“From the very beginning the intent was that the American people needed to be able to access the records so that we would be able to hold the government accountable for its actions.” - David Ferriero

During the first Trump administration, when access to certain websites and information was being threatened, we started our Keepers series about activist archivists, rogue librarians, historians, collectors, curators — protectors of the culture and the free flow of information and ideas.

Today our national librarians and archivists are being fired, our museums are being threatened, our journalists are being hampered, and truth and transparency is once again under attack.

In 2017, we talked with David Ferriero, the 10th Archivist of the United States, about the the beginnings of the National Archives under Franklin Roosevelt and its purpose. Ferriero tells of early keepers like Stephen Pleasonton, a brave civil servant who saved the Constitution and Declaration of Independence as the British burned Washington during the War of 1812. Stories of a letter from Fidel Castro to President Roosevelt requesting a $10 dollar bill, and a letter from Annie Oakley to William McKinley volunteering to rally 50 women sharp shooters to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

Selected as Archivist of the United States in 2010 by President Obama during the time of his Open Government Initiative, Ferriero worked to make the system more transparent and accessible to the public.

With a collection of about 13 billion pieces of paper, 43 million photographs and miles and miles of film and video and about 6 billion electronic records, Ferriero believes “we are responsible for documenting what is going on.”

“I think my favorite times are twice a year when we do naturalization ceremonies in the Rotunda and between 50 and 200 new citizens are sworn in in front of the Constitution," he said. "Just to see them experiencing the documents outlining the rights that are now theirs. Those are powerful moments.”

Deep within the National Museum of American History’s vaults is a battered Atari case containing what’s known as “the worst video game of all time.” The game is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and it was so bad that not even the might of Steven Spielberg could save it. It was so loathsome that all remaining copies were buried deep in the desert. And it was so horrible that it’s blamed for the collapse of the American home video game industry in the early 1980s. The story of just what went SO wrong with E.T.

Produced by Lizzie Peabody for Sidedoor, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. The Kitchen Sisters Productions is part of Radiotopia from PRX.

For more visit kitchensisters.org

The Kitchen Sisters are excited to share the first episode of Radio Pacific, a new monthly show from KALW in San Francisco that takes a deep and creative look at the issues facing California and the rest of our country today. The hour-long, monthly program features journalists, writers, and documentarians who are grappling with life in the country’s most populous and diverse state.

In this first episode, California legal scholar Kevin R. Johnson puts the first months of Trump’s administration in perspective and helps us understand California’s unique and disturbing role in the country’s immigration history.

Then we look into “Rapid Response Hotlines.” These community-run, 24/7 lines keep tabs on ICE activity in their neighborhoods, and dispatch legal assistance to those who need it. To understand how they work, we sit down with filmmaker Paloma Martinez, whose beautiful short documentary “Enforcement Hours” follows the San Francisco Rapid Response Hotline during President Trump’s first term.

We’re joined by Finn Palamaro, a staff member at the non-profit Mission Action and the lead organizer of the hotline today.

Special thanks to:
KALW - San Francisco
Host and Executive Producer: Eli Cohen
Editor: Ben Trefny.
Composer: Kirk Pearson
Sound Designer: Dogbotic Studios

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Hall. The show is part of PRX's Radiotopia.

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a mixed race shoemaker in New Orleans, was arrested, convicted and fined $25 for taking a seat in a whites-only train car. This was not a random act. It was a carefully planned move by the Citizen’s Committee, an activist group of Free People of Color, to fight a new law being enacted in Louisiana which threatened to re-impose segregation as the reforms made after the Civil War began to dissolve.

The Citizen’s Committee recruited Homer Plessy, a light skinned black man, to board a train and get arrested in order to push the case to the Supreme Court in hopes of a decision that would uphold equal rights. On May 18, 1896 the Supreme Court ruled on the Plessy v. Ferguson case establishing the "separate but equal" doctrine, upholding the constitutionality of racial segregation.

The case sharply divided the nation racially and its defeat “gave teeth” to Jim Crow. The “separate but equal” decision not only applied to public transportation it spread into every aspect of life — schools, public toilets, public eating places. For some 58 years it was not recognized as unconstitutional until the Brown v. Public Education case was decided in 1954.

Homer Plessy died in 1925 and his conviction for breaking the law remained on his record. In 2022, 125 years after his arrest, the Louisiana Board of Pardons voted unanimously to recommend that Homer Plessy be pardoned for his crime. The pardon was spearheaded by Keith Plessy, a descendent of Homer Plessy, and Phoebe Ferguson, the great-great granddaughter of John Howard Ferguson, the convicting judge in the case. The two have joined forces digging deep into this complex, little known story – setting the record straight, and working towards truth and reconciliation in the courtrooms, on the streets and in the schools of New Orleans and across the nation.

