Before the A’s: The East Bay’s earliest baseball teams

04/19/17 • 21 min

Long before the Athletics moved to Oakland, teams like the Colonels, the Larks and the Aztec Stars played baseball in the East Bay. Special guest contributor Cyrus Farivar digs into the roots of our national pastime—and even visits “vintage” game. Did you know that Oakland’s first black mayor was a pitcher in the West Coast Negro League? This is just one of the many stories explored in today’s episode. Play ball!

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“They knew it was a lie”: Exposing the cover-up behind Japanese-American mass incarceration

Four decades after the U.S. government incarcerated nearly 120,000 Japanese-Americans, long-hidden evidence revealed that the reason behind the mass imprisonment was a lie. This episode explores how the discovery a “smoking gun” report led to Oakland native Fred Korematsu re-opening his World War II-era Supreme Court case. Korematu’s lawyer, Dale Minami, shares how lessons learned from this “civil rights disaster” can help prevent another injustice of this magnitude—or worse.

Next Episode

“What about the underdog?”: Dorothea Lange never stopped fighting for freedom

Dorothea Lange is one of the most famous photographers of all time, but the local work she did during her many decades as an East Bay resident is often overlooked. This episode explores how she went from taking portraits of the Bay Area’s wealthiest families to documenting the poor and working class. Dorothea’s goddaughter, Elizabeth Partridge, and Drew Johnson, curator of the Oakland Museum’s new Dorothea Lange exhibition, share insights on what makes her photographs so iconic—and why they’re still so relevant. “Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing” is showing at the Oakland Museum of California from May 13 through August 13, 2017. For details, visit: http://museumca.org/exhibit/dorothea-lange-politics-seeing