Podcasts about Betty Shabazz

Betty Shabazz was born on May 28, 1934. After marrying Malcolm X and converting to Islam, she became an activist and educator, later earning a doctorate and teaching at Medgar Evers College. Her life was marked by tragedy, resilience, and an enduring legacy. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed with the latest news from a leading Black-owned & controlled media company: https://aurn.com/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In celebration of the 100th birthday of Malcolm X, Ambassador Attallah Shabazz, the eldest daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, joins Tavis for an EXCLUSIVE conversation about her father's legacy and the continuing relevance of his message.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/tavis-smiley--6286410/support.

In this powerful episode, Vanessa honors the legacy of activist Betty Shabazz with a heartfelt meditation, inviting listeners to reflect and recharge. Morgan and Vanessa collaborate on a practical self-care audit, sharing tools to nurture our collective well-being as we close out Family Week. On this final day of Week 3, Morgan also leads a teach-in on courageous conversations, offering actionable tips to tackle tough discussions with grace and confidence. To round off the episode, Trelani returns for Foremother Friday, bringing more timeless wisdom from our foremothers as we head into the weekend. Important Disclaimers: While this episode provides helpful information, we are not medical experts. Please consult your doctor for personalized advice.Trigger Warning: Abuse and Trauma This content includes discussions of various forms of abuse and trauma. Additionally, listeners are invited to reflect on past experiences, which may be emotionally challenging or triggering. Please take care of yourself and proceed only if you feel ready

One month before his assassination, Malcolm X sat down for a suppressed 1965 interview, warning of a plot by “the same forces that killed JFK.” This episode features restored audio of Malcolm naming Nation of Islam informants and CIA agents infiltrating his inner circle. Learn how FBI wiretaps captured his wife, Betty Shabazz, screaming, “They're in the walls!” hours before his murder—and why ballistics proved NYPD undercovers fired the fatal shots. A chilling premonition of America's war on Black leadership.

ILYASAH AL SHABAZZ – Third daughter of Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz, is an educator, social activist, motivational speaker, and author of award winning publications: (1) Growing Up X (Random House) a coming of age memoir; (2) Malcolm Little (Simon & Schuster), a children's illustration book and (3) X, A Novel (Candlewick Press) a young adult historical fiction. Ilyasah promotes higher education for at-risk youth, interfaith dialogue to build bridges between cultures for young leaders of the world, and she participates on international humanitarian delegations. Ilyasah produced training programs to encourage higher education sanctioned by City University of New York's Office of Academic Affairs. She served for twelve years on the Executive Youth Board for the City of Mount Vernon, including appointments as Director of Public Relations, Director of Public Affairs & Special Events, and later promoted to Director of Cultural Affairs. She is a member of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee at West Virginia University. She is a mentor for Nile Rogers' We Are Family Foundation. She mentors at various group homes, lock-up facilities, high schools and college campuses through production of The WAKE-UP Tour™ X-Tra Credit Forums—her exclusive youth empowerment program. Ilyasah has retraced her father's footsteps to the Holy City of Mecca, explored religious and historical sites in both Egypt and Jordan as the guest of HRH Princess Alia Hussein, participated in interfaith dialogue study programs under Rabbi Nancy Kreimer and Dr. Aziza Al Hibri, and served as member of the American Interfaith Leadership delegation that participated with the Malaria No More Foundation in Mali, West Africa. Ilyasah also served as a member of the United States delegation that accompanied President Bill Clinton to South Africa to commemorate election of President Nelson Mandela and the economic business development initiative. Ilyasah serves as Trustee for the Harlem Symphonic Orchestra, The Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, and The Malcolm X Foundation. She is a member of the Arts Committee for the New York City Opera at Lincoln Center and a project advisor for the PBS award-winning Prince Among Slaves documentary. She holds a Master of Science in Education & Human Resource Development from Fordham University and a Bachelor of Science in Biology from SUNY/New Paltz. Ilyasah is currently an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and resides in Westchester County, New York.For further information, please contact, Dr. Jamal Watson, at jamal@ilyasahshabazz.comwww.ilyasahshabazz.com http://Twitter.com/ilyasahshabazzX: A NOVEL, Candlewick Press. (1/2015) MALCOLM LITTLE, Simon & Schuster. (1/2014) GROWING UP X, Random House. (1/2002)Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.

Drama & Historical Movie Reactions! (Tuesdays) BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY... Visit http://www.liquidiv.com & use Promo Code: REJECTS to get 20% off your first order. Visit https://huel.com/rejects & receive 15% off your order. PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/thereelrejects Follow Us On Socials:  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reelrejects/  Tik-Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thereelrejects?lang=en Twitter: https://x.com/thereelrejects Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheReelRejects/ Aaron Alexander & Andrew Gordon return for another Historical / Drama Tuesday as they give their First Time Reaction, Commentary, Analysis, Breakdown, & Full Movie Spoiler Review for the Eponymous 1992 Spike Lee Joint telling the life story of Activist & Civil Rights Leader, Malcolm X. The film stars Denzel Washington (Training Day, Antoine Fisher, Gladiator II) as Malcolm Little aka el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz aka Malcolm X along with Angela Bassett (Black Panther, Strange Days) as Betty Shabazz, Delroy Lindo (Da 5 Bloods, Get Shorty) as West Indian Archie, Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing, She's Gotta Have It) as Shorty, Albert Hall (Apocalypse Now) as Bains, & Al Freeman Jr. (Roots: The Next Generations) as Elijah Muhammad, along with appearances from Theresa Randle (Bad Boys, Spawn, Space Jam), Karen Allen (Indiana Jones / Raiders of the Lost Ark), John David Washington (Tenet, BlakKklansman), Christopher Plummer (Knives Out), Reverend Al Sharpton, Bobby Seale, Nelson Mandela, Ossie Davis (Grumpy Old Me, Bubba Ho-Tep), & More. Aaron & Andrew React to all the Wrenching Scenes & Most Powerful Moments including the God is Black Scene, Converting to Islam Scene, Marching to the Hospital Scene, We Were Black Scene, Pilgrimage to Mecca Scene, I Am Malcolm X Scene, Who Taught You To Hate Yourself, By Any Means Necessary, & Beyond. Follow Aaron On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therealaaronalexander/?hl=en Follow Andrew Gordon on Socials:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MovieSource Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/agor711/?hl=en Twitter:  https://twitter.com/Agor711 Support The Channel By Getting Some REEL REJECTS Apparel! https://www.rejectnationshop.com/ Music Used In Manscaped Ad:  Hat the Jazz by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ POWERED BY @GFUEL Visit https://gfuel.ly/3wD5Ygo and use code REJECTNATION for 20% off select tubs!! Head Editor: https://www.instagram.com/praperhq/?hl=en Co-Editor: Greg Alba Co-Editor: John Humphrey Music In Video: Airport Lounge - Disco Ultralounge by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Ask Us A QUESTION On CAMEO: https://www.cameo.com/thereelrejects Follow TheReelRejects On FACEBOOK, TWITTER, & INSTAGRAM:  FB:  https://www.facebook.com/TheReelRejects/ INSTAGRAM:  https://www.instagram.com/reelrejects/ TWITTER:  https://twitter.com/thereelrejects Follow GREG ON INSTAGRAM & TWITTER: INSTAGRAM:  https://www.instagram.com/thegregalba/ TWITTER:  https://twitter.com/thegregalba Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The daughters of civil rights leader Malcolm X have filed a $100 million lawsuit against the CIA, FBI, New York Police Department, and other agencies, alleging involvement in his 1965 assassination. The lawsuit, filed Friday in Manhattan federal court, claims these agencies were aware of the assassination plot and failed to prevent it. The Malcolm X estate and family assert that prosecutors suppressed evidence of government involvement, stating that Malcolm X's wife, Betty Shabazz, and their family have endured decades of uncertainty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Chester Higgins Jr. discusses his approach to harnessing the spirit within a photograph. He has photographed Muhammad Ali, Betty Shabazz, Gordon Parks, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and many more prominent figures. His work is in the permanent collection of the MOMA. In 2022, he was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame museum. The wisdom in this conversation is invaluable. Chester Higgins Jr. can also be found online at: Instagram Website --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/blkshutter/support

adrienne gets witchy with Makani Themba who was previously on the show (6/24/21) with her brother, Robin D.G. Kelly. adrienne and Makani discuss incanting power, the way our voices vibrate when we're chanting, when we make ourselves on body, re-membering, Betty Shabazz, patriarchal organizing, love as the ultimate witchy force, Sonia Sanchez, the power of the medicine we're given, using music to shape ourselves, collective playlists, Egyptian astrology, the end of the patriarchal epic, how we bend the arc of justice and understanding abundance.Makani Themba is Chief Strategist at Higher Ground Change Strategies based in Jackson, Mississippi. A social justice innovator and pioneer in the field of change communications and narrative strategy, she has spent more than 20 years supporting organizations, coalitions and philanthropic institutions in developing high impact change initiatives. Higher Ground Change Strategies provides her the opportunity to bring her strong sense of history, social justice and organizing knowledge, and deft movement facilitation skills in support of change makers seeking to take their work to the next level. Higher Ground helps partners integrate authentic engagement, systems analysis, change communications and more for powerful, vision-based change. --- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠SUPPORT OUR SHOW! - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/Endoftheworldshow --- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TRANSCRIPT⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ --- Music by Tunde Olaniran, Mother Cyborg and The Bengsons --- HTS ESSENTIALS ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠SUPPORT Our Show on Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/Endoftheworldshow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠PEEP us on IG⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/endoftheworldpc/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/how-to-survive-the-end-of-the-world/message

In this episode, rLj & Kev dive deep into the intricate tapestry of truth, exploring the multifaceted dimensions of personal narratives, historical legacies, and societal reckonings. Join the conversation as the hosts continue to celebrate Black History Month, reflecting on the enduring legacies of icons like MLK, Malcolm X, Betty Shabazz, and Coretta Scott King, and the fire that started in Club Shay Shay.  

On this episode of Woke By Accident, we are joined by Sambaza, host and creator of the internationally renowned and award winning, Sambaza Podcast. We focused on #blacklove and celebrated famous black couples in history: Medgar Evers, Malcom X and Betty Shabazz, and Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. You can find Sambaza's content: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... https://www.podpage.com/sambaza/ https://www.instagram.com/sambazapodc... Check out Woke By Accident at www.wokebyaccident.net or on your favorite streaming platforms! Sponsor Get your pack of @Poddecks now for your next podcast interview using my special link: https://www.poddecks.com?sca_ref=1435240.q14fIixEGL Music Soul Searching · Causmic Last Night's Dream — Tryezz

We dive into the electrifying world of "Genius" as NatGeo catapults us into its fourth season with an adrenaline-fueled exploration of the legendary lives of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. TeaRon and Tiera Janee, weary from years of countless civil rights and slavery movies, were skeptical. But their doubts melted away in the face of Genius' gripping storytelling. The series skillfully humanizes two of the most towering figures in recent history. Genius delves deep into the complexities of these iconic men, painting a vivid portrait of their struggles, triumphs, and the relentless pursuit of justice. –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––About UBIQUITOUS BLACKS REVIEWS:'Ubiquitous Blacks Reviews' is an extension of the Ubiquitous Blacks Podcast where TeaRon (IG: @tearonworld) is joined alongside Tiera Janee' (IG: @itstierajanee) as the two review the latest in Black Movies, TV Shows, and more. These hilariously entertaining reviews are directed at discussing media that appeals to Black/African people around the world in the diaspora.You can watch the episodes on the official YouTube channel, and you can also listen to the full unedited episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.Follow and Interact With Us: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Threads

Today, we embark on a profound journey with the iconic Emory Douglas. As the former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, Emory's art ignited a revolution. Today, we ask you to reorient your ears… this is history. There's an old African proverb that states when a person transitions, a library burns to the ground. Well, today's conversation with Emory Douglass is a living archive revealing itself. It's what we here at the Institute call Archival Intelligence. Take notes. Research the names. Refer back. Today's conversation is a retelling of artmaking in revolutionary times, and what it means to create new identities within a community. Join us in this safe space as Emory candidly shares tales of rebellion, societal exchanges, and the intricate web of connections in his formative years. This episode is not just an interview; it's a voyage through the corridors of time, shedding light on the profound interplay of art, activism, and the Black experience. And to hear another side of this story, be sure to check out episode 26 with Elaine Browne, the only woman to serve as Chair of the Black Panther party. Connect with us on Twitter and Instagram @blackimagination, subscribe to our newsletter for updates, and support the show by clicking this support link. Visit our YouTube channel, 'The Institute of Black Imagination,' and explore more content on blackimagination.com.And now, join us as Emory Douglas navigates through the intersections of art, activism, and the enduring quest for justice. Key LinksThe Black Panther Party- African American revolutionary partyBobby Seale - African American political activist and co-founder and national chairman of the Black Panther Party.Huey P. Newton- African American revolutionary and political activist and co-founder of ‘The Black Panther Party Zapatista National Liberation Army - A group of mostly indigenous activists from the southern Mexican state of ChiapasThe Black Arts Movement (1965-1975) - Black nationalism movement that focused on music, literature, drama, and the visual arts made up of Black artists and intellectuals.Eldridge Cleaver- member of The Black Panther Party, he served as the first Minister of Information.Dr. Betty Shabazz - an American educator and civil rights activist, wife of Malcolm XCharles W. White - African American painter, printmaker, and teacherWhat to Read

Time for some high marking Negro filmmaking and we chose the 1992 classic, Malcolm X. The movie that made Denzel a star, Spike Lee an elite level filmmaker and showed how far blacks have came and what still needs to be done not just in America but the whole world. A movie that follows Malcolm's life in several stages. His rebellious youth in Harlem. Doing coke, running numbers, burning his scalp, doing goon shit with his ace boon and sleeping with white women. The Nigga American Dream! This goes to his time in jail and his awakening under the teachings of Elijah Muhammad. From there we see his leadership in the Nation of Islam and his blossoming love with his future wife Betty Shabazz. But like in all biopic's we see his fall or rather people plot against him.(*cough*ThePatriots*cough*) Especially after his second enlightening while on pilgrimage to Mecca. And then ultimately his tragic death being murdered in front if his family. So the real question is how did 3BG get through a movie thats this heavy? Easy! Metal Gear references, redpill jokes and constantly dragging white American culture. But seriously it was a pleasure to review this black movie classic. And Denzel Washington got robbed of an Oscar on this. 10/10

