The Last Negroes at Harvard: Recent Episodes
Kent Garrett
The podcast is about being Black in America for almost 80 years... as seen through the eyes of The Last Negroes at Harvard. There were 18 of us. We were in the Class of 1963. Before we leave the planet, we have a lot to say.
Michael Kippins joined Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR) as the Lauren Sampson Fellow in 2023.
In this role, Michael represents clients in a variety of civil rights cases, including police accountability, education, employment, and climate justice.
Nat Keohane is an American environmental economist who serves as president at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES).
Dr. Keohane is an economist with more than 20 years of energy and environmental policy experience in academia, government, and the non-profit sector, most recently as Senior Vice President for Climate with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), where he led all of EDF’s climate work in the United States and globally.
Rachel Swarns She is a journalism professor at New York University and a contributing writer for The New York Times. Swarns has been a foreign correspondent for the Times while reporting from Cuba, Russia and southern Africa (where she was the Johannesburg bureau chief). Swarns wrote the book American Tapestry (2012) about the history of Michelle Obama's ancestors.
Her new book is titled The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church.
Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named one of the New York Times10 Best Books of 202. How the Word is Passed: is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers
In their new book, Ali Winston & Darwin BondGraham trace the history of Oakland since its inception through the lens of the city’s police department, through the Palmer Raids, McCarthyism, and the Civil Rights struggle, the Black Panthers and crack eras, to Oakland’s present-day revival. The book is the culmination of over twenty-one years of fearless reporting. They shine a light on the jackbooted police culture, lack of political will, and misguided leadership that have conspired to stymie meaningful reform.
Gregory May is a historian who writes about the early American republic is a graduate of the College of William and Mary and Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After working as a Supreme Court law clerk, Greg practiced law in Washington, DC and New York for thirty years. He lives in Virginia.
His book tells the untold saga of John Randolph’s 383 slaves, freed in his much-contested will of 1821. Few legal cases in American history are as riveting as the controversy surrounding the will of Virginia Senator John Randolph (1773–1833), which—almost inexplicably—freed all 383 of his slaves in one of the largest and most publicized manumissions in American history.
Brett Forrest is a national-security reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where his investigative work focuses on the former Soviet Union.
His new book is about a young American lost in Russia. An FBI-cover up. A mystery leading from Washington to the heart of the Kremlin's war in Ukraine.
Ned Blackhawk is a historian at Yale University and a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone. He has written a sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.
Omavi Shukur is a Practitioner-in-Residence at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought’s Initiative for a Just Society. He also holds an appointment as an Associate Research Scholar at Columbia Law.
He examines how laws that criminalize resisting arrest harden white social dominance and deepen black racial subordination.
Macklin Smith and Aurko Joshi discovered their mutual love of rap music at the University of Michigan, where Macklin Smith taught a popular course in rap poetry… and Aurko Joshi was a student.
Lorgia Garcia Pena talks about her two new books. She is a first generation Latinx Studies scholar and the Mellon Associate Professor of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora Studies at Tufts University. She taught at Harvard University from 2013 to 2021… and was denied tenure in 2019.
Professor Benjamin Carter Hett is a leading scholar of twentieth-century Germany and a gifted storyteller whose portraits of these feckless politicians show how fragile democracy can be when those in power do not respect it. He offers a powerful lesson for today, when democracy once again finds itself embattled and the siren song of strongmen sounds ever louder.
Ted Rall is a political cartoonist, opinion columnist, graphic novelist and occasional war correspondent whose work has appeared in hundreds of publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Village Voice, and Los Angeles Times. His latest books are Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party (June 23, 2020) and The Stringer (April 20,2021)
Patricia A. Turner talks about her new book. She is Professor of African American Studies and of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on racial dynamics as they surface in folklore and popular culture.
Victor Rayis the F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor in the Departments of Sociology and Criminology and African American Studies at the University of Iowa and a Nonresident Fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution. Victor Ray talks about his new book. He was born in Pittsburgh and raised in western Pennsylvania. After receiving his bachelor of arts in urban studies at Vassar, he earned his PhD from Duke University in 2014. His research applies critical race theory to classic sociological questions.
Eve Fairbanks writes about change: in cities, countries, landscapes, morals, values, and our ideas of ourselves. A former political writer for The New Republic, her essays and reportage have been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian, among other outlets. Born in Virginia, she now lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her new book is titled The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning. A dozen years in the making, The Inheritors weaves together the stories of three ordinary South Africans over five tumultuous decades in a sweeping and exquisite look at what really happens when a country resolves to end white supremacy.
