Black Agenda Radio - 12.16.19

Welcome to the radio magazine that brings you news, commentary and analysis from a Black Left perspective. I’m Glen Ford, along with my co-host Nellie Bailey. Coming up: The battle against school segregation was considered a great victory of the civil rights movement, but a Black author says one casualty of that struggle was Black college sports; the author of a new book says Chairman Mao was not paranoid when he said the Chinese Communist Party was infested with capitalists; and, a venerable institution for Black Liberation in South Carolina may have to close its doors and shut down its radio station.

 School desegregation may have been a righteous cause, but Black college sports was one of the casualties. That’s the conclusion drawn by Derrick White, a professor of history at the University of Kentucky and author of the book, ““Blood, Sweat and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A & M, and the History of Black College Football.” White says Black colleges were out-performing white colleges in the 1940s and ‘50s, producing better athletes. But then, desegregation happened.

Mao Tse Tung, the father of the Chinese Revolution and the late leader of the Chinese Communist Party, famously warned that “capitalist roaders” within the Party were determined to turn the country capitalist. A new book by Zhun Xu, a professor of Economics at Howard University, says history has proven Chairman Mao to have been right. Prof. Xu’s book is titled, “From Commune to Capitalism: How China’s Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty.”

 For decades, the Malcolm X Center for Self-Determination has fought on the side of the oppressed in Greenville, South Carolina, and the world. However, the bill collectors may be about to shut the center down, and silence its radio station, WMXP. We spoke with the Center’s director, veteran activist Efia Nwangaza.

The U.S. corporate media report almost nothing from the Syrian side in the 8-year-long war against US-backed Islamic Jihadists. Instead, corporate media parrot the version of events put out by the US government and its allies. The European media also black out the views of the Syrian government. Steven Sa-he-ou-ni is a Syrian American, and chief editor of the political journal MidEast Discourse. Sa-he-ou-ni recently appeared on the Taylor Report, on Canadian radio. Sa-he-ou-ni said the Italians are also censoring the news from Syria.