"My father said that when you look at the cultural traditions of people, the European cultural tradition is a generation makes a mask. They put it up on the wall, put a glass box around it, and they point to it and say that's the greatest mask that's ever been made. The African tradition is every generation makes their own mask. So what we see with this constant creativity, this constant improvisation is a very human, African, homo sapiens tradition of not taking something and classicizing it to the point that nothing can be created beyond it and the generations after just have to kneel. It's about moving the culture forward."  Raoul Roach My guest is Raoul Roach, the son of the iconic and internationally revered jazz musician, Max Roach. Born in 1924, Max was firmly entrenched in activism, civil rights, and the social justice movement of the sixties and seventies. As a result, growing up, Raoul had a strong interest in social activism, being exposed to and mentored by some of the most pivotal black figures of that period, including Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Alvin Ailey.Born and raised in New York City by age fifteen, Raoul was cutting his teeth working for his legendary dad, first as an office assistant, a roadie, and eventually Max's road manager, before ultimately producing several of his concerts. As a 40-year upper echelon executive of the music industry, Raoul has worked with the biggest names in entertainment from Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson, and Anita Baker. Raoul helmed the successful turnaround of Jones's Qwest Records as the organization's co-executive director.Raoul also co-founded and pioneered Harry Belafonte's social justice entertainment enterprise, Sankofa.org, as the organization's co-executive director along with Gina Belafonte. Raoul executed the recruitment of artists and celebrities such as; Usher, Jay Z, Beyoncé, Jesse Williams, John Legend, Common, Dave Matthews, Carlos Santana, Michael B Jordan, T.I., and many more in coordination with grassroots organizations and activists to produce, films, music videos, social media campaigns, PSA's, concerts and major festivals. These initiatives raised resources for non-profit organizations as well as awareness to impact social movement and social justice.Currently, Raoul is coordinating along with his siblings Max Roach 100, an 18-month international centennial celebration of his father's music and life that includes film, documentaries, social media, concerts, exhibitions, new and previously unreleased recordings. Experience the groundbreaking sounds of bebop pioneer and virtuoso composer Max Roach, whose far-reaching ambitions were inspired and challenged by the inequities of the society around him. "American Masters – Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes" premieres Friday, October 6 at 9/8c on PBS. HOW WE MOVE Stay tuned to the end of the guest interview when international speaker, writer and diplomat Ambassador Shabazz (daughter of Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz) spends a few moments unpacking the discussion and highlights some of the interesting people, places and things that have her attention.   Instagram: Corner Table Talk  and Post and Beam Hospitality LinkedIn: Brad Johnson E.Mail:  brad@postandbeamhospitality.com For more information on host Brad Johnson or to join our mailing list, please visit: https://postandbeamhospitality.com/ Theme Music: Bryce Vine Corner Table™ is a trademark of Post & Beam Hospitality LLCSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode 168 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Say a Little Prayer”, and the interaction of the sacred, political, and secular in Aretha Franklin's life and work. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "Abraham, Martin, and John" by Dion. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. Even splitting it into multiple parts would have required six or seven mixes. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. Information about Martin Luther King came from Martin Luther King: A Religious Life by Paul Harvey. I also referred to Burt Bacharach's autobiography Anyone Who Had a Heart, Carole King's autobiography A Natural Woman, and Soul Serenade: King Curtis and his Immortal Saxophone by Timothy R. Hoover. For information about Amazing Grace I also used Aaron Cohen's 33 1/3 book on the album. The film of the concerts is also definitely worth watching. And the Aretha Now album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it's actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There's barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick warning before I begin. This episode contains some moderate references to domestic abuse, death by cancer, racial violence, police violence, and political assassination. Anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to check the transcript rather than listening to the episode. Also, as with the previous episode on Aretha Franklin, this episode presents something of a problem. Like many people in this narrative, Franklin's career was affected by personal troubles, which shaped many of her decisions. But where most of the subjects of the podcast have chosen to live their lives in public and share intimate details of every aspect of their personal lives, Franklin was an extremely private person, who chose to share only carefully sanitised versions of her life, and tried as far as possible to keep things to herself. This of course presents a dilemma for anyone who wants to tell her story -- because even though the information is out there in biographies, and even though she's dead, it's not right to disrespect someone's wish for a private life. I have therefore tried, wherever possible, to stay away from talk of her personal life except where it *absolutely* affects the work, or where other people involved have publicly shared their own stories, and even there I've tried to keep it to a minimum. This will occasionally lead to me saying less about some topics than other people might, even though the information is easily findable, because I don't think we have an absolute right to invade someone else's privacy for entertainment. When we left Aretha Franklin, she had just finally broken through into the mainstream after a decade of performing, with a version of Otis Redding's song "Respect" on which she had been backed by her sisters, Erma and Carolyn. "Respect", in Franklin's interpretation, had been turned from a rather chauvinist song about a man demanding respect from his woman into an anthem of feminism, of Black power, and of a new political awakening. For white people of a certain generation, the summer of 1967 was "the summer of love". For many Black people, it was rather different. There's a quote that goes around (I've seen it credited in reliable sources to both Ebony and Jet magazine, but not ever seen an issue cited, so I can't say for sure where it came from) saying that the summer of 67 was the summer of "'retha, Rap, and revolt", referring to the trifecta of Aretha Franklin, the Black power leader Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (who was at the time known as H. Rap Brown, a name he later disclaimed) and the rioting that broke out in several major cities, particularly in Detroit: [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "The Motor City is Burning"] The mid sixties were, in many ways, the high point not of Black rights in the US -- for the most part there has been a lot of progress in civil rights in the intervening decades, though not without inevitable setbacks and attacks from the far right, and as movements like the Black Lives Matter movement have shown there is still a long way to go -- but of *hope* for Black rights. The moral force of the arguments made by the civil rights movement were starting to cause real change to happen for Black people in the US for the first time since the Reconstruction nearly a century before. But those changes weren't happening fast enough, and as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", there was not only a growing unrest among Black people, but a recognition that it was actually possible for things to change. A combination of hope and frustration can be a powerful catalyst, and whether Franklin wanted it or not, she was at the centre of things, both because of her newfound prominence as a star with a hit single that couldn't be interpreted as anything other than a political statement and because of her intimate family connections to the struggle. Even the most racist of white people these days pays lip service to the memory of Dr Martin Luther King, and when they do they quote just a handful of sentences from one speech King made in 1963, as if that sums up the full theological and political philosophy of that most complex of men. And as we discussed the last time we looked at Aretha Franklin, King gave versions of that speech, the "I Have a Dream" speech, twice. The most famous version was at the March on Washington, but the first time was a few weeks earlier, at what was at the time the largest civil rights demonstration in American history, in Detroit. Aretha's family connection to that event is made clear by the very opening of King's speech: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech"] So as summer 1967 got into swing, and white rock music was going to San Francisco to wear flowers in its hair, Aretha Franklin was at the centre of a very different kind of youth revolution. Franklin's second Atlantic album, Aretha Arrives, brought in some new personnel to the team that had recorded Aretha's first album for Atlantic. Along with the core Muscle Shoals players Jimmy Johnson, Spooner Oldham, Tommy Cogbill and Roger Hawkins, and a horn section led by King Curtis, Wexler and Dowd also brought in guitarist Joe South. South was a white session player from Georgia, who had had a few minor hits himself in the fifties -- he'd got his start recording a cover version of "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor", the Big Bopper's B-side to "Chantilly Lace": [Excerpt: Joe South, "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor"] He'd also written a few songs that had been recorded by people like Gene Vincent, but he'd mostly become a session player. He'd become a favourite musician of Bob Johnston's, and so he'd played guitar on Simon and Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme albums: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "I am a Rock"] and bass on Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, with Al Kooper particularly praising his playing on "Visions of Johanna": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna"] South would be the principal guitarist on this and Franklin's next album, before his own career took off in 1968 with "Games People Play": [Excerpt: Joe South, "Games People Play"] At this point, he had already written the other song he's best known for, "Hush", which later became a hit for Deep Purple: [Excerpt: Deep Purple, "Hush"] But he wasn't very well known, and was surprised to get the call for the Aretha Franklin session, especially because, as he put it "I was white and I was about to play behind the blackest genius since Ray Charles" But Jerry Wexler had told him that Franklin didn't care about the race of the musicians she played with, and South settled in as soon as Franklin smiled at him when he played a good guitar lick on her version of the blues standard "Going Down Slow": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Going Down Slow"] That was one of the few times Franklin smiled in those sessions though. Becoming an overnight success after years of trying and failing to make a name for herself had been a disorienting experience, and on top of that things weren't going well in her personal life. Her marriage to her manager Ted White was falling apart, and she was performing erratically thanks to the stress. In particular, at a gig in Georgia she had fallen off the stage and broken her arm. She soon returned to performing, but it meant she had problems with her right arm during the recording of the album, and didn't play as much piano as she would have previously -- on some of the faster songs she played only with her left hand. But the recording sessions had to go on, whether or not Aretha was physically capable of playing piano. As we discussed in the episode on Otis Redding, the owners of Atlantic Records were busily negotiating its sale to Warner Brothers in mid-1967. As Wexler said later “Everything in me said, Keep rolling, keep recording, keep the hits coming. She was red hot and I had no reason to believe that the streak wouldn't continue. I knew that it would be foolish—and even irresponsible—not to strike when the iron was hot. I also had personal motivation. A Wall Street financier had agreed to see what we could get for Atlantic Records. While Ahmet and Neshui had not agreed on a selling price, they had gone along with my plan to let the financier test our worth on the open market. I was always eager to pump out hits, but at this moment I was on overdrive. In this instance, I had a good partner in Ted White, who felt the same. He wanted as much product out there as possible." In truth, you can tell from Aretha Arrives that it's a record that was being thought of as "product" rather than one being made out of any kind of artistic impulse. It's a fine album -- in her ten-album run from I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You through Amazing Grace there's not a bad album and barely a bad track -- but there's a lack of focus. There are only two originals on the album, neither of them written by Franklin herself, and the rest is an incoherent set of songs that show the tension between Franklin and her producers at Atlantic. Several songs are the kind of standards that Franklin had recorded for her old label Columbia, things like "You Are My Sunshine", or her version of "That's Life", which had been a hit for Frank Sinatra the previous year: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "That's Life"] But mixed in with that are songs that are clearly the choice of Wexler. As we've discussed previously in episodes on Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, at this point Atlantic had the idea that it was possible for soul artists to cross over into the white market by doing cover versions of white rock hits -- and indeed they'd had some success with that tactic. So while Franklin was suggesting Sinatra covers, Atlantic's hand is visible in the choices of songs like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "96 Tears": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "96 Tears'] Of the two originals on the album, one, the hit single "Baby I Love You" was written by Ronnie Shannon, the Detroit songwriter who had previously written "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Baby I Love You"] As with the previous album, and several other songs on this one, that had backing vocals by Aretha's sisters, Erma and Carolyn. But the other original on the album, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)", didn't, even though it was written by Carolyn: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] To explain why, let's take a little detour and look at the co-writer of the song this episode is about, though we're not going to get to that for a little while yet. We've not talked much about Burt Bacharach in this series so far, but he's one of those figures who has come up a few times in the periphery and will come up again, so here is as good a time as any to discuss him, and bring everyone up to speed about his career up to 1967. Bacharach was one of the more privileged figures in the sixties pop music field. His father, Bert Bacharach (pronounced the same as his son, but spelled with an e rather than a u) had been a famous newspaper columnist, and his parents had bought him a Steinway grand piano to practice on -- they pushed him to learn the piano even though as a kid he wasn't interested in finger exercises and Debussy. What he was interested in, though, was jazz, and as a teenager he would often go into Manhattan and use a fake ID to see people like Dizzy Gillespie, who he idolised, and in his autobiography he talks rapturously of seeing Gillespie playing his bent trumpet -- he once saw Gillespie standing on a street corner with a pet monkey on his shoulder, and went home and tried to persuade his parents to buy him a monkey too. In particular, he talks about seeing the Count Basie band with Sonny Payne on drums as a teenager: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Kid From Red Bank"] He saw them at Birdland, the club owned by Morris Levy where they would regularly play, and said of the performance "they were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before. What I heard in those clubs really turned my head around— it was like a big breath of fresh air when somebody throws open a window. That was when I knew for the first time how much I loved music and wanted to be connected to it in some way." Of course, there's a rather major problem with this story, as there is so often with narratives that musicians tell about their early career. In this case, Birdland didn't open until 1949, when Bacharach was twenty-one and stationed in Germany for his military service, while Sonny Payne didn't join Basie's band until 1954, when Bacharach had been a professional musician for many years. Also Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet bell only got bent on January 6, 1953. But presumably while Bacharach was conflating several memories, he did have some experience in some New York jazz club that led him to want to become a musician. Certainly there were enough great jazz musicians playing the clubs in those days. He went to McGill University to study music for two years, then went to study with Darius Milhaud, a hugely respected modernist composer. Milhaud was also one of the most important music teachers of the time -- among others he'd taught Stockhausen and Xenakkis, and would go on to teach Philip Glass and Steve Reich. This suited Bacharach, who by this point was a big fan of Schoenberg and Webern, and was trying to write atonal, difficult music. But Milhaud had also taught Dave Brubeck, and when Bacharach rather shamefacedly presented him with a composition which had an actual tune, he told Bacharach "Never be ashamed of writing a tune you can whistle". He dropped out of university and, like most men of his generation, had to serve in the armed forces. When he got out of the army, he continued his musical studies, still trying to learn to be an avant-garde composer, this time with Bohuslav Martinů and later with Henry Cowell, the experimental composer we've heard about quite a bit in previous episodes: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] He was still listening to a lot of avant garde music, and would continue doing so throughout the fifties, going to see people like John Cage. But he spent much of that time working in music that was very different from the avant-garde. He got a job as the band leader for the crooner Vic Damone: [Excerpt: Vic Damone. "Ebb Tide"] He also played for the vocal group the Ames Brothers. He decided while he was working with the Ames Brothers that he could write better material than they were getting from their publishers, and that it would be better to have a job where he didn't have to travel, so he got himself a job as a staff songwriter in the Brill Building. He wrote a string of flops and nearly hits, starting with "Keep Me In Mind" for Patti Page: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Keep Me In Mind"] From early in his career he worked with the lyricist Hal David, and the two of them together wrote two big hits, "Magic Moments" for Perry Como: [Excerpt: Perry Como, "Magic Moments"] and "The Story of My Life" for Marty Robbins: [Excerpt: "The Story of My Life"] But at that point Bacharach was still also writing with other writers, notably Hal David's brother Mack, with whom he wrote the theme tune to the film The Blob, as performed by The Five Blobs: [Excerpt: The Five Blobs, "The Blob"] But Bacharach's songwriting career wasn't taking off, and he got himself a job as musical director for Marlene Dietrich -- a job he kept even after it did start to take off.  Part of the problem was that he intuitively wrote music that didn't quite fit into standard structures -- there would be odd bars of unusual time signatures thrown in, unusual harmonies, and structural irregularities -- but then he'd take feedback from publishers and producers who would tell him the song could only be recorded if he straightened it out. He said later "The truth is that I ruined a lot of songs by not believing in myself enough to tell these guys they were wrong." He started writing songs for Scepter Records, usually with Hal David, but also with Bob Hilliard and Mack David, and started having R&B hits. One song he wrote with Mack David, "I'll Cherish You", had the lyrics rewritten by Luther Dixon to make them more harsh-sounding for a Shirelles single -- but the single was otherwise just Bacharach's demo with the vocals replaced, and you can even hear his voice briefly at the beginning: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Baby, It's You"] But he'd also started becoming interested in the production side of records more generally. He'd iced that some producers, when recording his songs, would change the sound for the worse -- he thought Gene McDaniels' version of "Tower of Strength", for example, was too fast. But on the other hand, other producers got a better sound than he'd heard in his head. He and Hilliard had written a song called "Please Stay", which they'd given to Leiber and Stoller to record with the Drifters, and he thought that their arrangement of the song was much better than the one he'd originally thought up: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Please Stay"] He asked Leiber and Stoller if he could attend all their New York sessions and learn about record production from them. He started doing so, and eventually they started asking him to assist them on records. He and Hilliard wrote a song called "Mexican Divorce" for the Drifters, which Leiber and Stoller were going to produce, and as he put it "they were so busy running Redbird Records that they asked me to rehearse the background singers for them in my office." [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Mexican Divorce"] The backing singers who had been brought in to augment the Drifters on that record were a group of vocalists who had started out as members of a gospel group called the Drinkard singers: [Excerpt: The Drinkard Singers, "Singing in My Soul"] The Drinkard Singers had originally been a family group, whose members included Cissy Drinkard, who joined the group aged five (and who on her marriage would become known as Cissy Houston -- her daughter Whitney would later join the family business), her aunt Lee Warrick, and Warrick's adopted daughter Judy Clay. That group were discovered by the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and spent much of the fifties performing with gospel greats including Jackson herself, Clara Ward, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But Houston was also the musical director of a group at her church, the Gospelaires, which featured Lee Warrick's two daughters Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick (for those who don't know, the Warwick sisters' birth name was Warrick, spelled with two rs. A printing error led to it being misspelled the same way as the British city on a record label, and from that point on Dionne at least pronounced the w in her misspelled name). And slowly, the Gospelaires rather than the Drinkard Singers became the focus, with a lineup of Houston, the Warwick sisters, the Warwick sisters' cousin Doris Troy, and Clay's sister Sylvia Shemwell. The real change in the group's fortunes came when, as we talked about a while back in the episode on "The Loco-Motion", the original lineup of the Cookies largely stopped working as session singers to become Ray Charles' Raelettes. As we discussed in that episode, a new lineup of Cookies formed in 1961, but it took a while for them to get started, and in the meantime the producers who had been relying on them for backing vocals were looking elsewhere, and they looked to the Gospelaires. "Mexican Divorce" was the first record to feature the group as backing vocalists -- though reports vary as to how many of them are on the record, with some saying it's only Troy and the Warwicks, others saying Houston was there, and yet others saying it was all five of them. Some of these discrepancies were because these singers were so good that many of them left to become solo singers in fairly short order. Troy was the first to do so, with her hit "Just One Look", on which the other Gospelaires sang backing vocals: [Excerpt: Doris Troy, "Just One Look"] But the next one to go solo was Dionne Warwick, and that was because she'd started working with Bacharach and Hal David as their principal demo singer. She started singing lead on their demos, and hoping that she'd get to release them on her own. One early one was "Make it Easy On Yourself", which was recorded by Jerry Butler, formerly of the Impressions. That record was produced by Bacharach, one of the first records he produced without outside supervision: [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "Make it Easy On Yourself"] Warwick was very jealous that a song she'd sung the demo of had become a massive hit for someone else, and blamed Bacharach and David. The way she tells the story -- Bacharach always claimed this never happened, but as we've already seen he was himself not always the most reliable of narrators of his own life -- she got so angry she complained to them, and said "Don't make me over, man!" And so Bacharach and David wrote her this: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Don't Make Me Over"] Incidentally, in the UK, the hit version of that was a cover by the Swinging Blue Jeans: [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "Don't Make Me Over"] who also had a huge hit with "You're No Good": [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "You're No Good"] And *that* was originally recorded by *Dee Dee* Warwick: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Warwick, "You're No Good"] Dee Dee also had a successful solo career, but Dionne's was the real success, making the names of herself, and of Bacharach and David. The team had more than twenty top forty hits together, before Bacharach and David had a falling out in 1971 and stopped working together, and Warwick sued both of them for breach of contract as a result. But prior to that they had hit after hit, with classic records like "Anyone Who Had a Heart": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Anyone Who Had a Heart"] And "Walk On By": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Walk On By"] With Doris, Dionne, and Dee Dee all going solo, the group's membership was naturally in flux -- though the departed members would occasionally join their former bandmates for sessions, and the remaining members would sing backing vocals on their ex-members' records. By 1965 the group consisted of Cissy Houston, Sylvia Shemwell, the Warwick sisters' cousin Myrna Smith, and Estelle Brown. The group became *the* go-to singers for soul and R&B records made in New York. They were regularly hired by Leiber and Stoller to sing on their records, and they were also the particular favourites of Bert Berns. They sang backing vocals on almost every record he produced. It's them doing the gospel wails on "Cry Baby" by Garnet Mimms: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And they sang backing vocals on both versions of "If You Need Me" -- Wilson Pickett's original and Solomon Burke's more successful cover version, produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "If You Need Me"] They're on such Berns records as "Show Me Your Monkey", by Kenny Hamber: [Excerpt: Kenny Hamber, "Show Me Your Monkey"] And it was a Berns production that ended up getting them to be Aretha Franklin's backing group. The group were becoming such an important part of the records that Atlantic and BANG Records, in particular, were putting out, that Jerry Wexler said "it was only a matter of common decency to put them under contract as a featured group". He signed them to Atlantic and renamed them from the Gospelaires to The Sweet Inspirations.  Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham wrote a song for the group which became their only hit under their own name: [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Sweet Inspiration"] But to start with, they released a cover of Pops Staples' civil rights song "Why (Am I treated So Bad)": [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Why (Am I Treated So Bad?)"] That hadn't charted, and meanwhile, they'd all kept doing session work. Cissy had joined Erma and Carolyn Franklin on the backing vocals for Aretha's "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You"] Shortly after that, the whole group recorded backing vocals for Erma's single "Piece of My Heart", co-written and produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] That became a top ten record on the R&B charts, but that caused problems. Aretha Franklin had a few character flaws, and one of these was an extreme level of jealousy for any other female singer who had any level of success and came up in the business after her. She could be incredibly graceful towards anyone who had been successful before her -- she once gave one of her Grammies away to Esther Phillips, who had been up for the same award and had lost to her -- but she was terribly insecure, and saw any contemporary as a threat. She'd spent her time at Columbia Records fuming (with some justification) that Barbra Streisand was being given a much bigger marketing budget than her, and she saw Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, and Dionne Warwick as rivals rather than friends. And that went doubly for her sisters, who she was convinced should be supporting her because of family loyalty. She had been infuriated at John Hammond when Columbia had signed Erma, thinking he'd gone behind her back to create competition for her. And now Erma was recording with Bert Berns. Bert Berns who had for years been a colleague of Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers at Atlantic. Aretha was convinced that Wexler had put Berns up to signing Erma as some kind of power play. There was only one problem with this -- it simply wasn't true. As Wexler later explained “Bert and I had suffered a bad falling-out, even though I had enormous respect for him. After all, he was the guy who brought over guitarist Jimmy Page from England to play on our sessions. Bert, Ahmet, Nesuhi, and I had started a label together—Bang!—where Bert produced Van Morrison's first album. But Bert also had a penchant for trouble. He courted the wise guys. He wanted total control over every last aspect of our business dealings. Finally it was too much, and the Erteguns and I let him go. He sued us for breach of contract and suddenly we were enemies. I felt that he signed Erma, an excellent singer, not merely for her talent but as a way to get back at me. If I could make a hit with Aretha, he'd show me up by making an even bigger hit on Erma. Because there was always an undercurrent of rivalry between the sisters, this only added to the tension.” There were two things that resulted from this paranoia on Aretha's part. The first was that she and Wexler, who had been on first-name terms up to that point, temporarily went back to being "Mr. Wexler" and "Miss Franklin" to each other. And the second was that Aretha no longer wanted Carolyn and Erma to be her main backing vocalists, though they would continue to appear on her future records on occasion. From this point on, the Sweet Inspirations would be the main backing vocalists for Aretha in the studio throughout her golden era [xxcut line (and when the Sweet Inspirations themselves weren't on the record, often it would be former members of the group taking their place)]: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] The last day of sessions for Aretha Arrives was July the twenty-third, 1967. And as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", that was the day that the Detroit riots started. To recap briefly, that was four days of rioting started because of a history of racist policing, made worse by those same racist police overreacting to the initial protests. By the end of those four days, the National Guard, 82nd Airborne Division, and the 101st Airborne from Clarksville were all called in to deal with the violence, which left forty-three dead (of whom thirty-three were Black and only one was a police officer), 1,189 people were injured, and over 7,200 arrested, almost all of them Black. Those days in July would be a turning point for almost every musician based in Detroit. In particular, the police had murdered three members of the soul group the Dramatics, in a massacre of which the author John Hersey, who had been asked by President Johnson to be part of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders but had decided that would compromise his impartiality and did an independent journalistic investigation, said "The episode contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the United States: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by “decent” men who deny they are racists; the societal limbo into which, ever since slavery, so many young black men have been driven by our country; ambiguous justice in the courts; and the devastation in both black and white human lives that follows in the wake of violence as surely as ruinous and indiscriminate flood after torrents" But these were also the events that radicalised the MC5 -- the group had been playing a gig as Tim Buckley's support act when the rioting started, and guitarist Wayne Kramer decided afterwards to get stoned and watch the fires burning down the city through a telescope -- which police mistook for a rifle, leading to the National Guard knocking down Kramer's door. The MC5 would later cover "The Motor City is Burning", John Lee Hooker's song about the events: [Excerpt: The MC5, "The Motor City is Burning"] It would also be a turning point for Motown, too, in ways we'll talk about in a few future episodes.  And it was a political turning point too -- Michigan Governor George Romney, a liberal Republican (at a time when such people existed) had been the favourite for the Republican Presidential candidacy when he'd entered the race in December 1966, but as racial tensions ramped up in Detroit during the early months of 1967 he'd started trailing Richard Nixon, a man who was consciously stoking racists' fears. President Johnson, the incumbent Democrat, who was at that point still considering standing for re-election, made sure to make it clear to everyone during the riots that the decision to call in the National Guard had been made at the State level, by Romney, rather than at the Federal level.  That wasn't the only thing that removed the possibility of a Romney presidency, but it was a big part of the collapse of his campaign, and the, as it turned out, irrevocable turn towards right-authoritarianism that the party took with Nixon's Southern Strategy. Of course, Aretha Franklin had little way of knowing what was to come and how the riots would change the city and the country over the following decades. What she was primarily concerned about was the safety of her father, and to a lesser extent that of her sister-in-law Earline who was staying with him. Aretha, Carolyn, and Erma all tried to keep in constant touch with their father while they were out of town, and Aretha even talked about hiring private detectives to travel to Detroit, find her father, and get him out of the city to safety. But as her brother Cecil pointed out, he was probably the single most loved man among Black people in Detroit, and was unlikely to be harmed by the rioters, while he was too famous for the police to kill with impunity. Reverend Franklin had been having a stressful time anyway -- he had recently been fined for tax evasion, an action he was convinced the IRS had taken because of his friendship with Dr King and his role in the civil rights movement -- and according to Cecil "Aretha begged Daddy to move out of the city entirely. She wanted him to find another congregation in California, where he was especially popular—or at least move out to the suburbs. But he wouldn't budge. He said that, more than ever, he was needed to point out the root causes of the riots—the economic inequality, the pervasive racism in civic institutions, the woefully inadequate schools in inner-city Detroit, and the wholesale destruction of our neighborhoods by urban renewal. Some ministers fled the city, but not our father. The horror of what happened only recommitted him. He would not abandon his political agenda." To make things worse, Aretha was worried about her father in other ways -- as her marriage to Ted White was starting to disintegrate, she was looking to her father for guidance, and actually wanted him to take over her management. Eventually, Ruth Bowen, her booking agent, persuaded her brother Cecil that this was a job he could do, and that she would teach him everything he needed to know about the music business. She started training him up while Aretha was still married to White, in the expectation that that marriage couldn't last. Jerry Wexler, who only a few months earlier had been seeing Ted White as an ally in getting "product" from Franklin, had now changed his tune -- partly because the sale of Atlantic had gone through in the meantime. He later said “Sometimes she'd call me at night, and, in that barely audible little-girl voice of hers, she'd tell me that she wasn't sure she could go on. She always spoke in generalities. She never mentioned her husband, never gave me specifics of who was doing what to whom. And of course I knew better than to ask. She just said that she was tired of dealing with so much. My heart went out to her. She was a woman who suffered silently. She held so much in. I'd tell her to take as much time off as she needed. We had a lot of songs in the can that we could release without new material. ‘Oh, no, Jerry,' she'd say. ‘I can't stop recording. I've written some new songs, Carolyn's written some new songs. We gotta get in there and cut 'em.' ‘Are you sure?' I'd ask. ‘Positive,' she'd say. I'd set up the dates and typically she wouldn't show up for the first or second sessions. Carolyn or Erma would call me to say, ‘Ree's under the weather.' That was tough because we'd have asked people like Joe South and Bobby Womack to play on the sessions. Then I'd reschedule in the hopes she'd show." That third album she recorded in 1967, Lady Soul, was possibly her greatest achievement. The opening track, and second single, "Chain of Fools", released in November, was written by Don Covay -- or at least it's credited as having been written by Covay. There's a gospel record that came out around the same time on a very small label based in Houston -- "Pains of Life" by Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio: [Excerpt: Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio, "Pains of Life"] I've seen various claims online that that record came out shortly *before* "Chain of Fools", but I can't find any definitive evidence one way or the other -- it was on such a small label that release dates aren't available anywhere. Given that the B-side, which I haven't been able to track down online, is called "Wait Until the Midnight Hour", my guess is that rather than this being a case of Don Covay stealing the melody from an obscure gospel record he'd have had little chance to hear, it's the gospel record rewriting a then-current hit to be about religion, but I thought it worth mentioning. The song was actually written by Covay after Jerry Wexler asked him to come up with some songs for Otis Redding, but Wexler, after hearing it, decided it was better suited to Franklin, who gave an astonishing performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] Arif Mardin, the arranger of the album, said of that track “I was listed as the arranger of ‘Chain of Fools,' but I can't take credit. Aretha walked into the studio with the chart fully formed inside her head. The arrangement is based around the harmony vocals provided by Carolyn and Erma. To add heft, the Sweet Inspirations joined in. The vision of the song is entirely Aretha's.” According to Wexler, that's not *quite* true -- according to him, Joe South came up with the guitar part that makes up the intro, and he also said that when he played what he thought was the finished track to Ellie Greenwich, she came up with another vocal line for the backing vocals, which she overdubbed. But the core of the record's sound is definitely pure Aretha -- and Carolyn Franklin said that there was a reason for that. As she said later “Aretha didn't write ‘Chain,' but she might as well have. It was her story. When we were in the studio putting on the backgrounds with Ree doing lead, I knew she was singing about Ted. Listen to the lyrics talking about how for five long years she thought he was her man. Then she found out she was nothing but a link in the chain. Then she sings that her father told her to come on home. Well, he did. She sings about how her doctor said to take it easy. Well, he did too. She was drinking so much we thought she was on the verge of a breakdown. The line that slew me, though, was the one that said how one of these mornings the chain is gonna break but until then she'll take all she can take. That summed it up. Ree knew damn well that this man had been doggin' her since Jump Street. But somehow she held on and pushed it to the breaking point." [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] That made number one on the R&B charts, and number two on the hot one hundred, kept from the top by "Judy In Disguise (With Glasses)" by John Fred and his Playboy Band -- a record that very few people would say has stood the test of time as well. The other most memorable track on the album was the one chosen as the first single, released in September. As Carole King told the story, she and Gerry Goffin were feeling like their career was in a slump. While they had had a huge run of hits in the early sixties through 1965, they had only had two new hits in 1966 -- "Goin' Back" for Dusty Springfield and "Don't Bring Me Down" for the Animals, and neither of those were anything like as massive as their previous hits. And up to that point in 1967, they'd only had one -- "Pleasant Valley Sunday" for the Monkees. They had managed to place several songs on Monkees albums and the TV show as well, so they weren't going to starve, but the rise of self-contained bands that were starting to dominate the charts, and Phil Spector's temporary retirement, meant there simply wasn't the opportunity for them to place material that there had been. They were also getting sick of travelling to the West Coast all the time, because as their children were growing slightly older they didn't want to disrupt their lives in New York, and were thinking of approaching some of the New York based labels and seeing if they needed songs. They were particularly considering Atlantic, because soul was more open to outside songwriters than other genres. As it happened, though, they didn't have to approach Atlantic, because Atlantic approached them. They were walking down Broadway when a limousine pulled up, and Jerry Wexler stuck his head out of the window. He'd come up with a good title that he wanted to use for a song for Aretha, would they be interested in writing a song called "Natural Woman"? They said of course they would, and Wexler drove off. They wrote the song that night, and King recorded a demo the next morning: [Excerpt: Carole King, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (demo)"] They gave Wexler a co-writing credit because he had suggested the title.  King later wrote in her autobiography "Hearing Aretha's performance of “Natural Woman” for the first time, I experienced a rare speechless moment. To this day I can't convey how I felt in mere words. Anyone who had written a song in 1967 hoping it would be performed by a singer who could take it to the highest level of excellence, emotional connection, and public exposure would surely have wanted that singer to be Aretha Franklin." She went on to say "But a recording that moves people is never just about the artist and the songwriters. It's about people like Jerry and Ahmet, who matched the songwriters with a great title and a gifted artist; Arif Mardin, whose magnificent orchestral arrangement deserves the place it will forever occupy in popular music history; Tom Dowd, whose engineering skills captured the magic of this memorable musical moment for posterity; and the musicians in the rhythm section, the orchestral players, and the vocal contributions of the background singers—among them the unforgettable “Ah-oo!” after the first line of the verse. And the promotion and marketing people helped this song reach more people than it might have without them." And that's correct -- unlike "Chain of Fools", this time Franklin did let Arif Mardin do most of the arrangement work -- though she came up with the piano part that Spooner Oldham plays on the record. Mardin said that because of the song's hymn-like feel they wanted to go for a more traditional written arrangement. He said "She loved the song to the point where she said she wanted to concentrate on the vocal and vocal alone. I had written a string chart and horn chart to augment the chorus and hired Ralph Burns to conduct. After just a couple of takes, we had it. That's when Ralph turned to me with wonder in his eyes. Ralph was one of the most celebrated arrangers of the modern era. He had done ‘Early Autumn' for Woody Herman and Stan Getz, and ‘Georgia on My Mind' for Ray Charles. He'd worked with everyone. ‘This woman comes from another planet' was all Ralph said. ‘She's just here visiting.'” [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"] By this point there was a well-functioning team making Franklin's records -- while the production credits would vary over the years, they were all essentially co-productions by the team of Franklin, Wexler, Mardin and Dowd, all collaborating and working together with a more-or-less unified purpose, and the backing was always by the same handful of session musicians and some combination of the Sweet Inspirations and Aretha's sisters. That didn't mean that occasional guests couldn't get involved -- as we discussed in the Cream episode, Eric Clapton played guitar on "Good to Me as I am to You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Good to Me as I am to You"] Though that was one of the rare occasions on one of these records where something was overdubbed. Clapton apparently messed up the guitar part when playing behind Franklin, because he was too intimidated by playing with her, and came back the next day to redo his part without her in the studio. At this point, Aretha was at the height of her fame. Just before the final batch of album sessions began she appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, and she was making regular TV appearances, like one on the Mike Douglas Show where she duetted with Frankie Valli on "That's Life": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and Frankie Valli, "That's Life"] But also, as Wexler said “Her career was kicking into high gear. Contending and resolving both the professional and personal challenges were too much. She didn't think she could do both, and I didn't blame her. Few people could. So she let the personal slide and concentrated on the professional. " Her concert promoter Ruth Bowen said of this time "Her father and Dr. King were putting pressure on her to sing everywhere, and she felt obligated. The record company was also screaming for more product. And I had a mountain of offers on my desk that kept getting higher with every passing hour. They wanted her in Europe. They wanted her in Latin America. They wanted her in every major venue in the U.S. TV was calling. She was being asked to do guest appearances on every show from Carol Burnett to Andy Williams to the Hollywood Palace. She wanted to do them all and she wanted to do none of them. She wanted to do them all because she's an entertainer who burns with ambition. She wanted to do none of them because she was emotionally drained. She needed to go away and renew her strength. I told her that at least a dozen times. She said she would, but she didn't listen to me." The pressures from her father and Dr King are a recurring motif in interviews with people about this period. Franklin was always a very political person, and would throughout her life volunteer time and money to liberal political causes and to the Democratic Party, but this was the height of her activism -- the Civil Rights movement was trying to capitalise on the gains it had made in the previous couple of years, and celebrity fundraisers and performances at rallies were an important way to do that. And at this point there were few bigger celebrities in America than Aretha Franklin. At a concert in her home town of Detroit on February the sixteenth, 1968, the Mayor declared the day Aretha Franklin Day. At the same show, Billboard, Record World *and* Cash Box magazines all presented her with plaques for being Female Vocalist of the Year. And Dr. King travelled up to be at the show and congratulate her publicly for all her work with his organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Backstage at that show, Dr. King talked to Aretha's father, Reverend Franklin, about what he believed would be the next big battle -- a strike in Memphis: [Excerpt, Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech" -- "And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right."] The strike in question was the Memphis Sanitation Workers' strike which had started a few days before.  The struggle for Black labour rights was an integral part of the civil rights movement, and while it's not told that way in the sanitised version of the story that's made it into popular culture, the movement led by King was as much about economic justice as social justice -- King was a democratic socialist, and believed that economic oppression was both an effect of and cause of other forms of racial oppression, and that the rights of Black workers needed to be fought for. In 1967 he had set up a new organisation, the Poor People's Campaign, which was set to march on Washington to demand a program that included full employment, a guaranteed income -- King was strongly influenced in his later years by the ideas of Henry George, the proponent of a universal basic income based on land value tax -- the annual building of half a million affordable homes, and an end to the war in Vietnam. This was King's main focus in early 1968, and he saw the sanitation workers' strike as a major part of this campaign. Memphis was one of the most oppressive cities in the country, and its largely Black workforce of sanitation workers had been trying for most of the 1960s to unionise, and strike-breakers had been called in to stop them, and many of them had been fired by their white supervisors with no notice. They were working in unsafe conditions, for utterly inadequate wages, and the city government were ardent segregationists. After two workers had died on the first of February from using unsafe equipment, the union demanded changes -- safer working conditions, better wages, and recognition of the union. The city council refused, and almost all the sanitation workers stayed home and stopped work. After a few days, the council relented and agreed to their terms, but the Mayor, Henry Loeb, an ardent white supremacist who had stood on a platform of opposing desegregation, and who had previously been the Public Works Commissioner who had put these unsafe conditions in place, refused to listen. As far as he was concerned, he was the only one who could recognise the union, and he wouldn't. The workers continued their strike, marching holding signs that simply read "I am a Man": [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "Blowing in the Wind"] The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP had been involved in organising support for the strikes from an early stage, and King visited Memphis many times. Much of the time he spent visiting there was spent negotiating with a group of more militant activists, who called themselves The Invaders and weren't completely convinced by King's nonviolent approach -- they believed that violence and rioting got more attention than non-violent protests. King explained to them that while he had been persuaded by Gandhi's writings of the moral case for nonviolent protest, he was also persuaded that it was pragmatically necessary -- asking the young men "how many guns do we have and how many guns do they have?", and pointing out as he often did that when it comes to violence a minority can't win against an armed majority. Rev Franklin went down to Memphis on the twenty-eighth of March to speak at a rally Dr. King was holding, but as it turned out the rally was cancelled -- the pre-rally march had got out of hand, with some people smashing windows, and Memphis police had, like the police in Detroit the previous year, violently overreacted, clubbing and gassing protestors and shooting and killing one unarmed teenage boy, Larry Payne. The day after Payne's funeral, Dr King was back in Memphis, though this time Rev Franklin was not with him. On April the third, he gave a speech which became known as the "Mountaintop Speech", in which he talked about the threats that had been made to his life: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech": “And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."] The next day, Martin Luther King was shot dead. James Earl Ray, a white supremacist, pled guilty to the murder, and the evidence against him seems overwhelming from what I've read, but the King family have always claimed that the murder was part of a larger conspiracy and that Ray was not the gunman. Aretha was obviously distraught, and she attended the funeral, as did almost every other prominent Black public figure. James Baldwin wrote of the funeral: "In the pew directly before me sat Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt—covered in black, looking like a lost, ten-year-old girl—and Sidney Poitier, in the same pew, or nearby. Marlon saw me, and nodded. The atmosphere was black, with a tension indescribable—as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack. Everyone sat very still. The actual service sort of washed over me, in waves. It wasn't that it seemed unreal; it was the most real church service I've ever sat through in my life, or ever hope to sit through; but I have a childhood hangover thing about not weeping in public, and I was concentrating on holding myself together. I did not want to weep for Martin, tears seemed futile. But I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep I would not be able to stop. There was more than enough to weep for, if one was to weep—so many of us, cut down, so soon. Medgar, Malcolm, Martin: and their widows, and their children. Reverend Ralph David Abernathy asked a certain sister to sing a song which Martin had loved—“Once more,” said Ralph David, “for Martin and for me,” and he sat down." Many articles and books on Aretha Franklin say that she sang at King's funeral. In fact she didn't, but there's a simple reason for the confusion. King's favourite song was the Thomas Dorsey gospel song "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", and indeed almost his last words were to ask a trumpet player, Ben Branch, if he would play the song at the rally he was going to be speaking at on the day of his death. At his request, Mahalia Jackson, his old friend, sang the song at his private funeral, which was not filmed, unlike the public part of the funeral that Baldwin described. Four months later, though, there was another public memorial for King, and Franklin did sing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" at that service, in front of King's weeping widow and children, and that performance *was* filmed, and gets conflated in people's memories with Jackson's unfilmed earlier performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord (at Martin Luther King Memorial)"] Four years later, she would sing that at Mahalia Jackson's funeral. Through all this, Franklin had been working on her next album, Aretha Now, the sessions for which started more or less as soon as the sessions for Lady Soul had finished. The album was, in fact, bookended by deaths that affected Aretha. Just as King died at the end of the sessions, the beginning came around the time of the death of Otis Redding -- the sessions were cancelled for a day while Wexler travelled to Georgia for Redding's funeral, which Franklin was too devastated to attend, and Wexler would later say that the extra emotion in her performances on the album came from her emotional pain at Redding's death. The lead single on the album, "Think", was written by Franklin and -- according to the credits anyway -- her husband Ted White, and is very much in the same style as "Respect", and became another of her most-loved hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Think"] But probably the song on Aretha Now that now resonates the most is one that Jerry Wexler tried to persuade her not to record, and was only released as a B-side. Indeed, "I Say a Little Prayer" was a song that had already once been a hit after being a reject.  Hal David, unlike Burt Bacharach, was a fairly political person and inspired by the protest song movement, and had been starting to incorporate his concerns about the political situation and the Vietnam War into his lyrics -- though as with many such writers, he did it in much less specific ways than a Phil Ochs or a Bob Dylan. This had started with "What the World Needs Now is Love", a song Bacharach and David had written for Jackie DeShannon in 1965: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "What the "World Needs Now is Love"] But he'd become much more overtly political for "The Windows of the World", a song they wrote for Dionne Warwick. Warwick has often said it's her favourite of her singles, but it wasn't a big hit -- Bacharach blamed himself for that, saying "Dionne recorded it as a single and I really blew it. I wrote a bad arrangement and the tempo was too fast, and I really regret making it the way I did because it's a good song." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "The Windows of the World"] For that album, Bacharach and David had written another track, "I Say a Little Prayer", which was not as explicitly political, but was intended by David to have an implicit anti-war message, much like other songs of the period like "Last Train to Clarksville". David had sons who were the right age to be drafted, and while it's never stated, "I Say a Little Prayer" was written from the perspective of a woman whose partner is away fighting in the war, but is still in her thoughts: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] The recording of Dionne Warwick's version was marked by stress. Bacharach had a particular way of writing music to tell the musicians the kind of feel he wanted for the part -- he'd write nonsense words above the stave, and tell the musicians to play the parts as if they were singing those words. The trumpet player hired for the session, Ernie Royal, got into a row with Bacharach about this unorthodox way of communicating musical feeling, and the track ended up taking ten takes (as opposed to the normal three for a Bacharach session), with Royal being replaced half-way through the session. Bacharach was never happy with the track even after all the work it had taken, and he fought to keep it from being released at all, saying the track was taken at too fast a tempo. It eventually came out as an album track nearly eighteen months after it was recorded -- an eternity in 1960s musical timescales -- and DJs started playing it almost as soon as it came out. Scepter records rushed out a single, over Bacharach's objections, but as he later said "One thing I love about the record business is how wrong I was. Disc jockeys all across the country started playing the track, and the song went to number four on the charts and then became the biggest hit Hal and I had ever written for Dionne." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Oddly, the B-side for Warwick's single, "Theme From the Valley of the Dolls" did even better, reaching number two. Almost as soon as the song was released as a single, Franklin started playing around with the song backstage, and in April 1968, right around the time of Dr. King's death, she recorded a version. Much as Burt Bacharach had been against releasing Dionne Warwick's version, Jerry Wexler was against Aretha even recording the song, saying later “I advised Aretha not to record it. I opposed it for two reasons. First, to cover a song only twelve weeks after the original reached the top of the charts was not smart business. You revisit such a hit eight months to a year later. That's standard practice. But more than that, Bacharach's melody, though lovely, was peculiarly suited to a lithe instrument like Dionne Warwick's—a light voice without the dark corners or emotional depths that define Aretha. Also, Hal David's lyric was also somewhat girlish and lacked the gravitas that Aretha required. “Aretha usually listened to me in the studio, but not this time. She had written a vocal arrangement for the Sweet Inspirations that was undoubtedly strong. Cissy Houston, Dionne's cousin, told me that Aretha was on the right track—she was seeing this song in a new way and had come up with a new groove. Cissy was on Aretha's side. Tommy Dowd and Arif were on Aretha's side. So I had no choice but to cave." It's quite possible that Wexler's objections made Franklin more, rather than less, determined to record the song. She regarded Warwick as a hated rival, as she did almost every prominent female singer of her generation and younger ones, and would undoubtedly have taken the implication that there was something that Warwick was simply better at than her to heart. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Wexler realised as soon as he heard it in the studio that Franklin's version was great, and Bacharach agreed, telling Franklin's biographer David Ritz “As much as I like the original recording by Dionne, there's no doubt that Aretha's is a better record. She imbued the song with heavy soul and took it to a far deeper place. Hers is the definitive version.” -- which is surprising because Franklin's version simplifies some of Bacharach's more unusual chord voicings, something he often found extremely upsetting. Wexler still though thought there was no way the song would be a hit, and it's understandable that he thought that way. Not only had it only just been on the charts a few months earlier, but it was the kind of song that wouldn't normally be a hit at all, and certainly not in the kind of rhythmic soul music for which Franklin was known. Almost everything she ever recorded is in simple time signatures -- 4/4, waltz time, or 6/8 -- but this is a Bacharach song so it's staggeringly metrically irregular. Normally even with semi-complex things I'm usually good at figuring out how to break it down into bars, but here I actually had to purchase a copy of the sheet music in order to be sure I was right about what's going on. I'm going to count beats along with the record here so you can see what I mean. The verse has three bars of 4/4, one bar of 2/4, and three more bars of 4/4, all repeated: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] While the chorus has a bar of 4/4, a bar of 3/4 but with a chord change half way through so it sounds like it's in two if you're paying attention to the harmonic changes, two bars of 4/4, another waltz-time bar sounding like it's in two, two bars of four, another bar of three sounding in two, a bar of four, then three more bars of four but the first of those is *written* as four but played as if it's in six-eight time (but you can keep the four/four pulse going if you're counting): [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] I don't expect you to have necessarily followed that in great detail, but the point should be clear -- this was not some straightforward dance song. Incidentally, that bar played as if it's six/eight was something Aretha introduced to make the song even more irregular than how Bacharach wrote it. And on top of *that* of course the lyrics mixed the secular and the sacred, something that was still taboo in popular music at that time -- this is only a couple of years after Capitol records had been genuinely unsure about putting out the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows", and Franklin's gospel-inflected vocals made the religious connection even more obvious. But Franklin was insistent that the record go out as a single, and eventually it was released as the B-side to the far less impressive "The House That Jack Built". It became a double-sided hit, with the A-side making number two on the R&B chart and number seven on the Hot One Hundred, while "I Say a Little Prayer" made number three on the R&B chart and number ten overall. In the UK, "I Say a Little Prayer" made number four and became her biggest ever solo UK hit. It's now one of her most-remembered songs, while the A-side is largely forgotten: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] For much of the

