template i like to use and we're going to be talking about the human condition and communication all that sort of thing but i like to sort of anchor it on the person could you share your own back room where you're born and raise that sort of thing some cation and then was a way to wade into a discussion o communications aggressive communications politics human condition that sort of thing but your own background please if you would well i was born right here in manhattan on the island of manhattan sometimes folks as me to come from the island and i'm telling him  and they were very interested to make sure that all of the students that they had learned how to read and write and to think well and much of what they taught me help me all the way through high school and i think in this to english early and high school because of the background that i had from them how about in the family or the family setting where they intellectually encouraging in that sort of thing and education minded and so forth and what my family my my parents both of them lived i would say twenty miles from each other they didn't know each other right but they met in the office and they got married and their expectation was that i finished high school because that was it for them and they didn't they weren't too familiar with colleges and rival colleges so they never really encouraged it they didn't discourage it but you know they my father particular felt that i should it would take my good high school education to get a job working for the city yeah i get the benefits i was talking with my friends and my dad and mother they were born turn of the century right and i happened to look at it and it was only something that when they graduated high school and they went on to a profession that but when they get there was something only like forty i think i saw a statistic only something like forty percent of the population of the country graduated from high school and now it's just taken as oh you given all that you know every people every was a college almost are able to but just a thought oh yeah another thought about that too that you know you know you have the high school equivalency  yeah and i remember preparing for regents exams i mean really studying hard because part of the regents exam was also that you write in complete sentences as you had to know that was a then teachers don't teach as hard to because they know the student doesn't need it when you're in school or education was it a pleasurable thing for you to be in the school did you enjoy it where you enjoyed the process of being educated and so forth or was it a drag a of people i see a lot of people say they compare high schools to a minimal minimal security correctional facility a lot of people have an attitude not when i was there when i played basketball in high school  books yeah so that i could play on the team were you oh ok you had to set a certain academic standard be able to be on the basketball the high school thing with the hitting of the books a pleasurable thing for you or was it a grind at times it would get more pleasurable  junior high school higher you got the more pleasure well no the more pleasurable in junior high school as opposed to high school because of the teachers that i had then i see they made things come to life you know i had one teacher who the language now and so we read a lot of charles dickens books and had a lot of discussions about about the social the social fabric of the united states at that time so that was that was very exciting the other part i did it because i wanted to play ball and it wasn't as pleasurable i mean in high school and high school it wasn't as pleasurable now you knew what it was pleasurable when you finally went on the college i pleasurable i was much older then you know i went to school after work it was kind of difficult one but it was something that i wanted to do many of my friends had gone on to school right after high school is the normal pat again if you can manage it you're right you have to work your way through right we didn't have any money for you good grit hard grit abraham lincoln it was hard being and sometimes i had two jobs and were i had a family by then i got married early i see and those are just pick up jobs or somebody did have some sort of career path or something not the career path that i wanted i would you know would but i heard about something that i could make a decent salary and i tried for  generally i got it yeah and were you political all along or did you pick up your political orientations or was it in the career but was it all through the school or what oh it was probably in the crib my grandfather was very brightest but my father was very critical he had a very bad experience when he was in in the military he was stationed in the beginning and he always told the story about how the black soldiers were used to he was a part of  detail that built airports they put on the runways solely anybodies or something yeah so he would they would go out and clear off the land so that they could put down this landing jim and while they were out there the japanese were just picking them out turbans like right and and you know they would send out a crew in the morning and bring back the bodies in the evening and finally he said he's not going out there they're just you know that they go i don't get shot right and he wrote a sounds he was really good he came out of georgia turn of the century and went to europe and everything and he actually won the highest award he was a black man george or no education everything and he works the way i became friends with  baker josephine baker and a lot of others but he had been military flying ace and he said all kinds of records he won the quad to guarantee the highest number of thing france can give an airing it was over there and you didn't have the racism in europe anyway but even in the nd world war still there did you have to do the military no i avoided the military i don't blame me the lessons that i learned from him  and then you know i was also paying paying attention to what was going on more so than my my contemporaries we you know i used to read to read what was going on and try to figure out what was this they were talking about in vietnam so i had a pretty good knowledge of what not to but that i would say better knowledge than they had yeah about what was going on what soldiers were being used for and i i determined then that i was not going to fight for the united states yeah seems these exactly good thing to go off on police action by day i didn't like the military at all it was a by took a voluntary draft to get out of the way but everybody it was conscious it was in the air you were going to be drafted it was yeah part of the think we don't have that now m really helped to get rid of that draft he was one of the major forces you know during the time of year they got rid of it but there was just one of the things we don't have that now but you were able to stay away from that your politics you grew up you when you were in high