'Blast from the Past' features and excerpt from an early 1970s Say Brother interview with musician Jerry 'Iceman' Butler where he talks about the difficulties for new performers to be given air time, especially African American musicians.

'Blast from the Past' features an excerpt from a 1971 interview with vocalist Miriam Makeba. She talks about her concerts in Europe and Africa, as well as her marriage to Stokely Carmichael and how this has affected her singing career.

Excerpt from compilation program featuring the Boston Art Ensemble performing in the Say Brother studio.

When 30,000 largely immigrant workers walked out of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile mills in January 1912, they launched one of the epic confrontations between capital and labor. The strike began in part because of unsafe working conditions in the mills, which were described in graphic detail in the testimony that fourteen-year-old millworker Camella Teoli delivered before a U.S. Congressional hearing in March 1912. Her testimony (a portion of which was included here) about losing her hair when it got caught in a textile machine she was operating gained national headlines in 1912--in part because Helen Herron Taft, the wife of the president, was in the audience when Teoli testified. The resulting publicity helped secure a strike victory.

Cannonball Adderley and the Cannonball Express. Program contains numerous 'magazine-style' segments, of which the most prominent is host John Slade's interview with musician Cannonball Adderley. Accompanying the interview, in segments before and after, is performance footage of Adderley's jazz band Cannonball Express (with Bobby Timmons, Walter Booker and Roy McCurdy) shot live at Paul's Mall in Boston the night before the interview. Other segments include a performance by the Immala Blakely Dancers, an interview with Harvard psychiatry professor Dr. Alvin Pouissant about his book Why Blacks Kill Blacks, a demonstration of self-defense techniques using karate with black belt Harry Gardner, and a performance by jazz group The J.R. Mitchell Experience. Produced by John Slade. Directed by Russell Tillman.

Alvin Pouissant on the rise of Black on Black murders. Program consists of a number of magazine-style segments, including a Stephen Curwood interview with Dr. Patricia Frazier (of Robert B. Brigham Hospital) and Henrietta Aladjem (author of the book, The Sun Is My Enemy) on the disease lupus, two studio performances by Stanton Davis and the Ghetto Mysticism Band (who perform 'Funkified Tofu' and 'Crescent Gypsies'), an 'Open Platform' debate moderated by Melvin Moore on whether or not Massachusetts should fund Medicaid abortions (with debaters Dr. Mildred Jefferson, President of the both the Massachusetts and the National Right to Life committees, and Niki Nichols Gamble, Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, and panel reporters James Drummey, news editor of Review of The News magazine and Susan Sprecher of WBCN Radio), the 'Say Brother News' with Karen Holmes, Margaret Tarter, Leah Fletcher, Eric Sampedro, and Tanya Hart, and the 'Community Calendar.' Tarter's report features an interview with Jack Hayes, editor of The Circle (a Boston paper for Native American residents); Fletcher's report features an interview with Dr. Alvin Pouissant, who discusses 'Black on Black' violence and the reasons for it. Produced by Barbara Barrow. Directed by David De Barger.

Dr. Emillio Carillo comments on healthcare in the Latino community. Program examines a number of health issues, with a focus on the needs of the Latino and Black community. Host Eduardo Diaz interviews Dr. Emilio Carrillo, cofounder of the Boricua Health Organization of Boston, to discuss problems related to healthcare delivery to Boston's Latino population. 'Encore' segments include 1974 interviews conducted by former Say Brother writer/researcher Dighton Spooner with Dr. Houston Kelly (on hypertension and the diet of the African American community), Dr. Louis Sullivan of the Boston Sickle Cell Center (on the physical and political implications of sickle cell anemia), and Howard Hughes, Director of the Dimock Community Health Center's alcoholism program (on recognizing and treating alcohol problems). Program includes a brief narrated segment (also from 1974) on lead paint poisoning and a short interview segment with African artist El Loco conducted by Barbara Barrow, in which Loco explains the symbolism of his work. Dr. Sullivan went on to become Secretary of Heath and Human Services under President Carter. Produced by Barbara Barrow. Directed by David De Barger.