"It's hard to hire female chefs. It's hard to hire African American chefs because there's just not as many people interested in it, which I'm like, yeah, and that's why we need to promote it, and that's why we need to give them opportunities far beyond what might seem reasonable because we want them to be the heroes so everyone else can look up to them.  Then we can actually bring real diversity into our kitchens."  Curtis Stone Curtis Stone is one of the busiest chefs in the country between running his restaurants, appearing in countless television shows like Top Chef Masters (host), Netflix's Iron Chef, and Fox's Crime Scene Kitchen (judge), being a New York Times best-selling author of six cookbooks, and growing Kitchen Solutions, a collection of top-selling and best-reviewed cookware on HSN. Obsessed with food from a young age, Curtis credits his mom and grandmother as his cooking and baking mentors. Following his passion, he began his culinary career as an apprentice at the Savoy Hotels five-star restaurant in his hometown of Melbourne, Australia. Three years later at the age of 21, he moved to Europe and sought out Britain's most celebrated chef (often referred to as the first celebrity chef), Marco Pierre White, to further his education and classical training for eight years. During that time, he was approached to co-host a television show, Surfing the Menu, traveling around Australia visiting food producers and cooking their produce. The show caught the eye of US producers that led to another television gig, Take Home Chef, and a subsequent move to the US settling in Los Angeles. Today, Los Angeles-based Curtis' Michelin-starred restaurants include Maude in Beverly Hills named for his paternal grandmother serving refined, seasonally-focused Southern Californian cuisine, and Gwen Butcher Shop & Restaurant in Hollywood named for his maternal grandmother where he partnered with his brother, Luke Stone, to create an old-world, European-style butcher shop and an elegant restaurant using fire-based cooking techniques.  Please join me, your host, Brad Johnson, and Curtis on Corner Table Talk as we learn more about what motivates him beyond creating beautiful and delicious food, sharing his philosophy and knowledge, and how he directs his actions to bring joy and create a positive community around him. HOW WE MOVE Stay tuned to the end of the guest interview when international speaker, writer and diplomat Ambassador Shabazz (daughter of Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz) spends a few moments unpacking the discussion and highlights some of the interesting people, places and things that have her attention.   Instagram: Corner Table Talk  and Post and Beam Hospitality LinkedIn: Brad Johnson E.Mail:  brad@postandbeamhospitality.com For more information on host Brad Johnson or to join our mailing list, please visit: https://postandbeamhospitality.com/ Theme Music: Bryce Vine Corner Table™ is a trademark of Post & Beam Hospitality LLCSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Conversations with Dr. Ian Smith, Ambassador Shabazz joins the podcast to close out Women's History Month with an insightful conversation. Ambassador Shabazz, the eldest daughter of Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz, shares her experiences as a woman in the public eye and discusses the impact of her parents' legacies on her own life. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the love between two parents and for their children and living through things beyond our understanding and control. And more importantly creating your own legacy in spite of those things. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Conversations with Dr. Ian Smith, Ambassador Shabazz joins the podcast to close out Women's History Month with an insightful conversation. Ambassador Shabazz, the eldest daughter of Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz, shares her experiences as a woman in the public eye and discusses the impact of her parents' legacies on her own life. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the love between two parents and for their children and living through things beyond our understanding and control. And more importantly creating your own legacy in spite of those things. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mr. Restaurant, Will Knox interviews legendary restaurateur and the Host of Corner Table Talk on today's show! After years of lowering the velvet rope and pulling out chairs on both coasts for countless guests, Brad Johnson puts his warm, present, and welcoming hospitality skills to use as the host of Corner Table Talk, covering topics spanning FOOD + DRINK + CULTURE. Following the guest conversation, international speaker, writer, and diplomat Ambassador Shabazz (eldest daughter of Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz) spends a few moments unpacking the discussion and lets us in on some of the interesting people, places, and things that have her attention in HOW WE MOVE. Brad Johnson's career in hospitality began in the early '70s in the dish pit of his father's renowned NYC restaurant, The Cellar, followed by his subsequent storied road creating high-profile establishments, from the lavish LA nightclub The Roxbury (yes, that Roxbury) to the Melrose Avenue soulful hotspot, Georgia, and the James Beard Award-nominated Post & Beam. Until we "eat" again! - Mr. Restaurant https://postandbeamhospitality.com