Classmate and Podcast group member Peter Grilli talks about Japan and Hiroshima. August 6, 1945 was the day that the United States dropped the atomic bomb!
Peter was one of the producers of a documentary titled PAPER LANTERNS. It tells the story of an atomic bomb survivor and his life long calling to tell the stories of the 12 American POWs killed by the bombing of Hiroshima.
Terrance MacMullan is a professor of philosophy and honors at Eastern Washington University, Department of Philosophy. He has written a book titled, Habits of Whiteness: A Pragmatist Reconstruction. The book offers a revised and updated look at the concept of whiteness in the United States and offers a distinctive way to talk about race and racism by focusing on racial habits and how to change them.
In his new book the University Professor and Warren Professor of History at Brandeis University explores the little-known history of how enslaved people from different regions of Africa interacted with colonists of European origins to create new regional cultures in the colonial United States.
Aaron Tang is a law professor at the University of California, Davis. On June 23rd, he wrote a New York Times Opinion piece titled There's a Way to Outmaneuver the Supreme Court, and Maine Has Found It.
In 2019, Professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin was appointed chair of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery which is anchored at the Radcliffe Institute. In April of this year, the Committee issued a landmark report detailing Harvard University’s direct, financial, and intellectual ties to slavery. Harvard has committed $100 million dollars to redress harms to descendant communities in the United States and in the Caribbean.
Ryan Busse is a former firearms industry executive who quit. In his new book he shows us how America's gun industry shifted from prioritizing safety and ethics to one that is addicted to fear, conspiracy, intolerance, and secrecy.
Gal Beckerman has written a book about the engines of social change and examines why revolutions ignite and then flame out.
Assistant Professor Josiah Rector from the University of Houston specializes in 20th century U.S. urban environmental history and the history of the environmental justice movement. He has written a book titled, Toxic Debt: Race, Capitalism, and the Struggle for Environmental Justice in Detroit.
Free Renty tells the story of her efforts to force Harvard University to surrender possession of a daguerreotypes of her great-great-great grandfather, an enslaved man named Renty. This past Thursday the Massachusetts Surpeme Court ruled that Tamara Lanier COULD sue Harvard for EMOTIONAL DISTRESS over its possession of photographs that depict her enslaved ancestors. But, the Court justices affirmed a lower court’s DISMISSAL of Lanier's property claims to the photographs.
Free Renty tells the story of Tamara Lanier's efforts to force Harvard University to surrender possession of a daguerreotypes(da·guerre·o·type) of her great-great-great grandfather, an enslaved man named Renty. The daguerreotype was commissioned in 1850 by a Harvard professor named Louis Agassiz. He wanted to use it as part of his research to "prove" the superiority of the white race. The film focuses on Lanier and tracks her lawsuit against Harvard.
Samuel Moyn is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and Professor of History at Yale University. His research interests are in modern European intellectual history, with special interests in France and Germany, political and legal thought, historical and critical theory, and Jewish studies. Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical—to ban torture and limit civilian casualties—have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier?
Our guest is Professor Did-ee-aa Fassin from the Institute for Advanced study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is a French anthropologist and sociologist who has adapted from the landmark essay Enforcing Order… a graphic book titled Policing the City: An Ethno-graphic
For 18 months, Professor Fassin observed up close the daily life of an anti-crime police unit in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris.
Michael Brenner is Professor Emeritus of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. He challenges American activities in Ukraine and says that American dissent on Ukraine is dying in darkness.
Greg Godel writes in MLToday: "Amidst echoes of 1914 and World War I, the political left– far less potent than a century ago– is split between the contestants in a European war. As in 1914, the rush to pick sides in the conflict in Ukraine clouds all judgment, conjuring the adolescent emotions engaged while witnessing a schoolyard fight. Some on the left portray Ukraine as an innocent victim of a notorious bully and the bully’s long history of belligerence. Others, long cognizant of the nefarious role of the US and NATO in bringing perceived rivals, renegades, or defiers to their knees, see Russia as the hapless victim of betrayed promises and existential threats. Those who rush to Ukraine’s defense without qualification display an ignorance of history and the transparent roles of all the players in the global imperialist chess game."
Simon Levien, a student investigative reporter for The Harvard Crimson writes that ""A fireplace in Adams House has racist caricatures sculpted into its pillars. Without a word, administrators boarded them up to divert attention away. Three years on, they have yet to formally, publicly acknowledge these sculptures or their literal cover-up."