The Plessy and Ferguson Foundation is responsible for erecting plaques throughout New Orleans commemorating African American historic sites and civil rights leaders.

Pie Down Here — Produced by Signal Hill

In the 1980s, when Robin D.G. Kelley was 24 years old, he took a bus trip to the Deep South. He was researching and recording oral histories with farmworkers and Communist Party members who had organized a sharecroppers union in Alabama during the Great Depression.

Kelly used those oral histories to write his award winning book, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression.

Recently Kelley listened back to those early recordings with Signal Hill contributor Conor Gillies. He hadn’t heard some of the recordings in decades. Memories came flooding back as Kelley reflected on the people, the story and the power of oral history.

Robin Davis Gibran Kelley is an American historian and academic, and the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. His books include the prize-winning Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002, new ed. 2022. His essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Nation, the New York Times, the New Yorker, New York Review of Books and more.

Pie Down Here was produced by Conor Gillies and edited by Liza Yeager and Omar Etman, with help from the Signal Hill team: Jackson Roach, Annie Rosenthal, and Lio Wong. Music by Nathan Bowles. You can listen to the entire first issue of Signal Hill — eight original stories — on their website at signalhill.fm, or wherever you get podcasts.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of independent producers.

In 2004, we opened up a phone line on NPR asking people to tell us about their Hidden Kitchens— secret, underground, below the radar cooking, and how people come together through food. One caller told us about immigrants and homeless people, who didn't have official kitchens, using the George Foreman Grill to make meals and a home. Did George Foreman know about this? We called him up to find out.

George Foreman the legendary two-time World Heavy Weight Champion and Olympic gold medalist talked with us about growing up hungry and violent, about his time in the Job Corps, about his career and comeback, about becoming a preacher, and his work with kids. “Feed them,” he says. “Hunger makes you angry.”

In honor of George Foreman who left this earth March 21, 2025, The Kitchen Sisters Present an Unexpected Kitchen: The George Foreman Grill and Beyond.

"No one should be given up on. You never lose your citizenship as a human being just because you've been in trouble." - George Foreman

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. Thanks to Laura Folger, Kate Volkman and Melissa Robbins for production help on this story. And thanks to our Hidden Kitchens series co-producer, Jay Allison. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of the Radiotopia network from PRX.

In 1981 The Kitchen Sisters interviewed Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston for a story about life on the homefront during World War II. Jeanne told stories of her childhood growing up in Manzanar, a hastily built detention camp surrounded by barbed wire and armed guard towers in the midst of the Owens Valley in the Mojave desert, where Japanese Americans were incarcerated for 3 years during World War II.

Jeanne was 7 years old when her father, a commercial fisherman, was taken away with no explanation by the FBI and imprisoned in Bismarck, North Dakota. The family had no idea where he had been taken or why.

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's book, Farewell to Manzanar, written in collaboration with her husband James D. Houston, has become a curriculum staple in classrooms across the nation and is one of the first ways many are introduced to this dark period of American history.

In listening to this interview recorded 44 years ago we are struck by how Jeanne's memories of those years — the sense of fear, of families being separated, of innocent people being terrorized, hunted — resonate with what is happening in our country today.

Jeanne died last year at the age of 90.

Tom Luddy was a quiet titan of cinema. He presided over the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley for some 10 years, co-founded and directed The Telluride Film Festival for nearly 50 years, produced some 14 movies, match-made dozens of international love affairs, and foraged for the most beautiful, political, important, risky films and made sure there was a place for them to be seen in the world. And that the people making this powerful work were known and knew each other.

Tom Luddy with his photographic memory, his infinite rolodex, his encyclopedic knowledge of global cinema and his catalytic ability to connect people, caused the most unusual of collaborations to come to be.

Tom championed the French New Wave, the Czech New Wave, Brazilian cinema novo, dissident Soviet cinema, directors Francis Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Agnes Varda, Les Blank, Paul Schrader, Agnieszka Holland, Barry Jenkins, Laurie Anderson and countless others.

Tom passed away on February 13, 2023. There’s a giant hole in the screen without him here. But his DNA is in the hundreds of filmmakers, musicians, writers and activists he nurtured and inspired.

The Tom Luddy Connection: The Man, The Movies, The Rolodex was produced by Evan Jacoby and The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) in collaboration with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton. Mixed by Jim McKee.