Interview of Marc Steiner

Abstract

President and Executive Producer of the Center for Emerging Media and host of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc Steiner, talks about life experiences that have shaped his perspective on race and influenced his life's work. He particularly talks about his first experience with seeing racism as a young child, being the only white scout member in an all-Black scout troop, and how this influenced his future work with both the Civil Rights movement and Black Lives Matter. He then goes on to talk about the mission and work of the Center for Emerging Media and the importance of community in delivering their own narratives. Marc also extensively discusses media coverage between the Civil Rights movement and Black Lives Matter and how social media has altered one's relationship to the movements.This interview was conducted during the 2021 Interdisciplinary CoLab as part of the project, From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore. Transcript is edited.From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore Date: 7 June 2021 Location: Online via Webex programming Interviewer: Deysi Chitic-Amaya Transcription: Lorra Toler Interviewee: Marc Steiner Length: 01:18:03 Deysi Chitic-Amaya (DCA): Hello, this is Deysi Chitic-Amaya from University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Summer Colab Project, “From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter: Oral Histories of the Lived Experience in Baltimore”. Today is June eighth, 2021 and I will be interviewing Marc Steiner. Marc Steiner is the host of The Marc Steiner Show, a radio now podcast show which has been on the air for twenty-eight years as of the date of this recording. He has previously worked for radio stations such as WYPR and its predecessor WJHU before operating his own production company, the Center for Emerging Media, which, since its inception, has produced a wide variety of media content including the Peabody award-winning series Just Words which features the voices and stories of working people in Baltimore who are often relegated to statistics and not given a platform to speak. The mission of the Center for Emerging Media and all of Marc’s projects is to employ media that produces unique programs that addresses issues that affect our world, often issues that individuals may find difficult to talk about or are not regularly given a platform in mainstream media and news. Today, Marc continues that mission with his current work on a video documentary series called, “The Alabama Chronicles”, which features Dr. Martin Luther King’s Montgomery, Alabama barber and other key players in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Marc, thank you for joining us today. Marc Steiner (MS): My pleasure to be here. DCA: Okay. So, how did you emerge as a radio talk show host? MS: Out of a cocoon. No, I, getting on the radio for me was an accident. I mean, it didn't, was not part of my plan. It just kind of happened. I had gone, this is how it happened. So I went to the dentist, and sitting in the dentist waiting room was the general manager of WJHU who’s a friend of mine, Dennis Keeta, because a few years earlier I had worked to produce a series out of that station in the late nineties, late eighties, called the history of Jewish music. And then for a number of reasons, I left the place in good stead. And he said to me, “We're thinking about starting a public affairs radio show. And we know you know the city so well, from the street corners to the corporate boardrooms, what do you think?” and I said, for some reason, what came out of my mouth was, “Well, I should be the host.” And he said, “But you’ve never done radio,” and I said, “Well, that's true. But what difference does that make? I can learn radio,” and so I didn't let it go after that. And then so one day he just said, “Okay, Marc, here we go. Every Tuesday and Thursday night, seven o'clock, after All Things Considered,” no, “Every Tuesday night, after All Things Considered at seven o'clock. This is your studio, this is your microphone, this is your desk. Good luck.” And so that's how it started. And then folks started helping me produce it and it just developed from there. A student from Hopkins, his name is Roger Sorkin, who’s now a filmmaker, wrote to me saying that he was graduating and that his parents would pay his salary for a year, and could he work for me. So he became my first producer. And we moved from Tuesdays and Thursdays to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And then in 1995, we moved to five days a week, two hours a day. So it was absolutely, it happened on accident, but I'm glad it happened. DCA: Awesome. And then like, I guess what were the kind of stories that you covered as you did this radio show, like what was the first radio show you did when you first started working? Sorry. MS: That's cool. The very first show was a debate between four women on Norplant. And Norplant, I don’t know if you all know what Norplant was, but Norplant was a contraceptive device they would put into, under the skin of women, so they wouldn't get pregnant. And it was highly controversial because it was being used only on poor women of color, poor black women in the city. And so there was a huge uproar around it. And so we had this raging debate for an hour and a half. The first shows were an hour and a half long. So it was a huge raging debate on that, and that's where it began, that was the first show. But then after that, I mean, I covered, I mean I've always been involved in community affairs, I've always been fighting against racism in this country since I was a kid. And so that, and the community rights, and also interviewing authors and ideas, it became, you know, a plethora of things. But so things that I cared about is what I brought to the airwaves. I was just lucky that everybody, like, also cared about them, or wanted to care about them or learned about them. So it worked. At least it seems to work too. DCA: That's really awesome. And then was there like, I guess anything from your life prior that, like, influenced the work? Because, like, it's clear that when you went into radio, like, you already had this, like, this idea that you wanted to, like, these stories you wanted to tell, these people you wanted to amplify your voices? Was there anything from your life beforehand that, like, gave you this drive? MS: Well, I think there's a couple things. I mean, I had a fairly eclectic existence professionally. And so you