Original Air Date: 12/4/1992Oprah takes a look at Spike Lee's autobiographical film, "Malcolm X." She talks with director Spike Lee, wife of the late Malcolm X, Dr. Betty Shabazz, and Attallah Shabazz, Malcolm X's daughter.

did the grandson really do it? --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thinlady/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thinlady/support

Our resident host Grace Sanders caught up with the amazing Los Angeles-based & Emmy nominated actress, Kelly Jenrette (Hulu's “The Handmaid's Tale”) who plays ‘Amara Patterson' on The CW's series All-American: Homecoming Kelly recently guest starred on the penultimate episode of NBC's THIS IS US, titled: “The Train” and previously starred in the Spectrum Original series “Manhunt: Deadly Games” on CBS (Corus in Canada). On the film front, she currently has two Netflix original movies streaming! These include “All Day and a Night” opposite Jeffrey Wright and Ashton Sanders as well as “Uncorked” alongside Courtney B. Vance and Niecy Nash. Kelly is also currently writing a play commissioned by the Black Rebirth Collective, which imagines a real-life meeting between Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott King, the widows of Malcolm X and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., respectively. Through Kelly's writing and imagination coupled with some of Betty and Coretta's words, the play will take the audience on the journey of how Betty and Coretta's relationship went from “rivalry to tolerance to genuine affection.”

Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz joins us live from The Center for Black Educator Development's 13th Annual Black Male Educators Convening to discuss the power of education, community sovereignty, and controlling our own narratives.