Mount Holyoke College Professor Patricia Banks takes a look at how Black Culture has been leveraged by corporate America.
Fryer is an economist and the youngest African American to receive tenure at Harvard. He applies empirical methods to social issues beyond traditional economics.
Ezra was born 1942 in Barbados… is a psychiatrist. He is Professor Emeritus of and Senior Research Scientist in Psychiatry the Yale University School of Medicine He is also Emeritus Professor of African and African-American Studies at Yale University. He was in the Harvard College Class of 1963
Professor of History at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, Victoria Wolcott talks about her new book.
John Logan. He is a professor of labor and employment studies in the College of Business at San Francisco State University. He has published widely on labor-management relations, employer opposition to unionization and labor law in the United States and globally.
Michael Walzer is a professor emeritus at the Institute of Advance Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1977 he wrote the landmark book JUST AND UNJUST WARS: A MORAL ARGUMENT WITH HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS
Dr. Holly Pinheiro... an Assistant Professor at Furman University talks abiout his upcoming book
Sam Jackson is an Assistant Professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany. His book is titled Oath Keepers: Patriotism and the Edge of Violence in a Right-Wing Antigovernment Group
David Lelyveld is a retired Professor of History at William Paterson University in the United States, is the author of Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (1978, reprinted 2003) and co- editor of A Wilderness of Possibilities: Urdu Studies in Transnational Perspective (2005).
David received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has held faculty and administrative positions at the University of Minnesota, Columbia and Cornell.
Back in 1964, when John McCluskey was a Junior at Harvard, he became the first African American to start at quarterback. He has retired from Indiana University as a professor of African American and African diaspora studies. He grew up in Middletown, Ohio.
Dr. Killewald investigates the gendered intersection of work and family. She takes on questions such as: How does marriage and parenthood affect wages? How do wives’ earnings shape their time in housework? In a second line of research, she analyzes how wealth inequality persists across generations and the role of inter-generational processes in the racial wealth gap.
Sara Mayeux, Associate Professor of Law and of History at Vanderbilt Law School, talks about her new book.
Professor Claude Clegg... Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill talks about his new book, The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama
In his new book,Northwestern University Professor Kevin Boyle captures the inspiring and brutal events of this passionate time with a remarkable empathy that restores the humanity of those making this history. Often they are everyday people like Elizabeth Eckford, enduring a hostile crowd outside her newly integrated high school in Little Rock, or Estelle Griswold, welcoming her arrest for dispensing birth control information in a Connecticut town. Political leaders also emerge in revealing detail: we track Richard Nixon’s inheritances from Eisenhower and his debt to George Wallace, who forged a message of racism mixed with blue-collar grievance that Nixon imported into Republicanism.
... some thoughts about what happened with that Antonio Brown meltdown and the Tampa Bay Bucs
Todd Gitlin is professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph.D program in Communications at Columbia University. His upcoming book: The Opposition will be published in the spring.
Historian and Harriet Tubman scholar, Kate Clifford Larson talks about her new book: Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer
Photographer and journalist Chester Higgins talks about his new book Sacred Nile... the story of our collective spiritual imagination and practice. His images illustrate how faith migrated up and down the River Nile from Ethiopia to Egypt leaving vestiges of ancient practice in today's worship.
Ron Jacobs writes for CounterPunch magazine and talks about an article he wrote about the recent Virginia election for Governor titled THE CONFEDERACY VOTES FOR A WHITE SUPREMACY - IS THAT NEWS?
He is also the author of DAYDREAM SUNSET: THE 60s COUNTERCULTURE in the 70s
Professor Kennedy talks about race, the Supreme Court and his new book, SAY IT LOUD!: ON RACE, LAW, HISTORY, and CULTURE
He is a Rower, Benjamin Franklin award-winning author, A Golden Oar recipient for his contributions to the sport of rowing, motivational speaker, and activist, particularly around issues of accessibility for low-income families. His book and new documentary is titled A Most Beautiful Thing… narrated by Common, produced by Grant Hill, Dwyane Wade, and 9th Wonder, from filmmaker Mary Mazzio. It tells the true story of a group of young men growing up on Chicago's West side who form the first all-Black high school rowing team in the nation, and in doing so not only transform a sport, but their lives.
There has been an increase in Black atmospheric PH.Ds, Vernon Morris, Professor of Chemistry and Director of the School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences at Arizona State University has trained most of them.
Adam Hochschild talks about his books, about writing and about being at Harvard with us
Aisha Nyandoro is head of Springboard to Opportunities. Their Magnolia Mother's Trust program provides $ 1,000 a month for one year to Black mothers living in extreme poverty in Jackson, Mississippi.