school and so forth were you politically inclined malcolm martin martin king yeah and that sort of thing or went in fact when i was in high school and i was playing basketball once i realize that you know chances of my becoming a someone i began to you know because it's some i used to play in a lot of the tournament's around the city right but i think in my junior year i decided that i was going to play in the tournament and they were building a housing complex in queens call  ok which was the large co op apartment i think was the nd largest next to co op city in the bronx and they were hiring any black construction workers and i did get involved with a lot of the things that were happening around the city and i think i would go to a lot of the demonstrations and just what's what was going on very much interested in seeing what w happening yeah the relationship between the police and the demonstrators and invariably it was whenever there was any conflict it was from what i saw it was the police that started it that they were the ones who were the the aggressors and that the people responded and then once the people responded they wound up being some kind of major disturbance and i remember whenever that would happen i would rush home in the evening to that one of the things that was happening was that the people who were doing the reporting really didn't know or understand what was going on rather that i would i wanted to get in to do news and just straight in a modest rein them out and i used to try and tell the sergeant in the i finally made my way into a newsroom that i realize that many of them didn't care that they would just a rip in raid and the official story always came from the police that became the official story and it's a metaphor for things coming s the elected government and then there's those those folks who get selected you know did did you get militant in your soul yeah you did well you know when you're for picking up on a militancy in your own you know perception of their environment and so you know because you know i'm saying well if for me it happened with the was there anything personal that happened to you this triggered it or was it just a joke growing understand because you said you start getting into public policy well that's a different kind of thing you wouldn't have to necessarily be in any kind of an idea about the injustices that exist to be doing things with some institution that didn't have a relationship to that issue if you understand what i'm saying well for me it happened with the murder of emmett till ok yeah oh god yeah it was my father used to go out as many black men did at that time to the barber shop yeah every saturday that's a great so it were yeah  morning after coming one saturday morning he brought home the jet magazine yeah and i could tell that he was upset and he passed in the my mother and he said he should read this and she read it and she still crying and went into the bedroom and i would see just you know what was this all about was a kid yeah i picked up the magazine and i saw this would look like a paper mach mask that was  seated well and a radical anger and anger yeah and it turned into a militancy as you begin to recognize that that could very easily have been you yeah or your body or you by the hand you know it anger anger turned inward can be depression and in you we better to be militant it seems to me in the face of this sort of thing then allowing that depression at the thing that the absurdity of the human condition you turn it on to self hatred and depression and stand yeah i was conscious i think there's a lesson in that i would agree by humanity at large i would say yes i was constantly trying to organize folks who who had grievances you know that we would get together and unify and present our grievances and try and pressure to bring about some kind of change and a lot of times i want to being out there all by myself you know i remember working down on wall street you worked ok we'll get it going for four base in company and i was in the purchase and sales department at that time and you know that department would would resolve any conflicts and trade at the end of the day between the american and the new york stock exchange and i worked on the new york stock exchange and they were we would be working there and  most of the folks that i work with world were men from the caribbean and as well as black men from the united states and a young white male would come in and we would train them in what we were doing and then they would disappear their goal when they would come back a month or two later as i was supervising yeah and they come back asking us yeah you know how do you do this and how do you do that and i would always tell  yeah yeah yeah and i didn't want him i didn't i didn't know what he was you know were you getting militant then or were you you know well the militant not so much militant but determined to try and do something to determine not to endure the condition that i was in thank you yeah i think that's something that would be well that would go right to the whole human condition i mean myself but that's another issue i see so you know you know i think i wrote up a petition based on what we all  complain but when they come santa really trying to do something confronting those people than him playing about so hard off you know it's also hard because the systemic the whole system it is you know maybe there could be if you can get you know it's like you know they just assume they've got a system director there now being a eyes a really important source of information alternative information also so maybe you could use a way over into when you got involved with communication and particularly specifically maybe be ai and maybe  pacifica and that sort of thing if you could well in addition to wanting to work in the newsroom i also wanted to be a d j and i would go out to i went to announcing school ok got a good boy stood up well thank you  i went to the new york school and then sing and speech and i graduated from there and then you know i noticed that once you graduate they made it very easy to get for you to get the lone voice you graduate  c doing inventory yeah in the freezer i had to put on a coat a hat and gloves muckluck him isn't doing yeah to do this inventory but i had some friends  wanted to do and why i wanted to do it and what was it you said you wonder were you doing the music or the commentary or what or no i told him i wanted to work in the newsroom work in the newsroom ripping and reading or knowing that ripping a radio but learning russia was launching the spaceship and i wrote something about and with this spaceship russia launched the the idea of something that they would have the longest i wanted to be very competent and you'd been to the public administration thing you know that when you study university about organization or something yeah you've been through that also as we had a sense of organization and systems and right thinking ok right that's gone and  background information about