Community is at the heart of everything we do. From the moment we are born, who we are as individuals is directly connected to the community we are surrounded by.   Ambassador Shabazz knows this well. As the daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, some of her earliest memories are of communities rallying together to advocate for change. As a result, Ambassador Shabazz grew up to be a determined, strong individual who now helps others realize and come into their own power.   In this episode, Ambassador Shabazz shares the importance of gaining a global perspective, and how her trip to Belize changed her own outlook on community and family. Ambassador Shabazz also shares what's next for her, including her goals in the field of sustainability.     New podcast episodes released weekly on Thursday. Follow along with the links below: Sign up for the Celebrations Chatter Newsletter: https://celebrationschatter.beehiiv.com/    Subscribe to Celebrations Chatter on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@celebrationschatter  Follow @CelebrationsChatter on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/celebrationschatter/    Follow @CelebrationsChatter on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@celebrationschatter  Listen to more episodes of Celebrations Chatter on Apple Podcasts:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/celebrations-chatter-with-jim-mccann/id1616689192    Listen to more episodes of Celebrations Chatter on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5Yxfvb4qHGCwR5IgAmgCQX?si=ipuQC3-ATbKyqIk6RtPb-A    Listen to more episodes of Celebrations Chatter on Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5saWJzeW4uY29tLzQwMzU0MS9yc3M?sa=X&ved=0CAMQ4aUDahcKEwio9KT_xJuBAxUAAAAAHQAAAAAQNg  Visit 1-800-Flowers.com: https://www.1800flowers.com/    Visit the 1-800-Flowers.com YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@1800flowers  Follow Jim McCann on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim1800flowers/  Follow Jim McCann on X / Twitter: https://twitter.com/jim1800flowers (@Jim1800Flowers)

Community is at the heart of everything we do. From the moment we are born, who we are as individuals is directly connected to the community we are surrounded by.   Ambassador Shabazz knows this well. As the daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, some of her earliest memories are of communities rallying together to advocate for change. As a result, Ambassador Shabazz grew up to be a determined, strong individual who now helps others realize and come into their own power.   In this episode, Ambassador Shabazz sits down with Jim to talk about self-respect, community, and relationships, and even reminisces about her parents and their relationship among so much more.   New podcast episodes released weekly on Thursday. Follow along with the links below: Sign up for the Celebrations Chatter Newsletter: https://celebrationschatter.beehiiv.com/    Subscribe to Celebrations Chatter on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@celebrationschatter  Follow @CelebrationsChatter on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/celebrationschatter/    Follow @CelebrationsChatter on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@celebrationschatter  Listen to more episodes of Celebrations Chatter on Apple Podcasts:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/celebrations-chatter-with-jim-mccann/id1616689192    Listen to more episodes of Celebrations Chatter on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5Yxfvb4qHGCwR5IgAmgCQX?si=ipuQC3-ATbKyqIk6RtPb-A    Listen to more episodes of Celebrations Chatter on Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5saWJzeW4uY29tLzQwMzU0MS9yc3M?sa=X&ved=0CAMQ4aUDahcKEwio9KT_xJuBAxUAAAAAHQAAAAAQNg  Visit 1-800-Flowers.com: https://www.1800flowers.com/    Visit the 1-800-Flowers.com YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@1800flowers  Follow Jim McCann on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jim1800flowers/  Follow Jim McCann on X / Twitter: https://twitter.com/jim1800flowers (@Jim1800Flowers)

JayQuan sits down with Sugar Hill Records and Tackhead drummer Keith LeBlanc to discuss his classic recording Malcolm X: No Sellout and his relationship with Malcolm's widow Betty Shabazz.Support the show

This is a “Best of MIP” episode from the archives. Closing out our coverage of the 56th Bridge Crossing Jubilee in Selma, Mark speaks with Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., who details the significance of Selma to both himself and the country-at-large. He is then joined by Ilyasah Shabaaz, daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, as well as author, community organizer, and activist. Executive Producer: Adell Coleman Producer: Brittany Temple Distributor: DCP Entertainment For additional content: makeitplain.com

All American fans, we have a treat for you! The CW Spiral's Sabrina Reed sat down with All American: Homecoming star Kelly Jenrette to discuss the All American spin-off series, the scandal Amara Patterson uncovered, and Jenrette's play about Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott King. As always, we'll see you on Mondays for more CW news and chaos. All American: Homecoming airs Mondays at 9 p.m. ET. on The CW See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, we're discussing another one of our favorite actresses.  She's someone who's had a 40+ year body of work which includes films and tv shows such as Boyz n The Hood, Malcolm X, Waiting to Exhale, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, The Jacksons: An American Dream,  ER, American Horror Story and Black Panther.  She's played real-life characters such as Betty Shabazz, Katherine Jackson, Rosa Parks and most famously, Tina Turner. Obviously, we're talking about Ms. Angela Bassett. Join us as we discuss our favorite moments from her amazing career.Head over to  troypodcast.com for links to some of the things that we referenced in this episode.Don't forget to rate, review and follow us on your podcast service of choice, and also follow us on the 'gram @TROYPodcast & the bird, @TROYPodcast for updates and more!  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week's 51%, we wrap our series speaking with women religious leaders and scholars. Dr. Sh. Haifaa Younis discusses her work at the Jannah Institute, an Islamic school for women. Uzma Popal, director of the Capital Region's Muslim Soup Kitchen Project, shares how charity is a pillar of her faith. And Stanford University's Dr. Amina Darwish challenges the perception of Muslim women in the U.S. Guests: Dr. Sh. Haifaa Younis, founder of the Jannah Institute; Uzma Popal, director of the Muslim Soup Kitchen Project; Dr. Amina Darwish, Associate Dean for Religious & Spiritual Life at Stanford University 51% is a national production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. It's produced by Jesse King, our executive producer is Dr. Alan Chartock, and our theme is "Lolita" by the Albany-based artist Girl Blue. Follow Along You're listening to 51%, a WAMC production dedicated to women's issues and experiences. Thanks for joining us, I'm Jesse King. This week, we're wrapping our series speaking with women religious leaders and scholars. By now, at part four, we've spoken to women from various backgrounds about their beliefs. My hope in doing this, as someone who doesn't know much about religion, was to hear directly from women about how they worship, why they do it, and what they see as the greatest challenges in their faiths - because while a lot of today's mainstream religions are traditionally male-led, women are increasingly stepping up to the plate. Today, we're wrapping the series by speaking with three well-versed Muslim women. Our first guest is Dr. Sh. Haifaa Younis, the founder and chairman of the Jannah Institute in St. Louis, Missouri. Haifaa Younis is a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist with roots in Iraq, and she says she started the Jannah Institute in 2013 to offer an Islamic education for women, by women. Haifaa Younis always wanted to dive deeper into her faith, and before starting the Institute, she went on her own journey in search of knowledge — a mission that proved somewhat difficult in the U.S. at the time. After trying various remote learning methods, she packed up her life and moved to Saudi Arabia, where she graduated from the Mecca Institute of Islamic Studies. "There, actually, is where I met the woman scholars. Before that I have not – maybe I've read about them before, but there I definitely met [them]. I learned 90% from woman scholars, with really deep knowledge," says Younis. "And the beauty when you learn from a woman – and this is not because of gender – is just because, as a woman, you know she goes through what you are going through. It's closer. So it doesn't mean the man doesn't do it, but it's just something a little bit [closer]. I didn't know this ‘till I felt it, ‘till I tried it. What kinds of classes are you teaching at the Jannah Institute? At the Jannah Institute, what we offer, there is a broad spectrum, because there's so many things you can learn about Islam. So we divided it into the main two things: the holy book itself, and then what we call Islamic study. So the holy book [courses are] if people want to learn how to read. Remember, the holy book, the Quran, is in Arabic, and the majority of the women that live in the west don't speak Arabic, and they don't know how to read. So we offer them courses from the basics, from literally the alphabet, to becoming an expert in reading. Then, if someone knows how to read, but they want to memorize – it's a huge virtue to memorize – we offer that too. Then we offer, if you want to read but you want to read perfect – how you study academically. How do you read it? It's a whole subject. That's one. And then the other, which is much more needed, is basically, “What does Islam say? What does Islam teach? How can I practice my religion living in the west, in 2022, as a professional woman, as a mother, as both?” And this is what we offer. We started in 2017, giving six-to-eight week courses, once a week or twice a week. And then last year in March, we call this “The Year of Knowledge: What Every Muslim Woman Should Learn About Islam.” And we designed it in a way that it is the traditional books and the traditional sciences, but in a practical way, and that the ordinary woman – the goal is not to graduate scholars, I told the woman from day one – the goal is you learn your religion, and how you apply it in your daily life. So what are some of the ways that students are taking those lessons into their daily lives? Whenever we are learning, the first question comes in how to apply it. So when we finished our first semester, we had the final exam. And at the end, there was a question, and I told the students, “This is not going to be marked.” And the question was, “What did this subject change in your life? And how did you apply it in your daily life?” So for example, when we were teaching the woman about prayers, how you pray – not supplication, how you perform, we call it “Sana” in Islam. And then we taught them all of it, the connection to God and everything. So what they wrote was amazing. Like, “I always used to look at it as a duty, I have to do it. I never thought of it as it is a connection with my creator. And now I take my time to do it.” The science of the Quran, which is very academic, and it's not easy – they said, “Although it is challenging, and a lot of new information, it's changed the way I look to the book itself. Like, ‘How am I, as a woman living in this day and age, how do I apply it? How do I learn it? And how do I teach it to my children and apply it in my home?'” So basically, it's a practical theory, but we bring it to practice always. And you went to school to memorize the Quran, correct? Yes. Yes, definitely. Was that like? How do you break up such a large text to put it down to memory? The younger you are the better, because your brain is not busy yet. So usually, either you do it yourself – a lot of people do it, but it takes much longer. Or you do it with a teacher one-to-one. Or the best way, where everyone will advise you, is you go to school. And usually there are small classes, eight or nine in the class. And you all memorize the same. The teacher is usually very expert. Usually, the way they do it, to make it easy: it's 30 parts. So they usually divided over three years, and every year you memorize 10 parts. The irony, if you want to use the word, and the challenge, is that you can forget it very easily. So when you memorize, you have to keep reviewing. So you build up…and you get tested and tested and tested. So you sit in front of the teacher, and you don't have the book, she opens it to any page, and then she says, “Read from the following.” What does worship look like to you? To me, and I have seen it also as we are teaching, what has the most impact is when you start learning about your creator. Because whatever we say, and we say, “Yeah, I know, I know, I know.” But when you start studying in detail – so we believe in a creed, that he is the only creator and the Prophet, peace be upon him, is the messenger. And then when you look at who is he, like we spend 13 weeks studying “Who is he?” This really had an impact on me before the students. One of the sayings says, “He created us, and he doesn't need us.” And he gives to us constantly and never runs out, if you want to use this word, of continuous giving. I always tell the students: take a break. Just think about this, close your eyes and see, “Who is he?” So when you want something, why do you ask from people? Why don't you go and ask from the source? And the source will make me subcontractors, if you only use the word, do it. So the most important to me personally, as a woman, is this connection, this personal connection. Anywhere I want to go – I don't need anybody, I just sit and I talk to him. And if you know his words, the holy book, it's even better, because now you're talking to him with his own words and spirit. Islam is a very spiritual religion, and many people don't know that, unfortunately. Even Muslims don't know that. There's a lot of spirituality and personal connection. And you don't get the peace that we are supposed to get from religion, unless you have this. One thing I've been asking my guests is, do you see any opportunities or obstacles in your religion? I would call them both. Because the obstacle is, I will call it one of the most misunderstood religions – because of many reasons, you probably know, working in the media. But this obstacle is the opportunity. This is how I look at it. For example, I cover my hair, right? So people will ask me about this. Well, this is an opportunity. I can look at it as an obstacle – “Well, they have labeled me” – but no, I look at it as an opportunity to explain to people what is my religion. Since I am doing it – I am convinced that I didn't do it for any other reason than to please Him, God – then this is the opportunity. I've been a professional lay woman for years, studied all in the western world. I have always had people, when they asked me, the first thing I say to myself is, “They don't know, there is no other reason they are asking. And this is the opportunity.” And this is what I teach, also, at the Jannah Institute. I always tell the women, “When you are in that grocery shop, this is your opportunity to practice what you are learning.” One of the teachings of the Prophet is to not get upset, don't get angry. So you go to the grocery shop, and the cashier is busy or made a mistake. Because we are so much used to everything going our way, we get upset. But remember what you learned and apply it, especially as a Muslim woman. And that's the opportunity. Do you have either a favorite religious message, or story, or person from the Quran that you'd like to share? Oh, I have lots of stories. My friends know that. But one story is not about me, but I was there. And I'm talking to you about the connection because I saw the connection on the spot. This is in the holy month of Ramadan. The last 10 days of Ramadan is a very highly spiritual time, when many go for exclusion. We call it the “Aitikaf,” when you go alone, and it's really highly recommended to do it in the mosque. So here I am. This is years ago, with another woman who I don't know. And we were in the mosque, in the holy mosque in Makkah, which is so crowded. Jesse, you're talking about millions, not one or two. And then you are up all night praying, and in between they give you a break, but if you want to leave the mosque, go out and eat and come back, you will miss the prayers. So whatever food you have [you eat], usually it's a cheese sandwich, maybe a piece of food. And this is for 10 days. So at the end, this woman, young woman at that time, in her 20s – you know that giving, generous person? Anybody wants anything, I was watching her, for 10 days, she gives it. So she came to me at 3 a.m. We were sitting together, exhausted. And she looked at me and she said, in her own slang language, “I am dying for a piece of meat.” And I looked at her and I was like, “Where are we going to get meat? We are in the mosque with this millions.” Not even five minutes [later], a woman comes in, sits in front of us with a container. She opens the container, and guess what's in the container? Meat, cooked meat in tomato sauce. We looked at her, we don't know this woman. She said, “By God, this was cooked at home, and you all are going to eat.” And I looked at her like, “What connection you have, that you only wanted food, and he gave it to you within five minutes.” Amazing, amazing. But to have the connection, you have to sacrifice, you have to work for him, and give for him, and do what he wants from you. And it's amazing what you get back. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. That's all the questions that I had for you off the top my head. But is there anything that I'm missing that you'd like me to know? Or that you'd like our listeners to know? Thank you so much, and thanks for everyone who's listening to me. I would ask everybody who's listening to us: don't judge people. Learn, ask, and ask with a smile. And believe me, everybody will be more than happy [to help]. But don't judge anybody just because they look different. Especially women, just because they look different or maybe they have an accent. Believe me, this is what we believe in Islam: we all were created from dust, and we all got to go back to dust. One thing we've seen over the course of these episodes is how many people worship through service, and our next guest, Uzma Popal, is no exception. Popal has long been a member of the Al-Hidaya Center in Latham, New York, and since 2017, she's been the director of the center's Muslim Soup Kitchen Project. The charity, which helps families across the Capital Region, says it's served roughly 42,000 meals since 2014 - and the projects keep coming. I sat down with Popal to learn more. How did you get involved with the organization? So I actually grew up here, I came to America when I was nine years old. I had heard about the Muslim Soup Kitchen Project a while ago, and at that time, I was mother of two: my kids were around 10, 11. And I really wanted them to learn to give to the needy, and to help others. Because we have a lot that He has blessed us with, but I wanted my children to be able to be grateful and to give back. In our faith, charity is one of our pillars. We can't even really call ourselves Muslims if we don't give in charity. And when this, MSTP, came into my lap, I knew that this is something I really wanted to do. Tell me a little bit about what the project does. How often do you hold soup kitchens, and where do you operate? So MSKP, Muslim Soup Kitchen Project, has many programs underneath its umbrella. We serve monthly soup kitchens, monthly meals to local shelters in Schenectady, Albany, and Troy. We serve about 300 to 500 meals. On top of that, once a year we do the National Soup Kitchen Day, in which we serve over 1,200 meals just locally, and we extend to multiple shelters in Albany. There's also monthly drives that we do. So maybe in winter we do coats and socks and hats and stuff like that. When school starts around August, we do school supplies, and then we do fresh vegetables and fruit, things like that. So we do that every month. We have a donation center that we collect those things, and then we distribute it to local refugees, local families in need. In our holidays, we have either Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr. So one of the holidays is where we sacrifice meat, and we actually donated over 1,500 pounds of meat to local families in need. These are just a few of the things that MSKP does, along with, you know, visiting the sick and the elderly. That's another thing in our religion, is that we look out for our elders. Just the idea of putting your parents or somebody into the nursing home, it's like a foreign thought for us. I know it can't be helped sometimes, because people have to work. We understand that, you know, just because you put your parent in a nursing home doesn't mean you don't love them. Of course, everybody loves their parents. But in our culture, it's more, “They took care of us, now we have to take care of them.” So in the community, if there's somebody that doesn't have a family member, or they're alone, it's a community's job. It's their right upon us that we have to check on them. As you're helping people with these projects, what are the things that you often see them struggling with? What are some of the things that you're seeing out there in the community? Especially with COVID right now, you know, some people have temporarily lost their jobs. And everything is so expensive – even food, everything is rising. So even people that may have lived normally, without feeling the pain of all this, they are starting to feel that. And we also have the refugee group that has come, and we work closely with USCRI. When the refugees come, they contact us and we try to help them get resettled as much as possible. So for the Muslim refugees that come, some of the things that we provide for them, like welcome packages, may have their prayer rugs, as well as the Quran. Not only that, but before they can find permanent housing or apartments – USCRI finds it for them – so in that meantime, they are in a hotel, and they have no money, they don't have food stamps or anything like that. In order to help them with that, we actually provide lunches. You mentioned that there are different things you guys are looking for different times of the year. What are some ways that people can help out with the soup kitchen project right now? One thing that we're always in need of obviously, is volunteers. And people can go to our website, they can email mskp@al-hidaya.org. So they can even email us and say, “Hey, we want to volunteer,” and we can get them started. I like to see what the volunteers are into, what they like to do, and then we try to find the right spot for them. Another way people can donate is they can donate toiletries, or cleaning supplies, because these are the types of things that food stamps doesn't cover – but they're expensive. What was it that made you want to get more involved with your faith? Or has this always been a part of your life? Oh, yeah, definitely. The main reason I'm doing this and being part of this is because of my faith. We have the Quran, the holy book, and after that, we have Hadith. The Hadith is all the Sunnah, which is the sayings of the Prophet and the things he did. So it'll say, “Give charity,” but then the Hadith will tell us how to give charity, and who to give to charity. And one thing that always stands out to me is, it says, “One cannot be a Muslim, unless they want for their brothers what they have for themselves.” So when you think about that, how can I eat food, and be OK with that, knowing that my neighbor, or somebody I know, is starving and going hungry? And then another thing that I really like is, when it comes to charity, it says charity begins at home. So I can't go and help the community when my own children are starving, you know? That just doesn't make sense. So I see it as a circle that grows. It's all about intentions. So if we do something, it depends what your intention is. For example, if I said, “I like your shirt” in a cynical or wrong way, where it hurts your feelings – like, yeah, I said, “I like your shirt,” but am I going to get a good deed or a bad deed? You know, obviously, it's a bad deed, because what was the intention? So if I say, “I like your shirt” [and mean it] – which I do, by the way – I get a good deed for that. If I sit down and I watch a movie with my family, and I did it with the intention that, you know, I want to spend time with my family, that's good, I get a good deed for it. And I don't know too much about too many other faiths and everything, but in one day, every action, everything that I could do, I could get a reward for it. National Muslim Soup Kitchen Day is scheduled for May 28th with participating soup kitchens across the U.S. For additional info on donations and more about the charity, check them out at al-hidaya.org. Our last guest today has actually already been mentioned on this program before. Dr. Amina Darwish is a close friend of last week's guest, Sangeetha Kowsik, and she does quite a lot of work as a spiritual advisor and the Associate Dean for Religious & Spiritual Life at Stanford University. She originally got her doctorate in chemical engineering before switching career paths and choosing to pursue Islamic scholarship. What made you want to steer your life toward studying Islam? I don't know if I should call them spiritual crises, because they ended up being spiritual awakenings. But when I was 16, I decided like, “You know, this whole praying five times a day thing is a lot of work. I'm either going to do it for me, or I'm not going to do it at all.” And I started reading the Quran mostly to like, argue with my mom. If I was gonna be like, “Oh, I'm not gonna pray anymore,” then I could rebut what she was saying based on this text. And I remember reading it for the first time, and by the end of it, I was like, “Shoot, I think I'm still Muslim. I have to keep praying. I think I should do this now.” And I remember once going to a conference, and it was a discussion on spirituality, and Imam Ghazali is like one of the most renowned Muslim mystics in Islamic history. And I remember hearing his book, it's called The Alchemy of Happiness – and I was like, “Where has this been my whole life?” I still have my notes about like the spirit and the ego, and how your spirit existed before your body, and it still remembers the presence of God, and it's always yearning for and it's always yearning for this, like, timeless existence. That was actually the beginning of me trying to learn and study Islam more seriously. Unfortunately, there are a lot of idiots on the internet. And when you research things online about Islam, the junk that they say about women is ridiculous. I grew up in a Muslim family, I lived in Kuwait for a long time, I've lived in Muslim societies, and I knew what they were saying was just not true to the lived reality. And I also knew deep in my heart, like, I know God's not a misogynist. And there were so many women in the life of Prophet Muhammad, that anytime someone's like, “Oh, women can't do this,” I'm like, “Let me tell you about a woman in the life of Prophet Muhammad who did.” There's a woman that goes to the Prophet, peace be upon him, and she asks him, she's like, “Why in this verse are men mentioned more than women?” And my response every time I present this – this woman was later widowed, Prophet Muhammad marries her later in her life – and I'm like, if people ask who wants to marry the crazy feminist woman that's like, “What about this thing?” The answer's Prophet Muhammad, and people who are actually following his footsteps. So I like this woman. And I'm so grateful for all of those examples of women in the life of Prophet Muhammad. And I feel like very few people know about them. Are there any other things that you feel people misunderstand about your faith? That seems to be the biggest one. I've lived in different parts of the country, so I lived in Ohio, and I remember showing up to spaces where I'm the Muslim representative, and someone's like, “Islam oppresses women.” And I'm like, “My dude, they sent me. What are you talking about?” I'm just so confused. And it's odd, because I feel like, especially as women, we struggle claiming [our] space and claiming [our] expertise – and I'm standing in this space, and I'm like, “No, I'm the expert in this room about Islam. And you're not going to tell me what it is.” We had a guest speaker, it's actually the first event I did at Stanford. Dr. Donna Austin is a professor at Rutgers University, and she had a discussion on the women in Malcolm X's life. His sister, Ella Collins, was the one that got him transferred, and advocated for him to get transferred to the prison that had the library. And that's how he learned how to read. He memorized a dictionary. And without his sister, he wouldn't have been there. And she talked about his sister, she talked about his mother, she talked about Dr. Betty Shabazz – like, we celebrate him, and we forget to mention the women that made him who he is. He couldn't have been that person without her, and this unspoken emotional labor that a lot of the times women do. And she was talking about [how] loving someone that society has deemed unlovable is an act of resistance. And it's an act of beauty. And that really resonated with me. Because even in the story of Moses, and I think this is true in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures, a lot of the women in history are unnamed. And it talks about his sister, it talks about his mother, it talks about his adoptive mother, and you see all of these women that healed him, carried him through his trauma, and protected him, and gave him the opportunity to become who he was. So then he can walk into the court of Pharaoh be like, “Let me tell you about God. Even though you're trying to kill me.” It's such a badass moment, but he couldn't have been there without the love these women gave him. I've been teaching the life of Prophet Muhammad for a number of years now, and a lot of the times the feedback I got from people was like, “This is the first time I've heard these particular stories.” I'm named after Prophet Muhammad's mom, so of course, I'm gonna talk about his mom. I'm talking about his mom a lot. Other times, you're like, ‘OK, this is where he was born.” [I start the story at] “No, this is everything that was happening in his society when he was born.” His father passed away when his mom was still pregnant, this pregnant widow is carrying all of this. And that's the beginning of his life. Tell me a little bit more about Muhammad's mother. Sadly, she passed away when he was six years old. He had so much trauma as a child. And even the Quran later addresses it and says, “You were an orphan and we sent people to love you.” Because if you look at a tribal society, the most vulnerable person is the orphan. And there's so much celebrating that child and protecting that child. And not just protecting that child with like, here we give, we donate. No, people loved him, people took him in. And it's fascinating that like, that was part of God helping him through his trauma. When he was much, much later in his life – he's in his 60s, he's achieved this success of his message spreading everywhere, people are recognizing him for the leader that he is. And he stops by the place where his mother is buried, and he's just gone for a long time. And then they send someone to go find him, and they just find him standing right next to where his mother was buried, just crying, just missing her. She clearly gave him so much love, and believed in him so much, that he was able to carry through the rest of his life knowing he was loved. That love is healing, it gives people resilience. I was talking to a student earlier today that's telling me about her fiancée. She's like, “It's getting really exciting, I think I'm gonna marry him.” And one of the conversations we had reflected on the story of Moses, and like, “If you marry him, do you think in 10 years that your prayers will be better? That they'll be deeper, they'll be more meaningful?” And she's like, “Yeah, I think so.” Then he is your spiritual partner. That's awesome. For those who don't know, let's just go over some of the basic beliefs in Islam and the ways that you worship. Most basic belief is just the oneness of God. There's one God, he sends prophets to tell us about – I want to say himself, just because English doesn't have a genderless, singular [pronoun]. Arabic does, which I'm grateful for. Even just putting God, when you say “he,” it becomes so limiting. God by design is one, and only God can be one, because only God is perfect and unique in their oneness. All the rest of us need other people. What daily practice looks like? I mentioned the five daily prayers, they're based on the position of the sun. They're at different times, just spread out throughout your day. They're very small circuits. It's also a physical prayer, so you're in different physical positions – there's a point where your head is above your heart and you're standing, there's a point where you're bowing and your heart and head are level, there's a point where your face is on the ground, and your heart is above your head. And there's different things that you're saying in each of those positions. And it's very personal, [but] you can do it in a group. It looks like people standing in rows doing yoga together, which I think is hilarious. In the same way that Muslims are talked about a lot, unfortunately, in the news, in very negative light, very rarely is everyday Muslim life actually discussed. The most consistent thing that is said in the prayer is “Allahu Akbar,” “God is greater.” This is, by design, not a complete sentence because you can, in your own mind, like “God is greater than whatever I was worried about before I started the prayer.” “God is greater” than this. I can personalize it, I can make it my own experience. And unfortunately, a lot of Americans will hear the words “Allahu Akbar,” and they're like, “Oh, no, this is something bad.” And that makes me sad. Like, I say it a lot. Any practicing Muslim says that a lot. And it feels so insulting, that someone can commit an evil act, say it once, and somehow their once becomes more valuable than my 100 times a day. Me and every other practicing Muslim. Overall, do you have any religious stories or messages that you'd like to share? So Prophet Muhammad's wife narrates the greatest number of narrations from him. He passed away, and she, for the rest of her life, carried on his message. Up to a third of Islam came to us from this woman, and such detailed things of like, “This is the procedure he followed in his shower.” Who would be able to tell us that besides his wife? And any time there's someone that is insulting to Muslim women, I'm like – first of all, go talk to one. I promise we're a force to be reckoned with. And two, a third of Islam came to us through a woman. We wouldn't know so much of our religion without her, and it's not like the other two thirds was all men. The other two thirds included both men and women. Muslim women have always been at the forefront of our faith: the first martyr was a woman, the first believer was a woman. There's so many firsts in Islam. One of my favorites, the oldest running degree-granting university in the world is the one in Fez in Morocco. It was opened by a woman by the name of Fatima al-Fihri. There was a moment where the [former] president of Harvard, at some point, was like, “Women are just not as good at math.” And then he got himself fired and replaced by a woman, which was perfect poetic justice. Thank you, whoever did that. But I remember when he said that, and we were having a discussion at the mosque, and I was like, “No, no. This university was credited of introducing the Arabic numerals that we now use to Europe. So we all wouldn't do math the way that we do without this particular woman, let alone every woman that has been.” I mean, like, women were at the beginning of computer science, and now our image of a computer scientist is a man. And it just it's not giving credit where credit is due. You've been listening to 51%. A big thanks, again to Dr. Amina Darwish, Uzma Popal, and Dr. Sh. Haifaa Younis for participating in this week's episode — and thanks to you for joining us in this special series. 51% is a national production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. Our executive producer is Dr. Alan Chartock, and our theme is “Lolita” by the Albany-based artist Girl Blue. You can also find us on Twitter and Instagram at @51percentradio. Until next week, I'm Jesse King for 51%.

