Summary
On Easter Sunday 1967 the Reverend Albert Cleage re-named his church in Detroit the Shrine of the Black Madonna. He preached that if man was made in God's image there was little chance that Jesus was white as most of the world's population is non-white. Plus, how British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wowed the Soviet Union with a live TV interview in 1987; how the death of singer Karen Carpenter raised the profile of the anorexia eating disorder; and the story of two Englishmen who were kidnapped on an orchid-hunt in Colombia.
Photo: Black Madonna and Child (Courtesy of BLAC Detroit)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and |
| 0:07.0 | the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson and the Witness History team |
| 0:12.0 | each week bringing you first-hand accounts of events which have |
| 0:14.6 | shaped our world. |
| 0:16.1 | We've got creaking communism, American prison problems, and the history of Anorexia, among |
| 0:21.5 | other things. But let's meet the team for this week |
| 0:23.5 | Mike Simon and Claire are with us hello hey my hi Max hi there so what have we been up to then |
| 0:29.0 | Mike first well I'm Mike Lanchin and this week Max I've literally been inside a prison in the state of Massachusetts at Walpole State Prison where something very strange happened in 1973. |
| 0:42.0 | Simon? |
| 0:43.0 | Yeah, I'm Simon Watson. |
| 0:44.0 | Well, I've been somewhere rather different. |
| 0:46.0 | I've been in a tropical rainforest in the Darien gap between Panama and Colombia |
| 0:51.0 | and I've been hearing the story of an orchid hunter who was |
| 0:54.2 | kidnapped there by a Colombian rebel group. |
| 0:56.8 | Cricky looking forward to that. Well first up this week is Claire Boz and Claire |
| 1:01.3 | you have an unusual Easter story from the past for this Easter weekend. |
| 1:06.5 | That's right I've been looking at the Christian church in America in the mid to late 1960s and as we know this was an era marked by issues of racism and |
| 1:17.2 | civil rights and in Detroit one prominent African American church minister, the Reverend Albert Clegg, began promoting the idea that Jesus was black. |
| 1:28.8 | He saw him not as a meek and mild savior, as a revolutionary leader and he preached about not |
| 1:35.0 | waiting for liberation to come when you die but to see the Bible as a tool for |
| 1:40.4 | liberation. I've been speaking to Pearl Clegg, the daughter of Reverend |
| 1:44.6 | Albert Clegg about his beliefs. The Bible says that God created man in his own |
... |
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