Juliette Kayyem is a former assistant secretary for homeland security under President Barack Obama and is faculty chair of the homeland-security program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of Security Mom: An Unclassified Guide to Protecting Our Homeland and Your Home.
Andrew Bacevich is an American historian specializing in international relations and foreign policy. He is a Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University. He is a retired Army Colonel. In his new book, After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed, he writes that American foreign policy must change, "the threats are here at home... where we live"
Civil Rights leader and educator Bob Moses died on July 25,2021. We speak with his daughter, Maisha Moses. She carries on his work and is Executive Director of the Young People's Project... so that we all reach our full human potential.
Gary Peller is a Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown University Law Center. He is an expert on Critical Race Theory. He is a contributor to and co-editor of: Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement
David Greenberg, Professor of History and of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, is currently writing a biography of the late Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis.
Caleb Scharf, Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University, argues that information is alive in a very real sense. All the data we create-- all of our emails, tweets, selfies, A.I.-generated text and funny cat videos-- amounts to an aggregate lifeform. Indeed, we must start to be concerned about our "information footprint."
Elizabeth Hinton... Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Yale University and Professor of Law at Yale Law School ... talks about her new book.
Professor Davarian Baldwin from Trinity College talks about his new book... In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities
Dr. Karlos K. Hill from the University of Oklahoma talks about one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history.
Debora Heard... PH.D. candidate specializing in Nubian Archaeology at the University of Chicago... sets the record straight about ancient African history.
This is a book about the 1970 visions and dreams of civil rights leader Floyd McKissick... who would attempt to build a new, predominately black city in North Carolina
Black Atlanta businessman and political activist Leo Smith explains why he is a Republican
Harvard Klansmen in 1924 pose for a graduation photo at the foot of the John Harvard statue in Harvard Yard... a look at undisclosed racism at Harvard.
In the late Middle Ages, Christian conversion could wash a black person's skin white—or at least that is what happens when a black sultan converts to Christianity in the English romance King of Tars. In Black Metaphors, Cord J. Whitaker examines the rhetorical and theological moves through which blackness and whiteness became metaphors for sin and purity in the English and European Middle Ages—metaphors that guided the development of notions of race in the centuries that followed.
Lynn French was a Black Panther from 1968 to 1973. She was in Chicago when Fred Hampton was murdred by police. She was an advisor on the movie Judas and the Black Messiah
Harvard Forward is an alumni group that is working to elect three candidates to the Harvard Board of Overseers in 2021 on a platform that pushes Harvard to live up to the University ideals: becoming a climate leader, tackling racial injustice, aligning our investments with our values and making governance more inclusive.
Dr. Khary Polk is an Associate Professor at Amherst College. He talks about his book: Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Workers Abroad, 1898 - 1948
Craig Hickman... a black member of the Harvard College Class of 1990. He is a Democratic politician serving in Maine and openly gay. He is also an organic farmer.
Race & Excellence: My Dialogue with Chester Pierce Belonging: Did we feel that we belonged at Harvard?
Marxist-Leninist writer and blogger, Greg Godels and former Fox News anchor, Larry Sparano join us to talk about what happened in the 2020 Presidential Election.
We have a sometimes heated conversation with critical thinker and podcaster, Coleman Cruz Hughes about police brutality and the morality of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Lance Morrow has a new book out about the drama of money in America. It is titled God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money
Can the Democrats stop Donald Trump from appointing a new Justice to the Supreme Court seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg?
Michael Moore says that Joe Biden's ground game in Michigan is worse than Hillary Clinton's. John Woodford, who lives in Michigan agrees!
A conversation with former long-time Fox 40 News (Binghamton, New York) anchor Larry Sparano. He says he is a liberal Democrat... but, we have some doubts about that!
On July 7, 2020, Matthew Alemu...scholar of race, culture and Black men... wrote an opinion piece for the Detroit Free Press. He wrote that (quote): Solidarity is not acknowledging your white privilege, but relinquishing it The PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan is our guest.
White Fragility... the latest neologism. Writer and blogger, Greg Godels says that it is a way to be anti-racism without dealing with racism.
Glenn Ford talks about bringing food and economic prosperity to inner city and rural areas that lack both.
We talk about efforts to suppress the black vote and a little bit about the black college experience that we did not get
An introduction to the 18 black members of the Harvard College Class of 1963. There were 18 of us. We were the largest number of Blacks ever admitted to Harvard at that time.