know, I was involved in theater, I was a community organizer, I’d been a union organizer, I’d been a therapist, and all mostly in poor working class communities where I worked. And so that was what the point of view I brought with me, it was like, one of the most important things to me was having a program where the voices that are not heard are now heard. Doesn't mean you cancel out the folks that you’d usually hear the, you know, the leading politicians and the business leaders and all the rest, academic leaders, but it's bringing in the voices of others. It was for me, you know, let me give us an example. I mean, it was bringing people into discussions that people would not ordinarily do. In other words, you can, whenever you talk about civil rights or races, is when you bring black folks on your show, that's what people do. So my idea was to really change all that up. To do that, but also, no matter what we're talking about, to ensure that women and people of color are part of that discussion. That was a huge motivating factor for me to do the work. And so what that meant was, if I was going to do a program on cosmology, or on astrophysics, let's say, which we did a bunch, because I did a whole series with Hubble, on the work that their space telescope, I made sure that they're always women, astrophysicists, and astronomers and black folks who were nuclear physicists, were on that show, so that the voices were heard, and you create a new sense of what is possible and what people hear. That way people hear and see is what gives them the perceptions, what's around them. And so to me, that was to work at changing that. And so that became a big part of it. And, you know, everything I've worked in, I brought to the show, I mean, I spent years working in prisons and programs that were alternatives to people being incarcerated, and we brought that to the airwaves and brought those voices to the airwaves, things like that. And so I tried to really mix it up and create something that gave you a sense of a larger community, and not just the same narrow thing most people do in their radio shows. DCA: That's great. And then, you mentioned about amplifying the voices of others. So what does it mean to be an ally to communities involved in the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter? MS: Interesting question. I, first of all, the word ally is part of the nomenclature for the last ten years, not one that we used coming up, but for me, you can use the word ally, you can also use the word solidarity, you can use the word, there's a lot of ways you can describe it. But, I was, alright, so when I was a kid, I was a civil rights worker. So I'm seventy-five now and when I, let me take it way back. So when I was eleven in 1957, remember this is Baltimore 1957, Baltimore was a legally segregated city. The black and white neighborhoods were just that, black and white neighborhoods, and they were legally segregated. I came from a pretty middle class home. And as a lot of people in the neighborhood, they had domestics working in their house, or a woman worked in the house. And so that was the case in our home as well. And her name is Mrs. Moselle Jackson, this is important to the story. This is what happened. This changed the whole nature of my existence because at eleven-years-old, I wanted to be a Boy Scout more than anything in the world, all I wanted to do was be a Boy Scout. You know, my uncle from England sent me the original Handbook, I read it. I was out of my mind reading it, I was like I gotta go be a Boy Scout, I got to go camping, I got to do this. So one day, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table with Mrs. Jackson and Mr. Dennis Foster, her nephew, came to pick her up as usual, he was sitting at the table. They're all having coffee and cake and talking. And I came downstairs saying, I’ve got to join the Boy Scouts. You know, I'm eleven. I’ll be eleven next week, I’ve got to join. And so I guess I was ten, almost eleven. And my mother said, oh, and my mother’s a Brit, was British, so she had this English accent. And she said, “Alright, love. I’ll sign you up straightaway, Monday morning, Beth Tfiloh,” which was the synagogue. And I said, “But Mom, I don't want to be in a troop of all Jewish kids,” because I had this mythology in my head about, you know, that Boy Scouts were about all kinds of guys, little boys, getting together. And so Mr. Foster said, “I'm a Scoutmaster, you can join my troop.” So my mother knew exactly what was going on at that moment. And she looked at him and she looked at me, I'll never forget it, and she said, “Oh, that's a lovely idea.” And so that Monday, Mr. Foster comes by and picks me up and drives me to his scout troop, and so we went from the northwest side on Forest Park, all the way down North Avenue, making a right on Broadway, down Ashland Avenue. And there I was at the Faith Baptist Church. And it was an integrated troop because I integrated the troop. And so that was the beginning of a huge lesson for me about race and class that changed the course of my existence while I was a kid, and for the rest of my life. And it's where I first confronted racism at the Boy Scout camp. That summer, I was eleven-years-old and it was one of those things where I was walking down to get my merit badge in swimming, and I think in canoeing, one of those two things, and we were the only black troop there. And a Boy Scout from another troop was leaning over a fence post on my way down to go swimming and he said, “Where's your trooper?” I pointed to the grove we were camped in, and he said, “What are you doing in a troop with all them N’s?” And I was devastated that a Boy Scout would use that word. I was a kid. I was a little boy. I didn't know, you know. And so that began changing things for me. I mean, everything began to kind of unfold in terms of the contradictions in our society. I remember, as a little boy, we were driving from the Boy Scout meeting and a whole bunch of guys in his car, and they stopped at this donut shop on Broadway, and everybody piled out of the car, and I sat there. And the Scoutmaster, Mr. Dennis Foster came over and said, “Come on, Marc.” And I said “No, I’ll sit here. I’ll wait.” He said, “No, no, no, you don’t understand. Wherever we can go, you can go.” And I knew that wherever I could go, he couldn't go. So all these things sort of happening to me as a kid, and it began to change the nature of how I looked at the world and, you know, being ostracized in my community, because I was in