching themes:
- Land – how do people express their connection to and struggle for land?
- History – how have these activists connected to the history of their own people's struggles?
- Culture – how have movements used the power of poetry and song to strengthen their resistance?
Audio History
You can listen by clicking on the track title - on new page click play .
In this speech given in 1963 James Baldwin addresses the genocide and slave labor that is largely denied by the history of the 'formation' of the United States.
- Buffy Saint Marie - My Country Tis of Thy People You’re Dying – about boarding schools and falsified history
- Joanne Tall – about the ongoing genocidal impact of boarding schools, how religion forces assimilation, the 1973 Liberation of Wounded Knee and how it impacted her and her people.
- Chant in resistance to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (the BIA), by Native-American activists
- “Radio Free Alcatraz” broadcast by the Indians of All Tribes on Alcatraz in 1969 – John Trudell, Richard Oakes and Don Cooney.
- Wounded Knee mix with sounds of the American Indian Movement (AIM) – occupation, shots, FBI radio messages, and the voices of Dennis Banks and Carter Camp. Wounded Knee was also the site of an 1890 genocidal massacre of the Sioux Nation by the US cavalry.
- Sweet Honey In The Rock – Give Your Hands to Struggle
- James Baldwin – about his visit to a slave station near Dakar in Senegal. He expresses his pain as he tries to imagine how the slaves might have felt as they awaited the middle passage. How they were met with the gun and the bible when they arrived and how white America denies and even justifies this history
- Sweet Honey In The Rock continued
- Freedom medley – a mix of songs from the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960’s
- Malcolm X on Black Nationalism as a response to US Colonialism
- Assata Shakur reads her poem Carry It On tracing the history of Black resistance to white supremacy
- Amandla!
- Winnie Mandella talks about the role of Black mothers in South Africa, Afrikaaners, the necessity to destroy apartheid.
- People Shall Govern from Radio Free South Africa
- Winnie Mandella about the grassroots struggle, the Black Women’s Federation, prison and political education
- Toi Toi song
- Winnie Mandella on the creation of the Freedom Charter by the ANC, hope for the freedom of South Africa
- Toi Toi song
- Amilcar Cabral
- Winnie Mandela
- Nelson Mandela
- Chris Hani
- South African national anthem
- Arab student
- June Jordan
How to Download
- in Windows, right-click and save to disk;
- Mac OS 9 users click and hold, Download Link to Disk;
- Mac OS X users, click once and file will open in Quicktime or your favorite audio player.
- Note: same large 26.5 MB mp3 file - saves to disk for play any time.
