For Anthony Brown the art of music must carry a purpose, a politic, a call to action and/or a healing. I ended this interview with him talking about current and upcoming work. I always enjoy your performances but the recent iteration of Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, and […]
My father first visited Berkeley when he was a yeoman in the Navy. Less than a year after my brother was born in Chicago, the three of them took a train to Berkeley to begin their California life. I was born in Berkeley, but that city was too small for […]
I have known and worked with Anthony Brown for decades. He has always been a musician with a vision that embraced and transcended his art form. A grammy nominated composer, arranger, drummer/percussionist and recording artist, he tours nationally and internationally and always includes his world view and life imperatives as a […]
An obvious question for my Dad was what was his road to writer and how and why did he find his home in non-fiction. As a second-generation writer I had my father, god father and many of my parents’ friends as shining beacons. But my father was from a different […]
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the various resistance efforts around the globe and at home. I grew from a child of peace to a woman of peace and have never seen bombing as the right tool. All terrorism is wrong. Years ago I wrote a piece as […]
My father wrote the book, A Panther is a Black Cat. Of course I wanted to know how he first met the Panthers. As with everything else in his life it was almost organic. He knew, hung out with, and kept the company of people who were looking and thinking […]
In 1966 my father’s life changed profoundly. It was in his words a “primal moment.” He had quit working for the California Department of Vehicles a year earlier and took the family to Europe where we lived in a tent for a year and, as my father said, “Got to […]
With Nat Burbridge as President and my father as Education Chair, the San Francisco Chapter of the NAACP kept promoting change in the early 1960’s. Some of it was more political, getting S.F.’s first Black firemen trained and hired, getting the principal at John Muir Elementary School fired after he, […]
Dr. Thomas Nathaniel (Nat) Burbridge was one my father’s best friends in San Francisco. Together the two of them led an effective and lasting impact improving various sectors through, to my father’s mind especially, and unlikely organization, the NAACP. How about we go to the last thing that we did […]
In redacting the tapes many of the stories are very small connecting stories jumping from one idea to another. There were so many moments some terrifying and some sublime, many funny. Often we talked as father and daughter more than me being a thoughtful documentarian so in time and subjects […]
