Black History Month

The entire vault. 85 hours of recordings from all five Pacifica stations — Malcolm X debating at Columbia, James Baldwin weeks after the Birmingham church bombing, Angela Davis in Watts, Fannie Lou Hamer challenging the DNC, Billie Holiday's autobiography performed in 1956, Alice Coltrane's final interview. 72 programs spanning 1956 to 2014. These recordings have never been available to the public like this.

Fannie Lou Hamer told the 1964 Democratic National Convention what happened in that Mississippi jail. The Pacifica vault has her actual voice across a decade of speeches, plus a 90-minute Sojourner Truth documentary and recordings of Rosa Parks and Lorraine Hansberry as strategists, not symbols. Two books cover what the recordings can't: the full sweep from the first African women on these shores through Breonna Taylor. The vault recordings are the raw material those histories are built on.

Bobby Seale on the Free Breakfast Program the FBI labeled a national security threat. Angela Davis at Huey Newton's funeral. Kathleen Cleaver and Elaine Brown on what it meant to lead as women inside the party. Seven hours of Pacifica recordings. The graphic novel, the Vanguard documentary, and Jeffrey Haas's account of Fred Hampton's assassination give you the history. The audio puts you inside it.

Angela Davis argued that Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday weren't just singers — they were the first Black feminists, using blues to claim autonomy decades before the movement had a name. This collection pairs Davis's groundbreaking text with the music itself: Ella, Nina, Billie, and Etta on CD. Three hours of Pacifica Archive audio round out the set: Davis's full Blues Legacies talk with Alberta Hunter performing live in 1978 — Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out, By and By, My Castle's Rocking, Handyman. Lady Day, featuring Billie Holiday's own recordings woven between sections of her autobiography — Lady Sings the Blues, Swing It Brother Swing, Don't Explain, Ain't Nobody's Business, Love Is Here to Stay, My Man, and more. Plus a rare Odetta live concert — God's Gonna Cut You Down, Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child — and her 1971 interview.

No label would touch Paul Robeson in the 1950s, so he pressed the records himself on his own Othello label. Spirituals, labor songs, folk melodies. 74 minutes, 34-page booklet of historic photos. Howard Bryant's book reveals the political cost: HUAC forced Jackie Robinson to testify against Robeson and split Black America down the middle. The Pacifica recording is C.L.R. James at Morehouse College in 1973, two hours from someone who knew Robeson personally, calling him the most remarkable human being he had ever met.