Political Gabfest - Gabfest Reads | The Radical Fund That Rewired American Progress
Political Gabfest
Slate Podcasts
4.4 • 8.5K Ratings
🗓️ 18 October 2025
⏱️ 32 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.
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Podcast production by Nina Porzucki.
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Transcript
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| 1:00.4 | Hello and welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of October 2025. |
| 1:04.5 | I'm Emily Bazelan, one of the hosts of Slate's political GabFest. Yeah. |
| 1:08.1 | Yeah. |
| 1:09.0 | Yeah. Yeah. I'm here I'm here today with |
| 1:24.7 | the new book, The Radical Fund, |
| 1:26.9 | how a band of Visionaries and a Million |
| 1:28.9 | Dollars upended America. |
| 1:31.1 | Hey, John. |
| 1:32.2 | Hi, I'm Blaine. |
| 1:33.2 | I'm so glad you're here. |
| 1:34.7 | I have been hearing about this book in bits and pieces along the way and so enjoyed reading |
| 1:41.4 | it. |
... |
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