central america or the north american committee on latin america then yeah great yeah the knock over reports i started reading about some of the history of the relationship between the us administration a critique and release you back to your daddy's roots maybe and i gave him a lot of credit then and then i you know i just began i was paying close attention to what people were saying there were a lot of there was a lot of  there were a lot of people coming through who had a lot to say and they would also stimulate you to do further research because a began to realize too that because someone says something know just in doing you know trying to learn how to do a story yeah with a beginning a middle and then the k and then there was the art of radio two yeah it was a mixing of sounds and right and creating emotions and feelings and b b as part of the pacifica network amy goodman you worked with who's become a star now and everything like that maybe you can talk about some of the people you worked with and when did you st get on mike and when did you start working institution yeah amy and i began to work together well i got an opportunity to do a morning program could someone who had gone out of town mike on mike is that the and st thing i did was i was doing working doing the fun drives and i was working with valerie venice the family doing some international stuff and in front of us they used to have a sheet where you'd read off  pitching points and you know we're listening sponsored with our brand is this and the electric bill is that and we need your help to to help us to pay that some continue to work and i went to the whole sheet and i looked up again people would think i was a complete it so that was my feeling ok yeah so then i had to begin to speak so i started to talk about why off the top of your head right yeah right yeah why i came to  what what it meant to me in that empty room in this empty room to a microphone which is a strange an opportunity and then some more gave me a program called emanations martin yeah and where i would go out in the community and gather all kinds of sounds from a variety of different forms bring them back mix them with music and try to give well i'll get to get to that but as a result and you know proximity is good too and when you did it i mean no one's going to ask you to do a show if you know that that's the beginning you know it's pretty good to be there to begin with yeah yeah so there was world form and something that took place in in latin america social was social no with the social form that it was this is about the environment all k ok and the person who was doing the morning program he went down to that form and i got an opportunity to do the morning show for several days in a row and there was a very positive response that came from the audience and many folks were letters many folks made phone calls because of my approach to the morning so then what was there about the approach you think it was a spontaneous it was a spontaneity there or well there was a sponsor they really as well as a creativity you know finally got an opportunity to share all of those books and pamphlets and stuff that i was reading yeah and you know and also and you fall we talk about when you open your mouth good thoughts came out yeah yeah that's good yeah and also you know i because of my work in the community you know and there were a lot of folks and i would bring them on the was some talk about starting a morning show and getting someone to come in and i was asked on several occasions when i would be willing to do a morning show and i'm told i couldn't do it without getting paid they went to the volunteer to do a whole lot of of volunteer and home so finally pacifica began to realize that they were losing that we were losing a lot of audience to national public radio yeah so they asked me if i would do the morning show and i said you know pay me a little so then they said well look what we'll do is we'll give you a half salary and if it's successful this was in october and if it's successful we'll give you full salary so i was willing to take that chance because i had a feeling i was sure that it was going to be you said oh fine i'm not doing it you said that yeah yeah and it was a good you didn't want to mix no because really it was because they had been trying for morning program trying to get a successful morning program for years and it was always unsuccessful and i wasn't going to work under anybody else i thought i'd work along with someone but i wasn't going to work under anybody and they wanted to put his programs i mean  so i said doing all the work in preparation for it and finally a meeting was called with me and a me in that and the station manager and the program director at that time to try to resolve it and he wanted to know what was the problem and i told him that there was no problem i can understand it right away and i'm just not going to do that so amy and i began to talk and we decided that we would work together and if there was anything that i didn't like that we wouldn't do it there was anything that she the like that we would do that's interesting yeah that's a synergy that means of a synergy yeah that can be a thread we prior you work that out yeah we're ok and if you haven't there's a lot of creativity goes into that space yeah but when you enter when you enter into it you have to know that we're all equal yeah right right right right right and then you work out your strengths that's one of the great things about music if you're playing music  so we did i was the one who pretty much kind of shape the program because my feeling was that it should move the should be continuous that you go from sound into sound right and that you take people on the journey even in the morning and get a really nice voice baritone like yeah you did that and now yeah go ahead yeah yeah so we did and then after the st program i said i think we've got something here transcribe and to digitize good ok so yeah there's a great deal and yeah yeah what i mean and we did you know we the program was very successful very popular we had a of people that came through we had a lot of people who came in to volunteer we did you know both international national and local issues and we tried to show the connections between them  how would you characterize the programming as as a whole pattern as it were and everything of the radio station w b a i well every program director the comes along inherits yeah we inherit it's hard to squeeze into the room only be two people in there but the egos is so enormous out of people with very strong views around or you see that brodsky ice you dog or try to has a shock but nights and how many angels can dance on the head of a trying to progressive is the word that you have a dictionary definition as our addiction a meaningful day if a nation is like generally trying to set in improve the society particularly for the least advantaged among us all toward a democratic kind of process of equity among the people that make up a society or something right