Hey everyone Jody Avigan here on Sundays over the course of the summer July and August

We're going to be bringing you some of our favorite episodes from the Archives

You're still going to get brand new episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but we're giving ourselves a little bit of a break on Sundays running a previous episode.

It's still from around the same date, so it will still hook in in that way.

But look, we've done about 450 of these.

There's a good chance you haven't heard this one or haven't heard

it in a while and might want to re-listen. So here we go with a Sunday favorite from the articles.

Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day July 25, 2009, actually it was July 24th, 2009, President Obama extended an invitation

to the White House to two men to come over to the White House and, well, to have a beer.

This was what came to be known as the Beer Summit.

Obama's attempt to intervene and smooth over an incident involving

a Boston police officer and Harvard Professor Henry Lewis Gates Jr.

The officer, we should say, was white, Henry Lewis Gates Jr. is black.

The officer, James Crowley, had arrested Gates on Gates's own doorstep after neighbors called the police

saying that a man was trying to break into a house in the neighborhood. That man was

Gates who had basically lost his keys, was trying to get into his own house. The cops get called Crowley

arrest Gates. This becomes a major incident after it gets written up in the

Harvard Crimson and then the AP picks it up and then Obama

weighs in and then it becomes a big scandal and we get to this beer summit

invitation to sit down and talk it out which I guess is what we're doing right now.

...