Political Gabfest - Gabfest Reads | The Radical Fund That Rewired American Progress
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 October 2025
⏱️ 32 minutes
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Summary
Emily Bazelon talks with Yale law professor John Witt about his new book The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America. They explore the remarkable story of the Garland Fund—a small 1920s foundation that bankrolled early work by A. Philip Randolph, and others who would go on to shape the civil rights and labor movements.
Witt traces how the fund connected race and class politics, supported the intellectual groundwork for Brown v. Board of Education, and anticipated today’s challenges around misinformation, inequality, and political disconnection. He and Bazelon also discuss what lessons progressives might take from this forgotten story of organizing during political exile.
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Transcript
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| 0:35.9 | Hello and welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of October 2025. |
| 0:40.9 | I'm Emily Bazelon, one of the hosts of Slate's political GabFest. |
| 0:44.4 | Yeah. |
| 0:48.9 | Yeah. |
| 0:50.1 | Yeah. |
| 0:53.9 | Yeah. Yeah. I'm here today with John Witt, who is a law professor at Yale, and the author of the new book, The Radical Fund, How a Band of Visionaries and a million dollars upended America. |
| 1:11.1 | Hey, John. |
| 1:12.1 | Hi, I'm Blaine. |
| 1:13.1 | I'm so glad you're here. |
| 1:14.5 | I have been hearing about this book in bits and pieces along the way and so enjoyed reading it. |
| 1:21.8 | It is a book that is full of stories, historical stories that I did not know, and insights about the activism and social |
| 1:30.3 | reform of the 1920s and 30s. It's kind of a prehistory of the civil rights movement and other |
| 1:36.1 | struggles of the 1960s that, at least I was more familiar with. The book starts with Charles Garland |
| 1:42.0 | and his unwanted inheritance. So, John, who was Charles Garland and what happened when his grandfather tried to give him a million dollars? |
| 1:49.5 | Charles Garland was a Harvard undergrad in the process of dropping out when he turned 21 and inherited what was left of a Civil War war bond's fortune. |
| 1:58.8 | His grandfather had been an investment banker, had helped to create |
... |
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