The Activist Files Podcast

On episode 31 of "The Activist Files," Staff Attorney Angelo Guisado and Senior Legal Worker Ian Head discuss two forthcoming Center for Constitutional Rights publications aimed at supporting communities and activists as they oppose rising right-wing and state violence. Combatting White Supremacist Organizing: Tools to Protect Our Communities from Violence is a toolkit of legal and non-legal strat...

On episode 30 of “The Activist Files,” Center for Constitutional Rights Senior Staff Attorney Ghita Schwarz and Attorney Chinyere Ezie talked with Make the Road New York’s Lead Organizer Eliana Fernandez about the impact organizing played in the two key Supreme Court of the United States’ decisions – Wolf v. Vidal, the decision that preserves Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which El...

On Episode 29 of The Activist Files, Communications Assistant Alex Webster speaks with TRANScending Barriers executive director Zahara Green and Abolitionist Law Center executive director Robert "Saleem" Holbrook about what Black August means to them and the ways that they continue its legacy in their work. They discuss the importance of honoring the solemnity of the month, how current and former...

What is necessary to reimagine civil rights in America? Center for Constitutional Rights’ Executive Director Vince Warren and PolicyLinks’ Founder in Residence Angela Glover Blackwell are in conversation about what equity looks like in this moment in a special joint, cross-promoted edition of “The Activist Files” and “Radical Imagination,” the organization’s respective podcasts. Using the pandemic...

In this conversation, the last of a four-part series of blogs about the movement response to COVID-19, Samah Mcgona Sisay and Center for Constitutional Rights Advocacy Associate maya finoh discuss their personal definitions of abolition; the ways in which prison abolitionists are using this particular moment to amplify their dreams of a world without cages; how prisons, policing, and surveillance...

In the 26th episode of “The Activist Files,” Senior Staff Attorney Ghita Schwarz and Bertha Justice Fellow Lupe Aguirre are in conversation about how their work fighting abusive immigration practices has shifted during the pandemic. They discuss the injustices and inhumanity of the immigration detention system, particularly the conditions immigrants are experiencing during the pandemic, including...

“We are left to wonder why we cannot see with foresight what we see so clearly with hindsight.” A Philadelphia-based federal appeals court wrote this in explaining why the New York City Police Department’s program of suspicionless surveillance of Muslims in the name of national security resembled destructive roads the country has traveled before, when targeting Jews during the Red Scare, African A...

The 24th episode of “The Activist Files” was the Center for Constitutional Rights’ first live podcast. The episode was recorded Feb. 28, 2020, at Studio Arte before a live audience and was the culmination of our Black History Month celebration. For the episode, “How it Would Feel to Be Free: Southern Resistance to Race and Gender Oppression,” Communications Director Chandra M. Hayslett led a discu...

On Episode 23 of “The Activist Files,” Staff Attorney Chinyere Ezie talks with Raquel Willis, activist, writer, Executive Editor of Out Magazine, and founder of Black Trans Circles, and Derecka Purnell, human rights lawyer, activist, writer, and Deputy Director of Union Theological Seminary Spirit of Justice Center, about their organizing and how they bring multiple identities into their advocacy,...

On episode 22 of “The Activist Files,” Donita Judge, Center for Constitutional Rights’ associate executive director, talks about reparations for Blacks with Dr. Ron Daniels, president of the National African American Reparations Commission, and past executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Marbre Stahly-Butts, executive director of Law 4 Black Lives and a member of the leade...

On Episode 21 of "The Activist Files," Center for Constitutional Rights Senior Staff Attorney Darius Charney speaks with Anthonine Pierre of the Brooklyn Movement Center and Marielle Shavonne Smith of Black Love Resists in the Rust, two leaders of Black-led grassroots organizations doing critical racial justice work on opposite ends of New York State. They discuss the strong similarities in police...

On Episode 20 of “The Activist Files,” Center for Constitutional Rights Staff Attorney Diala Shamas talks with Noura Erakat, author of the new book Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Through the lens of 100 years of struggle for Palestinian freedom, Diala and Noura discuss the relationship between law and politics, and the challenge of using law to achieve justice. Linking Palest...

On the 19th episode of “The Activist Files,” Communications Director Chandra Hayslett talks with photographer Ariana Faye Allensworth and map maker and interactive media developer Sam Raby of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), a data-visualization, data analysis, and storytelling collective documenting the dispossession and resistance upon gentrifying landscapes. Ariana and Sam provide an o...

