Political Gabfest - Gabfest Reads | The Radical Fund That Rewired American Progress
Slate Books
Slate Podcasts
3.8 • 546 Ratings
🗓️ 18 October 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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.
Tweet us your questions @SlateGabfest or email us at gabfest@slate.com. (Messages could be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Podcast production by Nina Porzucki.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of October 2025. |
| 0:10.7 | I'm Emily Bazelan, one of the hosts of Slate's political GabFest. |
| 0:14.3 | Yeah. |
| 0:18.0 | Yeah. |
| 0:18.7 | Yeah. |
| 0:19.0 | Yeah. I'm here. |
| 0:22.4 | Yeah. Yeah. |
| 0:23.4 | Yeah. |
| 0:25.4 | Yeah. |
| 0:27.2 | 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 |
| 0:38.6 | Dollars upended America. |
| 0:40.8 | Hey, John. |
| 0:41.9 | Hi, I'm Blaine. |
| 0:43.0 | I'm so glad you're here. |
| 0:44.4 | I have been hearing about this book in bits and pieces along the way and so enjoyed |
| 0:50.8 | reading it. |
| 0:51.4 | It is a book that is full of stories, historical stories that I did not |
| 0:57.1 | know, and insights about the activism and social reform of the 1920s and 30s. It's kind of a prehistory |
| 1:04.5 | of the civil rights movement and other struggles of the 1960s that at least I was more familiar |
| 1:09.3 | with. The book starts with Charles Garland and his |
| 1:12.4 | unwanted inheritance. So, John, who was Charles Garland and what happened when his grandfather |
| 1:17.5 | tried to give him a million dollars? Charles Garland was a Harvard undergrad in the process of |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate Podcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Slate Podcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.