Dinizulu Kamau and Abdullah Khalil Sabree comment on the Hakim Jamal murder case. Part two of Say Brother's discussion of the harsh sentencing of African Americans in the Massachusetts court system. Program focuses on the history of the De Mau Mau (a Black Panthers-type group organized by African American veterans returning from the Vietnam War) and the five Boston-based De Mau Mau members convicted in the murder of Hakim Jamal. In documentary format, Barbara Barrow-Murray speaks with Philip Key (Boston's De Mau Mau leader), Walpole inmates Dinizulu Kamau and Abdullah Khalil Sabree (convicted of Jamal's murder) and Mrs. Gaskin ('Mama G.,' mother of the appointed De Mau Mau leader after Key went into hiding) about the De Mau Mau, the events of the day Jamal was murdered, and the legal battle that followed. Program includes brief commentary by Larry Gaines (Chairman of the Citywide Coalition for Justice and Equality) and Saundra Carney (Coordinator for Brown, Clinkscales and Johnson Support Committee). Produced by Barbara Barrow-Murray. Directed by Brian Clarke.

In 1894, a strike at the Pullman Palace Car Company spread across the nation as the American Railway Union organized a national boycott and strike against all trains hauling Pullman cars. Strikers were met with the full force of company and government might. Thirty-four people were killed in two weeks of clashes between troops and workers across the nation. An ardent admirer of the military, artist-reporter Frederic Remington displayed no sympathy for the Pullman strikers in his reports for Harper's Weekly. Endorsing suppression, Remington described the strikers as a "malodorous crowd of foreign trash" talking "Hungarian or Polack, or whatever the stuff is."

In this autobiographical sketch published in 1903 in the Independent magazine (which ran a series of about eighty short autobiographical "lifelets" of "undistinguished Americans" between 1902 and 1906), Chinese immigrant Lee Chew looked back on his passage to America, and his years as a launderer and merchant on both the East and West coasts.

In the late 19th century, Irish-Catholic immigrants and their children were a bulwark of the New York Democratic Party and especially the machine politicians of Tammany Hall. In the mayoral election of 1886, Tammany fought hard to retain the support of these Irish-Catholic voters in the race between Democrat Abram Hewitt and United Labor Party candidate Henry George. While Catholic Church leaders opposed George and actively worked to prevent his election, Father Edward McGlynn enthusiastically backed his candidacy and praised him in this 1886 interview. Several years earlier McGlynn had read George's Progress and Poverty and had become a committed supporter of his single-tax economic theories. McGlynn's persistent labor activism led to his excommunication in 1887. Although pressure from liberal Catholics brought about his reinstatement in 1892, his superior soon transferred him to upstate New York--thereby removing his voice from the local labor scene.

'Black Nativity.'A Say Brother special presentation, 'Christmas in Color', features the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts' musical adaptation of Langston Hughes' 'Black Nativity,' which was performed in-studio. Additional segments include a mime performance by Halim Adbur Rashid (Fred Johnson) and a 'Christmas Cabaret' featuring four songs by vocalist Chip Garnett with back-up vocalists Cheryl Freeman and Sheryl Shell. Produced by Barbara Barrow-Murray.

This course will serve as both an introduction to contemporary political philosophy and a way to explore issues of pluralism and multiculturalism. Racial and ethnic groups, national minorities, aboriginals, women, sexual minorities, and other groups have organized to highlight injustice and demand recognition and accommodation on the basis of their differences. In practice, democratic states have granted a variety of group-differentiated rights, such as exemptions from generally applicable laws, special representation rights, language rights, or limited self-government rights, to different types of groups. This course will examine how different theories of citizenship address the challenges raised by different forms of pluralism. We will focus in particular on the following questions: - Does justice require granting group-differentiated rights? - Do group-differentiated rights conflict with liberal and democratic commitments to equality and justice for all citizens? - What, if anything, can hold a multi-religious, multicultural society together? Why should the citizens of such a society want to hold together?

