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Stalling the Dream: Cars, Race and Hurricane Evacuation
GUESTS: Meizhu Lui, Executive Director of United for a Fair Economy and Emma Dixon, Racial Wealth Divide Educator at UFE

It’s been over four months since Hurricane Katrina became the focal point for discussions of race relations in America. The images of thousands of black residents in New Orleans left behind in flooded neighborhoods and in the overcrowded Superdome raised questions about who was able to evacuate and who wasn’t. For its third annual report, the group United for a Fair Economy recently released a report entitled, “Stalling the Dream: Cars, Race and Hurricane Evacuation.” The report cites several key findings such as the fact that people of color are less likely to own cars than whites and that, among other things an inequality in car ownership affects the ability of people of color to evacuate themselves from potential hurricanes. The report also finds that such inequalities affect the divide in employment opportunities and health care.

For more information, visit www.faireconomy.org.

Download the report, Stalling the Dream.

Were Sacco and Vanzetti Guilty?
GUEST: Howard Zinn, author of “People’s History of the United States”

The case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti was one of the most significant in American history. The two Italian immigrants were anarchists charged with the murders of Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli in South Braintree, Massachusetts in 1920. The following year, the Sacco and Vanzetti faced trial for the murders and were eventually convicted. Many leading intellectuals, writers and artists such as Dorothy Parker, H.G. Wells, and Upton Sinclair mobilized to try and obtain a retrial saying that Sacco and Vanzetti did not receive a fair trial and were being targeted for their political ideals. Nevertheless, the two men were executed on August 23rd, 1927. In recent news, the Los Angeles Times reported last month that an Orange County man found an alleged letter written by Upton Sinclair in which Sinclair writes that an attorney for the two men, Fred Moore, had confided to him his clients’ guilt. Many conservative commentators, such as Jonah Goldberg, have taken the news at face value in order to write blanket condemnations of the left’s support for various political prisoners. In a conversation I had recently, People’s historian, Howard Zinn, provides much needed perspectives on what this news may or may not mean in the historical case of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Artist Feature: Southside Slim (Blues)
GUEST: Southside Slim

South LA’s blues tradition goes back decades to the 40s and 50s where local artists would plays the blues at local clubs. Despite the flourishing of blues artists in South LA, there have been few if any record labels that gave the primarily black blues artists a break. One of the record labels taking steps to correct that is Southside Records, which has put out my next guest’s latest CD called “Trouble on the Southside.” Named one of the best contemporary blues/R&B artist of 2004 by the LA Weekly South Side Slim, whose music we’ve been hearing this morning, joins me in studio.

For more information, visit www.southsideslim.com, and www.southsidela.com.

Listen to Southside Slim’s music.

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day:

“What is the great American interpretation of the tragic comic? It’s the blues … And there’s no way that America can deal with its darkest moment in the history, with the exception of the civil war, of its fragile and precious democratic experiment, without wrestling with the blues.” – Cornel West, from a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.