On this week's 51%, we wrap our series speaking with women religious leaders and scholars. Dr. Sh. Haifaa Younis discusses her work at the Jannah Institute, an Islamic school for women. Uzma Popal, director of the Capital Region's Muslim Soup Kitchen Project, shares how charity is a pillar of her faith. And Stanford University's Dr. Amina Darwish challenges the perception of Muslim women in the U.S. Guests: Dr. Sh. Haifaa Younis, founder of the Jannah Institute; Uzma Popal, director of the Muslim Soup Kitchen Project; Dr. Amina Darwish, Associate Dean for Religious & Spiritual Life at Stanford University 51% is a national production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. It's produced by Jesse King, our executive producer is Dr. Alan Chartock, and our theme is "Lolita" by the Albany-based artist Girl Blue. Follow Along You're listening to 51%, a WAMC production dedicated to women's issues and experiences. Thanks for joining us, I'm Jesse King. This week, we're wrapping our series speaking with women religious leaders and scholars. By now, at part four, we've spoken to women from various backgrounds about their beliefs. My hope in doing this, as someone who doesn't know much about religion, was to hear directly from women about how they worship, why they do it, and what they see as the greatest challenges in their faiths - because while a lot of today's mainstream religions are traditionally male-led, women are increasingly stepping up to the plate. Today, we're wrapping the series by speaking with three well-versed Muslim women. Our first guest is Dr. Sh. Haifaa Younis, the founder and chairman of the Jannah Institute in St. Louis, Missouri. Haifaa Younis is a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist with roots in Iraq, and she says she started the Jannah Institute in 2013 to offer an Islamic education for women, by women. Haifaa Younis always wanted to dive deeper into her faith, and before starting the Institute, she went on her own journey in search of knowledge — a mission that proved somewhat difficult in the U.S. at the time. After trying various remote learning methods, she packed up her life and moved to Saudi Arabia, where she graduated from the Mecca Institute of Islamic Studies. "There, actually, is where I met the woman scholars. Before that I have not – maybe I've read about them before, but there I definitely met [them]. I learned 90% from woman scholars, with really deep knowledge," says Younis. "And the beauty when you learn from a woman – and this is not because of gender – is just because, as a woman, you know she goes through what you are going through. It's closer. So it doesn't mean the man doesn't do it, but it's just something a little bit [closer]. I didn't know this ‘till I felt it, ‘till I tried it. What kinds of classes are you teaching at the Jannah Institute? At the Jannah Institute, what we offer, there is a broad spectrum, because there's so many things you can learn about Islam. So we divided it into the main two things: the holy book itself, and then what we call Islamic study. So the holy book [courses are] if people want to learn how to read. Remember, the holy book, the Quran, is in Arabic, and the majority of the women that live in the west don't speak Arabic, and they don't know how to read. So we offer them courses from the basics, from literally the alphabet, to becoming an expert in reading. Then, if someone knows how to read, but they want to memorize – it's a huge virtue to memorize – we offer that too. Then we offer, if you want to read but you want to read perfect – how you study academically. How do you read it? It's a whole subject. That's one. And then the other, which is much more needed, is basically, “What does Islam say? What does Islam teach? How can I practice my religion living in the west, in 2022, as a professional woman, as a mother, as both?” And this is what we offer. We started in 2017, giving six-to-eight week courses, once a week or twice a week. And then last year in March, we call this “The Year of Knowledge: What Every Muslim Woman Should Learn About Islam.” And we designed it in a way that it is the traditional books and the traditional sciences, but in a practical way, and that the ordinary woman – the goal is not to graduate scholars, I told the woman from day one – the goal is you learn your religion, and how you apply it in your daily life. So what are some of the ways that students are taking those lessons into their daily lives? Whenever we are learning, the first question comes in how to apply it. So when we finished our first semester, we had the final exam. And at the end, there was a question, and I told the students, “This is not going to be marked.” And the question was, “What did this subject change in your life? And how did you apply it in your daily life?” So for example, when we were teaching the woman about prayers, how you pray – not supplication, how you perform, we call it “Sana” in Islam. And then we taught them all of it, the connection to God and everything. So what they wrote was amazing. Like, “I always used to look at it as a duty, I have to do it. I never thought of it as it is a connection with my creator. And now I take my time to do it.” The science of the Quran, which is very academic, and it's not easy – they said, “Although it is challenging, and a lot of new information, it's changed the way I look to the book itself. Like, ‘How am I, as a woman living in this day and age, how do I apply it? How do I learn it? And how do I teach it to my children and apply it in my home?'” So basically, it's a practical theory, but we bring it to practice always. And you went to school to memorize the Quran, correct? Yes. Yes, definitely. Was that like? How do you break up such a large text to put it down to memory? The younger you are the better, because your brain is not busy yet. So usually, either you do it yourself – a lot of people do it, but it takes much longer. Or you do it with a teacher one-to-one. Or the best way, where everyone will advise you, is you go to school. And usually there are small classes, eight or nine in the class. And you all memorize the same. The teacher is usually very expert. Usually, the way they do it, to make it easy: it's 30 parts. So they usually divided over three years, and every year you memorize 10 parts. The irony, if you want to use the word, and the challenge, is that you can forget it very easily. So when you memorize, you have to keep reviewing. So you build up…and you get tested and tested and tested. So you sit in front of the teacher, and you don't have the book, she opens it to any page, and then she says, “Read from the following.” What does worship look like to you? To me, and I have seen it also as we are teaching, what has the most impact is when you start learning about your creator. Because whatever we say, and we say, “Yeah, I know, I know, I know.” But when you start studying in detail – so we believe in a creed, that he is the only creator and the Prophet, peace be upon him, is the messenger. And then when you look at who is he, like we spend 13 weeks studying “Who is he?” This really had an impact on me before the students. One of the sayings says, “He created us, and he doesn't need us.” And he gives to us constantly and never runs out, if you want to use this word, of continuous giving. I always tell the students: take a break. Just think about this, close your eyes and see, “Who is he?” So when you want something, why do you ask from people? Why don't you go and ask from the source? And the source will make me subcontractors, if you only use the word, do it. So the most important to me personally, as a woman, is this connection, this personal connection. Anywhere I want to go – I don't need anybody, I just sit and I talk to him. And if you know his words, the holy book, it's even better, because now you're talking to him with his own words and spirit. Islam is a very spiritual religion, and many people don't know that, unfortunately. Even Muslims don't know that. There's a lot of spirituality and personal connection. And you don't get the peace that we are supposed to get from religion, unless you have this. One thing I've been asking my guests is, do you see any opportunities or obstacles in your religion? I would call them both. Because the obstacle is, I will call it one of the most misunderstood religions – because of many reasons, you probably know, working in the media. But this obstacle is the opportunity. This is how I look at it. For example, I cover my hair, right? So people will ask me about this. Well, this is an opportunity. I can look at it as an obstacle – “Well, they have labeled me” – but no, I look at it as an opportunity to explain to people what is my religion. Since I am doing it – I am convinced that I didn't do it for any other reason than to please Him, God – then this is the opportunity. I've been a professional lay woman for years, studied all in the western world. I have always had people, when they asked me, the first thing I say to myself is, “They don't know, there is no other reason they are asking. And this is the opportunity.” And this is what I teach, also, at the Jannah Institute. I always tell the women, “When you are in that grocery shop, this is your opportunity to practice what you are learning.” One of the teachings of the Prophet is to not get upset, don't get angry. So you go to the grocery shop, and the cashier is busy or made a mistake. Because we are so much used to everything going our way, we get upset. But remember what you learned and apply it, especially as a Muslim woman. And that's the opportunity. Do you have either a favorite religious message, or story, or person from the Quran that you'd like to share? Oh, I have lots of stories. My friends know that. But one story is not about me, but I was there. And I'm talking to you about the connection because I saw the connection on the spot. This is in the holy month of Ramadan. The last 10 days of Ramadan is a very highly spiritual time, when many go for exclusion. We call it the “Aitikaf,” when you go alone, and it's really highly recommended to do it in the mosque. So here I am. This is years ago, with another woman who I don't know. And we were in the mosque, in the holy mosque in Makkah, which is so crowded. Jesse, you're talking about millions, not one or two. And then you are up all night praying, and in between they give you a break, but if you want to leave the mosque, go out and eat and come back, you will miss the prayers. So whatever food you have [you eat], usually it's a cheese sandwich, maybe a piece of food. And this is for 10 days. So at the end, this woman, young woman at that time, in her 20s – you know that giving, generous person? Anybody wants anything, I was watching her, for 10 days, she gives it. So she came to me at 3 a.m. We were sitting together, exhausted. And she looked at me and she said, in her own slang language, “I am dying for a piece of meat.” And I looked at her and I was like, “Where are we going to get meat? We are in the mosque with this millions.” Not even five minutes [later], a woman comes in, sits in front of us with a container. She opens the container, and guess what's in the container? Meat, cooked meat in tomato sauce. We looked at her, we don't know this woman. She said, “By God, this was cooked at home, and you all are going to eat.” And I looked at her like, “What connection you have, that you only wanted food, and he gave it to you within five minutes.” Amazing, amazing. But to have the connection, you have to sacrifice, you have to work for him, and give for him, and do what he wants from you. And it's amazing what you get back. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. That's all the questions that I had for you off the top my head. But is there anything that I'm missing that you'd like me to know? Or that you'd like our listeners to know? Thank you so much, and thanks for everyone who's listening to me. I would ask everybody who's listening to us: don't judge people. Learn, ask, and ask with a smile. And believe me, everybody will be more than happy [to help]. But don't judge anybody just because they look different. Especially women, just because they look different or maybe they have an accent. Believe me, this is what we believe in Islam: we all were created from dust, and we all got to go back to dust. One thing we've seen over the course of these episodes is how many people worship through service, and our next guest, Uzma Popal, is no exception. Popal has long been a member of the Al-Hidaya Center in Latham, New York, and since 2017, she's been the director of the center's Muslim Soup Kitchen Project. The charity, which helps families across the Capital Region, says it's served roughly 42,000 meals since 2014 - and the projects keep coming. I sat down with Popal to learn more. How did you get involved with the organization? So I actually grew up here, I came to America when I was nine years old. I had heard about the Muslim Soup Kitchen Project a while ago, and at that time, I was mother of two: my kids were around 10, 11. And I really wanted them to learn to give to the needy, and to help others. Because we have a lot that He has blessed us with, but I wanted my children to be able to be grateful and to give back. In our faith, charity is one of our pillars. We can't even really call ourselves Muslims if we don't give in charity. And when this, MSTP, came into my lap, I knew that this is something I really wanted to do. Tell me a little bit about what the project does. How often do you hold soup kitchens, and where do you operate? So MSKP, Muslim Soup Kitchen Project, has many programs underneath its umbrella. We serve monthly soup kitchens, monthly meals to local shelters in Schenectady, Albany, and Troy. We serve about 300 to 500 meals. On top of that, once a year we do the National Soup Kitchen Day, in which we serve over 1,200 meals just locally, and we extend to multiple shelters in Albany. There's also monthly drives that we do. So maybe in winter we do coats and socks and hats and stuff like that. When school starts around August, we do school supplies, and then we do fresh vegetables and fruit, things like that. So we do that every month. We have a donation center that we collect those things, and then we distribute it to local refugees, local families in need. In our holidays, we have either Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr. So one of the holidays is where we sacrifice meat, and we actually donated over 1,500 pounds of meat to local families in need. These are just a few of the things that MSKP does, along with, you know, visiting the sick and the elderly. That's another thing in our religion, is that we look out for our elders. Just the idea of putting your parents or somebody into the nursing home, it's like a foreign thought for us. I know it can't be helped sometimes, because people have to work. We understand that, you know, just because you put your parent in a nursing home doesn't mean you don't love them. Of course, everybody loves their parents. But in our culture, it's more, “They took care of us, now we have to take care of them.” So in the community, if there's somebody that doesn't have a family member, or they're alone, it's a community's job. It's their right upon us that we have to check on them. As you're helping people with these projects, what are the things that you often see them struggling with? What are some of the things that you're seeing out there in the community? Especially with COVID right now, you know, some people have temporarily lost their jobs. And everything is so expensive – even food, everything is rising. So even people that may have lived normally, without feeling the pain of all this, they are starting to feel that. And we also have the refugee group that has come, and we work closely with USCRI. When the refugees come, they contact us and we try to help them get resettled as much as possible. So for the Muslim refugees that come, some of the things that we provide for them, like welcome packages, may have their prayer rugs, as well as the Quran. Not only that, but before they can find permanent housing or apartments – USCRI finds it for them – so in that meantime, they are in a hotel, and they have no money, they don't have food stamps or anything like that. In order to help them with that, we actually provide lunches. You mentioned that there are different things you guys are looking for different times of the year. What are some ways that people can help out with the soup kitchen project right now? One thing that we're always in need of obviously, is volunteers. And people can go to our website, they can email mskp@al-hidaya.org. So they can even email us and say, “Hey, we want to volunteer,” and we can get them started. I like to see what the volunteers are into, what they like to do, and then we try to find the right spot for them. Another way people can donate is they can donate toiletries, or cleaning supplies, because these are the types of things that food stamps doesn't cover – but they're expensive. What was it that made you want to get more involved with your faith? Or has this always been a part of your life? Oh, yeah, definitely. The main reason I'm doing this and being part of this is because of my faith. We have the Quran, the holy book, and after that, we have Hadith. The Hadith is all the Sunnah, which is the sayings of the Prophet and the things he did. So it'll say, “Give charity,” but then the Hadith will tell us how to give charity, and who to give to charity. And one thing that always stands out to me is, it says, “One cannot be a Muslim, unless they want for their brothers what they have for themselves.” So when you think about that, how can I eat food, and be OK with that, knowing that my neighbor, or somebody I know, is starving and going hungry? And then another thing that I really like is, when it comes to charity, it says charity begins at home. So I can't go and help the community when my own children are starving, you know? That just doesn't make sense. So I see it as a circle that grows. It's all about intentions. So if we do something, it depends what your intention is. For example, if I said, “I like your shirt” in a cynical or wrong way, where it hurts your feelings – like, yeah, I said, “I like your shirt,” but am I going to get a good deed or a bad deed? You know, obviously, it's a bad deed, because what was the intention? So if I say, “I like your shirt” [and mean it] – which I do, by the way – I get a good deed for that. If I sit down and I watch a movie with my family, and I did it with the intention that, you know, I want to spend time with my family, that's good, I get a good deed for it. And I don't know too much about too many other faiths and everything, but in one day, every action, everything that I could do, I could get a reward for it. National Muslim Soup Kitchen Day is scheduled for May 28th with participating soup kitchens across the U.S. For additional info on donations and more about the charity, check them out at al-hidaya.org. Our last guest today has actually already been mentioned on this program before. Dr. Amina Darwish is a close friend of last week's guest, Sangeetha Kowsik, and she does quite a lot of work as a spiritual advisor and the Associate Dean for Religious & Spiritual Life at Stanford University. She originally got her doctorate in chemical engineering before switching career paths and choosing to pursue Islamic scholarship. What made you want to steer your life toward studying Islam? I don't know if I should call them spiritual crises, because they ended up being spiritual awakenings. But when I was 16, I decided like, “You know, this whole praying five times a day thing is a lot of work. I'm either going to do it for me, or I'm not going to do it at all.” And I started reading the Quran mostly to like, argue with my mom. If I was gonna be like, “Oh, I'm not gonna pray anymore,” then I could rebut what she was saying based on this text. And I remember reading it for the first time, and by the end of it, I was like, “Shoot, I think I'm still Muslim. I have to keep praying. I think I should do this now.” And I remember once going to a conference, and it was a discussion on spirituality, and Imam Ghazali is like one of the most renowned Muslim mystics in Islamic history. And I remember hearing his book, it's called The Alchemy of Happiness – and I was like, “Where has this been my whole life?” I still have my notes about like the spirit and the ego, and how your spirit existed before your body, and it still remembers the presence of God, and it's always yearning for and it's always yearning for this, like, timeless existence. That was actually the beginning of me trying to learn and study Islam more seriously. Unfortunately, there are a lot of idiots on the internet. And when you research things online about Islam, the junk that they say about women is ridiculous. I grew up in a Muslim family, I lived in Kuwait for a long time, I've lived in Muslim societies, and I knew what they were saying was just not true to the lived reality. And I also knew deep in my heart, like, I know God's not a misogynist. And there were so many women in the life of Prophet Muhammad, that anytime someone's like, “Oh, women can't do this,” I'm like, “Let me tell you about a woman in the life of Prophet Muhammad who did.” There's a woman that goes to the Prophet, peace be upon him, and she asks him, she's like, “Why in this verse are men mentioned more than women?” And my response every time I present this – this woman was later widowed, Prophet Muhammad marries her later in her life – and I'm like, if people ask who wants to marry the crazy feminist woman that's like, “What about this thing?” The answer's Prophet Muhammad, and people who are actually following his footsteps. So I like this woman. And I'm so grateful for all of those examples of women in the life of Prophet Muhammad. And I feel like very few people know about them. Are there any other things that you feel people misunderstand about your faith? That seems to be the biggest one. I've lived in different parts of the country, so I lived in Ohio, and I remember showing up to spaces where I'm the Muslim representative, and someone's like, “Islam oppresses women.” And I'm like, “My dude, they sent me. What are you talking about?” I'm just so confused. And it's odd, because I feel like, especially as women, we struggle claiming [our] space and claiming [our] expertise – and I'm standing in this space, and I'm like, “No, I'm the expert in this room about Islam. And you're not going to tell me what it is.” We had a guest speaker, it's actually the first event I did at Stanford. Dr. Donna Austin is a professor at Rutgers University, and she had a discussion on the women in Malcolm X's life. His sister, Ella Collins, was the one that got him transferred, and advocated for him to get transferred to the prison that had the library. And that's how he learned how to read. He memorized a dictionary. And without his sister, he wouldn't have been there. And she talked about his sister, she talked about his mother, she talked about Dr. Betty Shabazz – like, we celebrate him, and we forget to mention the women that made him who he is. He couldn't have been that person without her, and this unspoken emotional labor that a lot of the times women do. And she was talking about [how] loving someone that society has deemed unlovable is an act of resistance. And it's an act of beauty. And that really resonated with me. Because even in the story of Moses, and I think this is true in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures, a lot of the women in history are unnamed. And it talks about his sister, it talks about his mother, it talks about his adoptive mother, and you see all of these women that healed him, carried him through his trauma, and protected him, and gave him the opportunity to become who he was. So then he can walk into the court of Pharaoh be like, “Let me tell you about God. Even though you're trying to kill me.” It's such a badass moment, but he couldn't have been there without the love these women gave him. I've been teaching the life of Prophet Muhammad for a number of years now, and a lot of the times the feedback I got from people was like, “This is the first time I've heard these particular stories.” I'm named after Prophet Muhammad's mom, so of course, I'm gonna talk about his mom. I'm talking about his mom a lot. Other times, you're like, ‘OK, this is where he was born.” [I start the story at] “No, this is everything that was happening in his society when he was born.” His father passed away when his mom was still pregnant, this pregnant widow is carrying all of this. And that's the beginning of his life. Tell me a little bit more about Muhammad's mother. Sadly, she passed away when he was six years old. He had so much trauma as a child. And even the Quran later addresses it and says, “You were an orphan and we sent people to love you.” Because if you look at a tribal society, the most vulnerable person is the orphan. And there's so much celebrating that child and protecting that child. And not just protecting that child with like, here we give, we donate. No, people loved him, people took him in. And it's fascinating that like, that was part of God helping him through his trauma. When he was much, much later in his life – he's in his 60s, he's achieved this success of his message spreading everywhere, people are recognizing him for the leader that he is. And he stops by the place where his mother is buried, and he's just gone for a long time. And then they send someone to go find him, and they just find him standing right next to where his mother was buried, just crying, just missing her. She clearly gave him so much love, and believed in him so much, that he was able to carry through the rest of his life knowing he was loved. That love is healing, it gives people resilience. I was talking to a student earlier today that's telling me about her fiancée. She's like, “It's getting really exciting, I think I'm gonna marry him.” And one of the conversations we had reflected on the story of Moses, and like, “If you marry him, do you think in 10 years that your prayers will be better? That they'll be deeper, they'll be more meaningful?” And she's like, “Yeah, I think so.” Then he is your spiritual partner. That's awesome. For those who don't know, let's just go over some of the basic beliefs in Islam and the ways that you worship. Most basic belief is just the oneness of God. There's one God, he sends prophets to tell us about – I want to say himself, just because English doesn't have a genderless, singular [pronoun]. Arabic does, which I'm grateful for. Even just putting God, when you say “he,” it becomes so limiting. God by design is one, and only God can be one, because only God is perfect and unique in their oneness. All the rest of us need other people. What daily practice looks like? I mentioned the five daily prayers, they're based on the position of the sun. They're at different times, just spread out throughout your day. They're very small circuits. It's also a physical prayer, so you're in different physical positions – there's a point where your head is above your heart and you're standing, there's a point where you're bowing and your heart and head are level, there's a point where your face is on the ground, and your heart is above your head. And there's different things that you're saying in each of those positions. And it's very personal, [but] you can do it in a group. It looks like people standing in rows doing yoga together, which I think is hilarious. In the same way that Muslims are talked about a lot, unfortunately, in the news, in very negative light, very rarely is everyday Muslim life actually discussed. The most consistent thing that is said in the prayer is “Allahu Akbar,” “God is greater.” This is, by design, not a complete sentence because you can, in your own mind, like “God is greater than whatever I was worried about before I started the prayer.” “God is greater” than this. I can personalize it, I can make it my own experience. And unfortunately, a lot of Americans will hear the words “Allahu Akbar,” and they're like, “Oh, no, this is something bad.” And that makes me sad. Like, I say it a lot. Any practicing Muslim says that a lot. And it feels so insulting, that someone can commit an evil act, say it once, and somehow their once becomes more valuable than my 100 times a day. Me and every other practicing Muslim. Overall, do you have any religious stories or messages that you'd like to share? So Prophet Muhammad's wife narrates the greatest number of narrations from him. He passed away, and she, for the rest of her life, carried on his message. Up to a third of Islam came to us from this woman, and such detailed things of like, “This is the procedure he followed in his shower.” Who would be able to tell us that besides his wife? And any time there's someone that is insulting to Muslim women, I'm like – first of all, go talk to one. I promise we're a force to be reckoned with. And two, a third of Islam came to us through a woman. We wouldn't know so much of our religion without her, and it's not like the other two thirds was all men. The other two thirds included both men and women. Muslim women have always been at the forefront of our faith: the first martyr was a woman, the first believer was a woman. There's so many firsts in Islam. One of my favorites, the oldest running degree-granting university in the world is the one in Fez in Morocco. It was opened by a woman by the name of Fatima al-Fihri. There was a moment where the [former] president of Harvard, at some point, was like, “Women are just not as good at math.” And then he got himself fired and replaced by a woman, which was perfect poetic justice. Thank you, whoever did that. But I remember when he said that, and we were having a discussion at the mosque, and I was like, “No, no. This university was credited of introducing the Arabic numerals that we now use to Europe. So we all wouldn't do math the way that we do without this particular woman, let alone every woman that has been.” I mean, like, women were at the beginning of computer science, and now our image of a computer scientist is a man. And it just it's not giving credit where credit is due. You've been listening to 51%. A big thanks, again to Dr. Amina Darwish, Uzma Popal, and Dr. Sh. Haifaa Younis for participating in this week's episode — and thanks to you for joining us in this special series. 51% is a national production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. Our executive producer is Dr. Alan Chartock, and our theme is “Lolita” by the Albany-based artist Girl Blue. You can also find us on Twitter and Instagram at @51percentradio. Until next week, I'm Jesse King for 51%.