In 1890, two competing organizations working to gain the right to vote for women joined forces to form the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA campaigned diligently for the vote in a variety of ways, but did not achieve success until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. This prolonged struggle entangled female activists in other important political and moral issues that divided the nation along racial, ethnic, and class lines, and debates over the vote for women often took a divisive tone. Some white women suffrage leaders were willing to use class, ethnic, and racial arguments to bolster the case for granting white women the vote. In 1894 (a year of extraordinary class conflict that included the national Pullman and coal strikes), Carrie Chapman Catt addressed an Iowa suffrage gathering and maintained that women's suffrage was necessary to counter "the ignorant foreign vote" in American cities and protect the life and property of native-born Americans.

The San Francisco Building Trades Council (BTC), organized in 1898, actively participated in the anti-Asian agitation that characterized California politics, particularly labor politics, in the late-19th century. The BTC, like the national American Federation of Labor (AFL), argued that the very presence of Chinese (and, after 1900, Japanese and Korean immigrants as well) dragged down the living standards of white workers. The following excerpt is from a 1902 AFL pamphlet entitled Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat vs. Rice, which called for a second extension of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Despite the pamphlet's disclaimer that it was not prejudiced, arguments were riddled with racist statements about the employment history and "Social Habits" of "John Chinaman." The selections from the pamphlet reprinted here reflected the abiding beliefs of many white workers, especially skilled workers who belonged to the San Francisco BTC.

Chuck Turner interview. Program focuses on the origin and work of the Community Fellows Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Host Topper Carew interviews Frank Jones (Program Director of Community Fellows Program), Mel King (State Representative and Assistant Director of the Community Fellows Program), and fellows Pat Raynor (an Equal Employment Opportunity Officer), Chuck Turner (Director of the Circle Association), Johnny Tillman (Executive Director of the National Welfare Rights Organization), and Frieda Garcia (Community Fellow) about their projects, the influence of the program, and their feelings about being a fellow. Includes footage of a portion of one the Program's 'seminar' meetings (in which Fredda Garcia presents her work on Puerto Rican and Dominican populations) and footage of Topper Carew talking about his involvement with the Community Fellows (Carew was a fellow prior to becoming producer of Say Brother). The Community Fellows Program provides a stipend, tuition, and research funds for a diverse population of individuals from the community so that they can partner with an academic institution to effect change. The program was founded by Mel King, who served as its Director until 1996. Produced by Topper Carew. Directed by Conrad White.

Action for Boston Community Development. Program discusses a variety of topics via a magazine-style format. Host John Slade introduces a moderated discussion led by Say Brother filmmaker Henry Johnson with Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) employees Barbara Brydie, Arnett Waters, and Russell Hill (who discuss the agency's threatened status due to a proposed withdrawal of federal aid in President Nixon's proposed budget), an interview and performance by vocalist Eddie B. with the Contemporary Jazz Trio; and an interview conducted by John Slade with Helaine Simmonds, Clarence Dilday, and Benjamin Jones of the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association (on Governor Francis Williams Sargent's judgeship nominations). Produced by John Slade. Directed by Russell Tillman.

Francis Daniel Pastorius arrived in Pennsylvania in 1683, commissioned by the Frankfort Land Company and a group of German merchants to obtain 15,000 acres of land for a settlement in the new colony of Pennsylvania. Pastorius, well educated in European universities, reported back to his friends in Germany. This report was later published as Positive Information From America, concerning the Country of Pennsylvania by a German who Traveled There (1684), a promotional tract to encourage other Germans to immigrate. Pastorius found the journey to be difficult but the prospects attractive. He remarked notably upon the ethnic and religious complexity of the colony. Pennsylvania attracted many colonists seeking religious freedom and communal prosperity. Pastorius went on to lead settlement of Mennonites and Quakers at Germantown.

The role of the family in human evolution, and as a symbol in our own social and political lives. Topics include: sex, marriage, and parenting; the labor market; class, race, and ethnicity; and the family's probable future. We begin by considering briefly the evolution of the family, its cross-cultural variability, and its history in the West. We next examine how the family is currently defined in the U.S., discussing different views about what families should look like. Class and ethnic variability and the effects of changing gender roles are discussed in this section. We next look at sexuality, traditional and non-traditional marriage, parenting, divorce, family violence, family economics, poverty, and family policy. Controversial issues dealt with include day care, welfare policy, and the "Family Values" debate.