The Kitchen Sisters Present

When  Lena Richard  cooked her first chicken on television, she beat Julia Child to the screen by over a decade. At a time when most African American women cooks worked behind swinging kitchen doors, Richard claimed her place as a culinary authority, broadcasting in the living rooms of New Orleans’s elite white families. She was an entrepreneur, educator, author, and an icon—and her legacy lives o...

We delve into the story of the founding of the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute at Harvard by Dr. Marcyliena Morgan, Professor of African and African American Studies and Professor Henry Louis Gates to “facilitate and encourage the pursuit of knowledge, art, culture, scholarship and responsible leadership through Hiphop.” You’ll hear from Professor Morgan, Professor Gates, Nas, Nas Fellow Pat...

It was top secret. But everyone in Santa Fe knew there was something going on up on the hill in the remote, desert mountains of Los Alamos in 1943. J. Robert Oppenheimer and dozens of the top scientists and thinkers in the world were sequestered away up there — fenced in, with military guard towers all around. But there was one little sanctuary down along the river where they could escape and find...

In 1981, The Kitchen Sisters interviewed filmmaker Jon Else about his Academy Award nominated documentary, The Day After Trinity, a deeply moving film about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the dramatic story of the creation of the atomic bomb. The film, now showing on the Criterion channel, traces Oppenheimer’s evolution from the architect of the bomb to an outspoken opponent of nuclear proliferation. T...

Behind the scenes at the International Congress of Youth Voices when 131 youth activists,13 to 26 years old, from 37 countries — students, writers, poets, marchers, community leaders all gathered together in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2019, to share and amplify their ideas and energy — to brainstorm possibilities for how to achieve a better world. The International Congress of Youth Voices, founded...

Born in 1895 in Lynchburg, VA, Amaza Lee Meredith was an African American architect, artist and educator who taught at Virginia State College where she founded the art department. Despite the fact she was never a registered architect, she was one of the few Black architects practicing at the time, and one of the country's very few Black women architects. In 1939, Amaza designed Azurest South, a ti...

In 1983 Prince hired LA sound technician Susan Rogers, one of the few women in the industry, to move to Minneapolis and help upgrade his home recording studio as he began work on the album and the movie Purple Rain. Susan, a trained technician with no sound engineering experience became the engineer of Purple Rain, Parade, Sign o’ the Times, and all that Prince recorded for the next four years. Fo...

Chris was a man possessed. “El Fanatico,” Ry Cooder called him. A song catcher, dedicated to recording the traditional, regional, down home music of America, his adopted home after his family left Germany at the close of WWII. Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Big Mama Thornton, Clifton Chenier, Rose Maddox, Flaco Jimenez… the list is long and mighty. Chris Strachwitz w...

Ada Louise Huxtable, who “invented” the profession of architecture critic, wrote countless articles for two great daily newspapers and had a gigantic influence on our understanding of the work of architects, real estate developers, city bureaucrats, and the city itself, over the course of six decades in print. Beginning in 1963, Huxtable was the first full-time architecture critic at an American n...

Cab drivers, children’s jump rope rhymes, folk songs, dialects, controversial TV ads, interviews with blacklisted artists and writers during the McCarthy Era — Tony Schwartz was one of the great sound recordists and collectors of the 20th Century. In honor of Tony Schwartz’s Centennial, The Kitchen Sisters Present an audio portrait of a man who spent his life exploring and influencing the world th...

For some eight years now thirty-four Black women have gathered monthly around a big dining room table in the orange house on Orange Street in Oakland, CA—meeting, cooking, dancing, strategizing—grappling with the issues of eviction, erasure, gentrification, inadequate health care, and the sex trafficking of Black women and girls that are overwhelming their community. Spearheaded by dancer/choreogr...

Many know Ray Eames as the small, dirndled woman behind her more famous husband, Charles Eames. But Ray was the industrial designer bending plywood in the spare bedroom, a talented artist who saw the world full of color, the visionary who treated folk art, cigarette wrappers, flowers, and toys as equally valuable and inspiring. Ray brought the sparkle and inspiration to the legendary Eames Office....