032- T is a transformational coach who strives to create a sacred space for her clients to get curious and claim their own passion and pleasure. She champions integrity and self-investment for artists, creatives, and founders that have let the voices and desires of others dilute their own authentic creative spark. With a blend of authority and feminine ease, T is dedicated to working 1-1 with clients to guide them to connect with themselves and answer their soul's calling. She is Founder and Coach of The T Hive, a new coach with Electric Woman, and has the pleasure of supporting talented actors at The 5 Management. Timestamps:2:30 - T's background, career path & how to identify  purpose 6:30 - How did T reach her current state of  self confidence?12:30 - curiosity vs judgement mindset14:30 - what about artists and creatives drew T in as a coach?16:30 - what is imposter syndrome?22:00 - the legacy of Michelle Obama and the most impactful role models in T's life (Nina Simone, Josephine Baker, Dr. Betty Shabazz, Maya Angelou, Mavis Staples)27:30 - growing the pie vs zero sum game mindset (in personal life and the D&I discussion) 36:30 - fallacy of advice40:30 - how to navigate unsolicited advice and the “you should do it this way” mentality 44:00 - 3 things gameT's question - what are  three things you have learned from making mistakes?Thomas' question - what are  three things you have learned about friendship?Let me Know What Topics to Discuss Next!Follow Bro Nouveau on Instagram here Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Saturday, November 27th 9:00PM Eastern/ 6:00PM Pacific The Context of White Supremacy hosts the weekly Compensatory Call-In. We encourage non-white listeners to dial in with their codified concepts, new terms, observations, research findings, workplace problems or triumphs, and/or suggestions on how best to Replace White Supremacy With Justice ASAP. We'll use these sessions to hone our use of words as tools to reveal truth, neutralize White people. We'll examine news reports from the past seven days and – hopefully – promote a constructive dialog. #ANTIBLACKNESS  While the U.S. prepared to gorge on turkey and promote White Supremacist lies about a mythical feast between Whites and so called Indians, a black male, Darrell Brooks, is accused of killing six people and wounding dozens when he drove an SUV into a Wisconsin Christmas parade. Numerous reports call attention to Brooks' history of domestic abuse and question why he was ever released from greater confinement. Prior to the parade attack, many were anxious for a verdict in the Ahmaud Arbery murder trial. The nearly all White jury (11 of 12) will decide if yet more White Men will be turned loose in the name of "self defense." One week after two black males were exonerated for the assassination of Minister Malcolm X, Malikah Shabazz, one of Betty Shabazz and the minister's six daughters, reportedly died at her residence. Police officials announced there was no cause for suspicion. According to The New York Times, accidental food poisoning is a possible cause of death. #WhiteSupremacyIsTerrorism INVEST in The COWS – http://paypal.me/TheCOWS Invest in The C.O.W.S. - https://cash.app/$TheCOWS CALL IN NUMBER: 720.716.7300 CODE 564943# The C.O.W.S. Radio Program is specifically engineered for black & non-white listeners - Victims of White Supremacy. The purpose of this program is to provide Victims of White Supremacy with constructive information and suggestions on how to counter Racist Woman & Racist Man. Phone: 1-605-313-5164 - Access Code 564943# Hit star *6 & 1 to enter caller cue

