Now Live: The Inaugural Episode of Scribe

By Obasi Davis

This month we launched Scribe, a new educational podcast series dedicated to celebrating artistic expression and race and literacy. For our inaugural episode, recorded live in West Oakland, we sat down with acclaimed author and retired UC Berkeley professor Cecil Brown to discuss his book, James Baldwin's World.

We traced Baldwin's years in exile and his mastery of language, including his fluency in French, alongside his complex literary relationships with Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, and William Styron. Joined by Grammy-winning musician Roger Glenn and retired professor and poet Cecil Ciscrown, we also explored the liberating history artistic expression in Europe.

From there, we widened the discussion into a broader oral storytelling tradition, drawing a line from 19th-century poet George Moses Horton to Tupac Shakur. We closed by grounding these literary and musical legacies in our own mission at Kingmakers of Oakland: building community space environments where black youth can cultivate positive racial and cultural identity and find their own voice.

Scribe is available now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.