In 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois, scholar, public intellectual, and social and political activist, published his magnum opus: Black Reconstruction in America . In it, he tackled the subject of the American Civil War and, especially, the decade or so that followed, a period known as Reconstruction. During Reconstruction it seemed, for a time, that the South and the United States as a whole, might be remad...

In the early 1980s, Black students and the African American community at American University had been demonstrating for more access and inclusion in the university’s community services. One of the demands was for four hours of time every Saturday on Radio station WAMU, the campus station. This demand was met and suddenly Black students and the community were pouring into the station on Saturdays t...

Criticisms of fast food often focus on the industrialized system that produces the burgers, buns and fries, or the food’s negative health impacts. Some criticisms have noted the deep ties between McDonald’s and the Black community, blaming communities of color for bad choices, sometimes blaming the fast food industry for being predatory with its advertising or store locations. But the relationship...

In 2015 we presented this story about Curtis Carroll, the Stock Market Wizard of San Quentin. Everyone in San Quentin called him Wall Street. He was teaching his fellow prisoners about stocks and had become an informal financial adviser to fellow inmates and correctional officers. After serving 27 years of a 54 years to life sentence in prison, Curtis Carroll, has been released on parole. We hear...

Since the devastating 2019 fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the ringing of the cathedral’s bells has ceased. Sound artist, Bill Fontana, known for his sound sculptures of Golden Gate Bridge, temple bells in Kyoto, and trees in Sequoia National Forest, creates a new work giving voice to the silenced bells of Notre Dame. To create his new work, Silent Echoes , Fontana attached seismic accelero...

Over 7000 hours of interviews, oral histories, songs, field recordings, along with photographs, notebooks, journals, and research material created by The Kitchen Sisters has recently been acquired by The Library of Congress where it will be preserved and made accessible to researchers, students, other producers and the general public into the future. Alexis Madrigal of KQED’s Forum talks with Davi...

Edmond Richardson is an audio producer for Uncuffed, a KALW podcast produced by people in prison. Recently, Edmond and his love, Avelina, got married inside San Quentin and Uncuffed produced this story. The Kitchen Sisters are great admirers of KALW’s Uncuffed podcast and are proud to share this story. KALW , San Francisco, has led rehabilitative classes in audio production inside San Quentin Stat...

Each fall, the Ojibwe tribes of northern Minnesota harvest wild rice by hand. It’s a long process that begins with families in canoes venturing into the tall grasses, where rice is poled and gently brushed with knockers into the bed of the canoe. We journey to White Earth Reservation, out onto Big Rice Lake in a canoe, to see how one tribe is supporting itself and changing the diet of its people t...

We trace the history of country music in Kenya, dating back to the 1920s and 30s when local populations first heard Jimmie Rodgers on early country western 78 records, to the current day, where the clubs of Nairobi are filled with rising stars bringing their own unique sounds to country music. Hear their takes on the hits of Don Williams, Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton and more. And an interview and p...

As elections loom, we need to get involved, step up to the civic plate, take part in discourse. And that’s what Manny Yekutiel has been driven to do since 2018. He’s created a community-focused meeting place in San Francisco — a gathering space for people to watch presidential debates, meet people working on the front lines of social change, and discuss issues with policy makers in person. From co...

The legendary Linda Ronstadt has a new book out. Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands — a historical, musical, edible memoir that spans the story of five generations of Linda’s Mexican American German family, from the Sonoran desert in Mexico to the Ronstadt family hardware store in Tucson to the road that led Linda to LA and musical stardom. Intimate and epic, "this is little Linda...

The story of The Real Ambassadors, a jazz musical created by Dave Brubeck and Iola Brubeck for Louis Armstrong in the 1950/60s— a poignant tale of cultural exchange, anti-racism, jazz history, and it’s a love story —between life-long husband and wife partners, Iola and Dave Brubeck and their vision for a better world. The original show, featured Louis Armstrong, Carmen McCrae, Dave Brubeck and Lam...

In the early morning hours of August 16, 2020, 12,000 lightning strikes exploded across northern California, igniting more than 585 wildfires. In the Santa Cruz Mountains scattered blazes grew into one massive burning organism — The CZU August Lightning Complex Fire — eating all in its path, scorching some 86,000 acres, destroying over 900 homes and Big Basin, California’s first state park. We hea...