and get giving information that the people who write lying on them they had their intelligence to make proper decisions o more informed people are the better decisions they'll make what does happen to be ai though and some of the changes that we've made is interesting when you go back to the sixty's and seventy's the the great know no scenario you're absolutely right yeah and at that time it was considered to be just the radios that was authority yeah yeah but since that time we've included people from the community from other groups yeah you get a wide umbrella they color very wide umbrella which also makes it very difficult to raise funds because you know the more diverse you are you it becomes difficult yeah it's much easier the raids of funds if you do strip program it would be easier if you raise funds for chase manhattan bank or some some establishment organization you know like well you know what i mean who would like to give us money they would love to but you know right in the middle of the f m dial which means people get us going back and forth nobody but if you're if you're on the progressive side of thing it isn't exactly the most lucrative kind of big fat cats that are really to put a lot of money into something is going to support the status quo you know being and if you're talking about something progressive  people yeah they don't want to take it take a chance on that like what happened when st the issue of civil rights came a women's suffrage yet and all the kind of things where they're trying to expand the number of people and diversity the people people who are in favor of the status quo or benefiting by it or are institutionally connected to us as they don't want to hear about change because they're sitting pretty i mean that's a general thing and fern's of the way the world operates yet or has and maybe we're coming to a time where we're going to have to subsume that in a large scale in the same thing positive on the other side liberation or something that is the color corollary of the situation in which you find yourself and it's going to come out of alternative media like w b a i and i would submit public access television as well  yeah i agree you know i mean i agree i agree that how that's where the with because i think that it will come from that because that's where the real issues and that's where the real the reality of what's going on is going to be discussed it's not going to be discussed so these are the i think that i since i think it's just almost the way the universe is set out of his that you're not going to have the people there to respond the people adverse side with those big wigs were not able to understand the fact that there was an industrial revolution coming and there was a change coming they couldn't understand it i mean because they thought they were in on john regime people got their identity by the system that had been in place the fugitive slave law as for crying out loud they had you know we had ended the world changes  technology changes the new possibilities emerged that all system might have to be subsumed or transformed fundamentally itself and yet they think they've got a thing for the ages particularly now fukuyama writes a book and says the end of history to have everybody on board all right so we have to understand what is going on in the right to different places and time so what you have is that there is something going on in the black community in the latin the community a level of repression that it's very it's becoming very clear shot on that other feller with fifty two dollars bullets that's right yeah and at the same time we have some members of the w b i audience who feel that the station is becoming too black and wh black radio station because you got some because you got some yeah the majority of the people who are doing work still white people but the perception that once you introduce that then the becomes a black radio station w book about but israel he did yeah very you're going to get a lot of problem new york city a lot of jewish people that are zionist inclined and that kind of thing you're going to a lot of people if you criticize that they take that very very because they suffered losses in have the thing called chattel slavery for crying out loud and everyone needs to be able to tell the story they need to be able to tell it and so that people understand it and who for instance i was saying that do you know what's happening in the black community there's going to be an explosion of you do you predict that not from this day i mean from now you're talking from from then on because the ingredients as malcolm would once said being greedy and toward explosion of their people and not going to continue to be the targets of the police and that respond in the same way is that a metaphor for the world well a very we have a we have a world and we're beginning to reach out we have a world worth it serves maybe that top twenty percent live well and gated communities increasingly save mr stiglitz the teller's eight hundred and six thousand and eighty percent of the world population is not certain trends are not good in terms of helping to bring the least advantage of the world into some sort of a reason they can't realize their full biography let alone their full potential ality there are some really major changes that are needed if we're going to have something that offsets the existential reality that we have weapons systems that can destroy the whole ball  oh yeah it's a crucial time it's not your normal time that we live in those years and in that sense then i sense that you know we were living in a time to when and when media it's so stupid extremely important and it's being so  so restricted at the same time as growing as it were into i know today yeah there because of corporate media is becoming more and more restricted and it is forcing these other types of media to pop up and what  they need to begin to do is it's come together right and try and develop some way of getting information out to people that have what do you say you're right it is a metaphor for what's going on in society and because you know the palestinians  able to tell this story well the poor never have the rich or the hundreds write the history always the victors always write the ois that says news report you saw about what happened in the day that you saw and you go home and they write it and it's completely different they live with the reality yeah right so that story can be told to be the basis of an alternative system for operating you know one of the problems is the time space continuum is we run out of pine we've run out run for this hour yeah can you believe it both looking for comprehensive answers and so forth in getting the word out so this is been one hour that could have been twenty hours easy we could have talked on and on and bernard thank you really very much and thank you very much my pleasure thank you for coming in not only for coming in doing the program and that but also for a very well led life up to now that's only getting better