On the 18th episode of The Activist Files, Jen Nessel talks with Sarah Blust and Bronte Walker of the Rude Mechanical Orchestra about the activist street band’s mission and the ways it brings joy to resistance. Sarah is a co-founder of the project and plays the bass drum. Bronte plays the trumpet. With dozens of active members in the NYC-based band at any time, the RMO exists “in order to serve th...

On the 17th episode of “The Activist Files,” Communications Associate Josh Manson talks with Janice Dickerson and her attorney, Christopher Meeks, about the struggle to protect a historically Black cemetery in Louisiana. Purchased in 1881 by Janice’s great-great-great grandfather and other former slaves, Revilletown Cemetery in Plaquemine, LA, has long been the final resting place for former slave...

On the 16th episode of “The Activist Files,” Advocacy Director Nadia Ben-Youssef speaks to Staff Attorney Diala Shamas and client Ziad Alwan about our intervention into a case filed by Israeli settlers against Airbnb. In late 2018, following grassroots efforts by Palestinian rights activists, Airbnb announced its decision to remove rental listings in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Just a fe...

On the 15th episode of “The Activist Files,” Staff Attorney Chinyere Ezie and author, activist, and Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law Dean Spade discuss the state of the queer and trans rights movement in the U.S. today, 50 years after the Stonewall uprising. Chinyere and Dean reflect on the formal progress that queer and trans communities have seen in the past half century, as...

On the fourteenth episode of The Activist Files, Senior Staff Attorney Pam Spees talks with Lydia Gerard and Sharon Lavigne, two of the brave Women of Cancer Alley leading the resistance to the toxic petrochemical industry in Louisiana. Cancer Alley is an 85-mile stretch of land with a high concentration of petrochemical companies. It also is populated by primarily Black communities with high rate...

On the thirteenth episode of The Activist Files, Advocacy Program Manager Aliya Hussain speaks with Center for Constitutional Rights Legal Director Baher Azmy and Senior Staff Attorney Katherine Gallagher about Al Shimari v. CACI, our case against private military contractor CACI Premier Technology, Inc., for its role in torture and other abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Fifteen years after the...

On the twelfth episode of The Activist Files, Senior Legal Worker Leah Todd talks with educator, organizer, and director of Project NIA Mariame Kaba and journalist, author, and organizer Victoria Law about their work on issues of violence, incarceration, gender, criminalization, and transformative justice. Mariame and Victoria share the personal experiences that brought them to their social justic...

On the eleventh episode of The Activist Files, host Ian Head talks with writer and educator Walidah Imarisha and musician and teaching artist Gabriel Teodros about the relationship between fantastical writing and social justice work. As Walidah says, we are all doing science fiction when we imagine a different world. Science and visionary fiction, says Gabriel, is a useful tool for imagining a dif...

It’s a question our legal team gets asked all the time: What is it like visiting Guantánamo? From the food options on the island to why it’s important to keep fighting against the continued indefinite detention seventeen years on, our Gitmo attorneys Wells Dixon and Shayana Kadidal give the Activist Files an inside look into the notorious prison.

On this bonus episode of The Activist Files, guest host and Senior Legal Worker Leah Todd talks to Bertha Justice Fellow Lupe Aguirre and Staff Attorney Angelo Guisado, who have just returned from the southern border at Tijuana, where they provided hands on legal support to asylum-seekers, along with Center for Constitutional Rights client and partner Al Otro Lado. Lupe and Angelo discuss what the...

On the eighth episode of The Activist Files, Center for Constitutional Rights Advocacy Program Manager Nahal Zamani speaks with S’bu Zikode, a founding member and president of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack dwellers’ movement in South Africa. S’bu is one of the leaders of Abahlali baseMjondolo, one of the largest peoples’ movements to emerge in post-apartheid South Africa. S’bu talks to Nahal ab...

On the seventh episode of The Activist Files, your frequent host Senior Legal Worker Ian Head is joined by CCR Communications Director Chandra Hayslett to interview Jaribu Hill, a  civil and human rights attorney and the Executive Director of Mississippi Workers Center for Human Rights. Jaribu is also a former Ella Baker intern at CCR and former director of the CCR’s southern regional office. In t...