Listen to the Thurs. Nov. 25, 2021 special edition of the Pan-African Journal: Worldwide Radio Broadcast hosted by Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire. The program features our regular PANW report with dispatches on the tragic deaths of 27 migrants drown in the English Channel; the Ethiopian government is seeking to correct the false narrative related to the attacks being levelled at the country from the United States and its surrogates inside the Horn of Africa state; Sudan's restored interim Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok has called for the police not to brutalize demonstrators; and Egypt has announced the reopening of the Luxor museum. In the second hour we continue our examination of the exoneration of two men falsely accused of being assassins of Malcolm X. The daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, Malikah, was found dead earlier in the week in Brooklyn, New York. Finally, we pay tribute to the Indigenous people and their struggle to reclaim independence and sovereignty. 

Malikah Shabazz, 56, daughter of Malcolm X, was found dead in her Brooklyn apartment; Kevin Strickland is exonerated after 43 years in prison, one of the longest wrongful convictions in U.S. history.  He was wrongfully convicted of triple murder in 1979 by an all White jury in Kansas City, MO; Ahmaud Arbery Day 12: Jury begins deliberations after Closing Arguments; Groveland Four are exonerated of a 1949 rape - TheAHNShow with Michael Imhotep 11-23-21   Support The African History Network through Cash App @ https://cash.app/$TheAHNShow or PayPal @ TheAHNShow@gmail.com or http://www.PayPal.me/TheAHNShow or visit http://www.AfricanHistoryNetwork.com and click on the yellow “Donate” button.

In the first episode of season 2, Sherryl is joined by the ‘King of Kunyaza', erotologist, historian, author and sex educator; Habeeb Akande.The two dive straight into unpacking the importance of pleasuring a woman and the traditional Rwandan practice of Kunyaza!They also discuss the need for effective communication, why humour works best (sometimes) and why men view sex as performative.It gets especially interesting when they consider Malcolm X's apparent inability to satisfy his wife; Betty Shabazz and why this is a great starting point for getting the conversation around sexual issues going.It's one hour of unfiltered opinion, facts and a bit of bants!#HTCPODConnect with HabeebInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/habeeb_akande Twitter: https://twitter.com/Habeeb_AkandeBuy a book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Habeeb-Akande/e/B008KZGIV2/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1503601357&sr=8-1Connect with Sherryl Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sherrylsworldTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sherrylsworld Twitter: https://twitter.com/SHERRYLsWorLDWebsite: https://sherrylsworld.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Soul-Full Reflections on Community with Ilyasah Shabazz and Suhaib Webb This past Ramadan, At Your Service had the honor of hosting a series of Virtual Iftars (dinners to break our fast). To really hone in on impact for these events, we tapped into some incredible leaders to guide us through themed conversations around intention and community. This truly was one of my favorite events I've ever been to, let alone hosted. When you're in the Month of Ramadan, feeling all your feelings, and you receive blessings in the form of gems, with your community all together Live, there's really nothing like it. Last week we dropped a conversation with Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir and Iddris Sandu. THIS WEEK, we have the honor of revisiting a conversation between the esteemed Ilyasah Shabazz and Suhaib Webb. Professor Ilyasah Shabazz promotes higher education for at-risk youth, interfaith dialogue to build bridges between cultures for young leaders of the world, and she participates in international humanitarian delegations. She served as a member of the U.S. Delegation that accompanied President Bill Clinton to South Africa to commemorate the election of President Nelson Mandela and the Education & Economic Development initiatives. While she is frequently asked to speak about the Legacy of Malcolm X, she shares that it is her mother, Dr. Betty Shabazz's wisdom, courage and compassion that guide her. Suhaib Webb is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Public Service of NYU's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. He has a degree in Education from the University of Central Oklahoma, and in Islamic law from al-Azhar Universiy in Cairo. He was named as a "Faith Leader to Watch" by The Center for American Progress in 2016, selected by the Muslim Community as one of CNN's 25 Most Influential Leaders; as well as one of "Five Hundred of the Most Influential Muslims" by the Royal Islamic Studies Center in 2017. He is also currently the resident scholar at the ICNYU. And PS, he married Adam and I at our wedding :) This conversation between Ilyasah Shabazz and Suhaib Webb on community and being there for yourself in order to be there for others just CLICKED. I'm currently reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X and listening to this episode again and it couldn't be more timely. I hope you enjoy! PS, In case you missed it last week, we played back another conversation from this event series, with Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir and Iddris Sandu. ays xx Our sponsors, but more like friends, at Ahmad Tea helped us put so much intention into these events, and we could not be more grateful to have them as partners. www.ahmadteausa.com instagram.com/ahmadtea_usa I hope you enjoy this episode, as much as I enjoyed hosting these lovely souls. _____ If you have any feedback, PLEASE leave a review of PODCAST NOOR. Follow Ilyasah: Instagram.com/ilyasahshabazz Follow Suhaib: instagram.com/suhaib.webb Follow Noor: instagram.com/noor Follow AYS: instagram.com/ays www.noortagouri.com/linktree

While I'm away on vacation, the staff at The North Star will be playing some of our favorite episodes from some of our other podcast series. Today,  Here's a replay of a special time when my wife, Rai King, took over The Breakdown to talk about the lives and legacies of Myrlie Evers-Williams, Betty Shabazz, and Coretta Scott King. She discusses why they are more than footnotes in the stories of their husbands and why their work is relevant today.

In this episode of The Gospel of Malcolm X podcast. We review the Amazon Prime , Regina King directed film "One Night in Miami"We talk about some of the historical inaccuracies of the film and why it falls short in its depictions of Malcolm X , Betty Shabazz, and Muhammad Ali .--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/eric-summers6/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/eric-summers6/support --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/eric-summers6/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/eric-summers6/support

In this episode of The Gospel of Malcolm X podcast. We review the Amazon Prime , Regina King directed film "One Night in Miami"We talk about some of the historical inaccuracies of the film and why it falls short in its depictions of Malcolm X , Betty Shabazz, and Muhammad Ali .--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/eric-summers6/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/eric-summers6/support --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/eric-summers6/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/eric-summers6/support

What was Butler and Johnson's Role in Malcolms Assassination ?In this Episode of The Gospel of Malcolm X Podcast We will discuss Norman 3x Butler and Thomas 15x 's roles in the assassination of Malcolm X We will examine all the evidence to determine if they were indeed innocent or guilty. In this episode we also discuss and examine the affidavit of Thomas Hagan who participated in the assassination of Malcolm X and other events that lead up to the assassination of Malcolm X. Additionally, we will look into why Louis Farrakhan blamed the wife of Malcolm X , (Honorable Betty Shabazz) for the conviction of the people that participated in her husband's assassination. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/eric-summers6/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/eric-summers6/support --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/eric-summers6/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/eric-summers6/support

What was Butler and Johnson's Role in Malcolms Assassination ?In this Episode of The Gospel of Malcolm X Podcast We will discuss Norman 3x Butler and Thomas 15x 's roles in the assassination of Malcolm X We will examine all the evidence to determine if they were indeed innocent or guilty. In this episode we also discuss and examine the affidavit of Thomas Hagan who participated in the assassination of Malcolm X and other events that lead up to the assassination of Malcolm X. Additionally, we will look into why Louis Farrakhan blamed the wife of Malcolm X , (Honorable Betty Shabazz) for the conviction of the people that participated in her husband's assassination. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/eric-summers6/messageSupport this podcast: https://anchor.fm/eric-summers6/support --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/eric-summers6/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/eric-summers6/support

The idea behind Don't Complain, Activate is that you don't have to be President Obama or Beyonce to activate your community. You could be a mom, dad, teacher, artist, activist, lawyer, and the list goes on. Dr. Betty Shabazz once said "find the good and praise it." That is precisely what DCA seeks to do. Each episode, Leslie E. Redmond interviews a dynamic group activators. This episode features the first Attorney General Keith Ellison, Dr. Josie R. Johnson, Charlnitta "Mama Chi" Ellis.

Interview with Dr. James Taylor Professor James Lance Taylor is from Glen Cove, Long Island. He is author of the book Black Nationalism in the United States: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama, which earned 2012 "Outstanding Academic Title" - Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. (Ranked top 2 percent of 25,000 books submitted and top 8 percent of 7,300 actually accepted for review by the American Library Association). Rated “Best of the Best.” The hardback version sold out in the U.S. and the paperback version was published in 2014.He is a former President of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS), an important organization of African American, African, and Afro Caribbean political scientists in the United States, 2009-2011. Taylor also served as Chair of the Department of Politics at the University of San Francisco from 2012-2015, and Faculty Coordinator of the African American Studies Program for 2015-2017. He served as the Chair for the “Committee on the Status of Blacks” in Political Science for the American Political Science Association (APSA), 2016-2017.Professor Taylor is currently writing and researching a book with the working title, Peoples Temple, Jim Jones, and California Black Politics. He expects the book to be completed with a 2018-2019 publication range. The book is a study of the Peoples Temple movement and African American political history in the state of California.He co-edited and published in Something's in the Air: Race and the Legalization of Marijuana, with Katherine Tate (UC Irvine) and Mark Sawyer (UCLA), focusing on controversies concerning race, social justice, and marijuana legalization in the state of California.Prof. Taylor has published articles on subjects such as Father Divine's International Peace Mission Movement, Dr. Betty Shabazz (wife of Malcolm X), Dr. Benjamin Chavis (then, Muhammad), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Black Nationalism,” The post-9/11 relationship of Muslims in Northern California and the United States to Black Social and Political History, San Francisco Sun Reporter publisher Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett, and on the Peoples Temple Movement in Northern and Southern California.https://www.usfca.edu/faculty/james-lance-taylorhttps://www.amazon.com/Black-Nationalism-United-States-Malcolm/dp/1626371857/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=James+Taylor+black+nationalism&qid=1565048626&s=books&sr=1-1

The story of Muslims in America has primarily been told through the experiences of men and often revolves around narratives of immigration. Sylvia Chan-Malik, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, expands upon and challenges this scholarly pattern in Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam (NYU Press, 2018). Chan-Malik centers Black Muslim women's involvement in U.S. communities and the various spaces of social identity that are frequently ignored in scholarship. Crucial to her analysis is how social racial-religious formation informs both lived religion and how Muslim women are represented in public. “Being Muslim,” therefore, can be variously embodied in Black Muslim womanhood. Through an episodic exploration of Islam in twentieth and twenty-first century America Chan-Malik demonstrates the crucial ways race, gender, and religion intersect. In our conversation we discussed the “blackness” of American Islam, the Ahmadiyya Movement, domesticity, the Nation of Islam, Betty Shabazz, cultural representations of Black Muslim women, the problem with feminism and how it can be deployed, American perceptions of Iranian's 1979 revolution, and environmentalism and food justice. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ILYASAH AL SHABAZZ – Third daughter of Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz, is an educator, social activist, motivational speaker, and author of award winning publications: (1) Growing Up X (Random House) a coming of age memoir; (2) Malcolm Little (Simon & Schuster), a children's illustration book and (3) X, A Novel (Candlewick Press) a young adult historical fiction. Ilyasah promotes higher education for at-risk youth, interfaith dialogue to build bridges between cultures for young leaders of the world, and she participates on international humanitarian delegations. Ilyasah produced training programs to encourage higher education sanctioned by City University of New York's Office of Academic Affairs. She served for twelve years on the Executive Youth Board for the City of Mount Vernon, including appointments as Director of Public Relations, Director of Public Affairs & Special Events, and later promoted to Director of Cultural Affairs. She is a member of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee at West Virginia University. She is a mentor for Nile Rogers' We Are Family Foundation. She mentors at various group homes, lock-up facilities, high schools and college campuses through production of The WAKE-UP Tour™ X-Tra Credit Forums—her exclusive youth empowerment program. Ilyasah has retraced her father's footsteps to the Holy City of Mecca, explored religious and historical sites in both Egypt and Jordan as the guest of HRH Princess Alia Hussein, participated in interfaith dialogue study programs under Rabbi Nancy Kreimer and Dr. Aziza Al Hibri, and served as member of the American Interfaith Leadership delegation that participated with the Malaria No More Foundation in Mali, West Africa. Ilyasah also served as a member of the United States delegation that accompanied President Bill Clinton to South Africa to commemorate election of President Nelson Mandela and the economic business development initiative. Ilyasah serves as Trustee for the Harlem Symphonic Orchestra, The Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, and The Malcolm X Foundation. She is a member of the Arts Committee for the New York City Opera at Lincoln Center and a project advisor for the PBS award-winning Prince Among Slaves documentary. She holds a Master of Science in Education & Human Resource Development from Fordham University and a Bachelor of Science in Biology from SUNY/New Paltz. Ilyasah is currently an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and resides in Westchester County, New York.For further information, please contact, Dr. Jamal Watson, at jamal@ilyasahshabazz.comwww.ilyasahshabazz.com http://Twitter.com/ilyasahshabazzX: A NOVEL, Candlewick Press. (1/2015) MALCOLM LITTLE, Simon & Schuster. (1/2014) GROWING UP X, Random House. (1/2002)This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/1198501/advertisement

TONIGHT: Listen to The Michael Imhotep Show, Tues. June, 23rd, 10pm-12midnight EST with host Michael Imhotep of The African History Network.  CALL IN WITH Questions/Comments at 1-888-669-2281.  Our guest will be Dr. Boyce Watkins of Your Black World.  We'll discuss some hot news stories. POST YOUR COMMENTS.  WE MAY READ THEM ON AIR.  Listen online at http://tunein.com/radio/Empowerment-Radio-Network-s199313/ or by downloading the "TuneIn Radio" app to your smartphone and search for "Empowerment Radio Network" or at www.AfricanHistoryNetwork.com. 1) Police Officers took Mass Murderer Dylan Roof to Burger King after he was arrested.  2)  A White woman flies the Confederate Flag in an all African American neighborhood.  Why?  3) Update on South Carolina AME Shooting.  4) Entrepreneurship Segment – A 10 year old Entrepreneur is doing big things with lemonade.  5) This date in African American History – Dr. Betty Shabazz.   Help Support The African History Network Crowdfunding Campaign.  We are trying to raise $200 today to reach our daily goal.  If 200 people donate at least $1 we will reach today's goal.  Visit www.AfricanHistoryNetwork.com and click on the “Donate” button. 

TONIGHT: Listen to the The African History Network Show, Thur. May, 28th, Special Time 9:00pm (6:00pm PST) with host Michael Imhotep founder of The African History Network?  We'll honor Dr. Betty Shabazz, Maya Angelou and Gil Soctt Heron.  We'll also discuss current events and hot topics on our Facebook Fanpage “The African History Network”.   CALL IN WITH QUESTIONS/COMMENTS & LISTEN AT (914) 338-1375.  Listen online LIVE and the archived show here: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/theafricanhistorynetworkshow/2015/05/28/five-on-the-black-handside-the-history-of-the-dap-and-african-american-hands or www.AfricanHistoryNetwork.com.     1) Today is the 81st birthday of Dr. Betty Shabazz, widow of Malcolm X.  It has been 1 year since poet Maya Angelou died and Gil Scott Heron died on May 27th, 2011 as well.  We'll honor all 3 of them on tonight's show.  2)  The Justice Department issues reforms to fix Cleveland policing.  What is next? 3) Media Mogul Byron Allen did a radio interview this morning where he talked about how African Americans are set up to fail economically and more.  4) In 1994, the Crime Bill that Bill Clinton signed into prohibited prisoners using Pell Grants to get a college degree.  That could change very soon.  5) This date in African American History.