an all black troop, and I had these guys come over to visit me at the house and spend the night and that was a no go for a lot of guys in my neighborhood, you know. And then at thirteen-years-old, almost fourteen, I walked my first picket line at Mondawmin Shopping Center at the White Coffee Pot. And that's when I started working in the Civil Rights Movement. So that was like, for me that was, as a little boy, all these things had happened, and I won't go on and on, but the police thing can happen and they were kind of earth shaking and changed the nature of my perceptions of the world. And they never stopped. But that's where it began. DCA: Wow that's, yeah, that's incredible. Going off that similar, like, how do you define and enact good allyship? MS: So I suppose that’s what you asked in the first place, I'm sorry I digress too much. So, okay, to me, there's a lot of ways to look at that question. So if you start with the assumption that one of the most defining factors in America is racism and race, which it is, it's divided union movements, class struggles, all kinds of things in our country, besides being a completely repressive and oppressive regime for hundreds of years for black folks in America, and other people of color as well. So, I think part of that, to me, is you always have to stand up to it. If it happens in the course of your daily work, if it happens in the course of your family, if it happens wherever it does, you've got to stand up and speak up and say something. You don't just let it happen. And I think it also means that, you know, this is, I'm just preparing now for an interview with Hy Thurman, who's an old friend of mine who is a part of a group called the Young Patriots, who were members, some of them used to be members of the Klan, and the Ku Klux Klan. And they live in a neighborhood called uptown Chicago. And they formed the first Rainbow Coalition back in 1967, ’68, with the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, who were Puerto Ricans, and the Brown Berets, who were Mexican Americans, and the American Indian Movement in Chicago. And so, building these cross racial coalitions to fight for justice is something that's been going on in my life for forever. And to me, that to me is as, I mean, when people say ally, sometimes the system that it’s in support of, black movements and against racism, and that is critical, but it's got to be more than that. You have to, from my perspective, be willing to organize in diverse communities and other communities in your own community, to build those kinds of coalition's to make that happen. I think that that is, that to me is key to it. So that's why I've never really in my own life never really used the word ally just because it's not in my nomenclatures, not where I come from. I'm more, I mean, I think about how you organize and fight racism, and how you organize and fight for economic and social justice in this country, and how you always confront racism everytime you see it, every time you hear it. And as someone who grew up as an organizer in the sixties and early seventies, organizing in mostly white working class communities. That to me is a critical part of what you do, if you really want to change things, building these coalitions. I don’t know if that answers your question, but that's, I'm happy to probe it more, if you’d like. DCA: No, I think you answered it just fine. It's just very interesting throughout doing, like, a few of these interviews, just, like, hearing everyone's, like, perspective and relationship with these words, which is something that, like, we don't think about a lot our own relationship with, like, what do words mean, and what do they mean to us? So I think it's really important. So thank you for your answer to that. Bringing it back to your work with radio as well as media, why do you think it is important for journalists and media to cover social injustice in communities such as Baltimore? MS: Why it’s important for media to do so, is that what you said? Why it’s important for media to do that? DCA: For journalists and media, yes. MS: Well you see, first of all, you got to think about what is journalism? I mean, what is, that to me is, journalism is kind of morphing and changing over the years. And so growing up, you know, there were, for me, there were three stations on television. ABC, CBS and NBC. That was it. Those three. Then PBS came along a little later, then Fox, the forty-five stuff came in even later. But there were three major stations and the idea of media was, whether it was print or TV or radio, was that it was supposed to be objective journalism. And so, but what does that mean? I mean, objective, I think objective is a really difficult thing to get to. Because we live very subjective lives, in terms of how we feel and see things. And then you got to remember that almost all the hosts, almost everybody on camera, and behind the mic, and radio, were white men, unless you were in the black media, then they were mostly black men, and some women, but mostly black men. And so, even in Baltimore the radio stations, while they are still segregated in some ways, still very segregated. I mean you had WSID and WEAA. There were just a few black stations, you know, that were on the air, mostly other stuff was white. So, but you looked at journalists who were supposed to be objective, but never really was. And I think that the ensuing movements in the Civil Rights Movement, Anti-War Movement, other things were happening, change that began to change the nature of media itself. So that now we have media which is, in some ways, really partisan. And so media is always a changing landscape. And I think that, for me, the important role that media plays is one that exposes the contradictions, that exposes the inequities. But just more than that, it's helping the world find solutions, to create the discussions that allow people to find the solutions to what we face. You know, and I made no bones about where I stood the whole time I was on radio. I couldn't hide who I was, I wasn't gonna hide who I was, but I also began to realize that even in the places that I might oppose politically, that the truth lives in every corner. There's truth in every corner. That no one has the lock on it. And the media's job is to hear it, and to listen to it, and then to bring it into play and into dialogue with the other. And I think that that's important. I mean, I think that, you know, you might hear, I could give an example, I hope this connects. Back in the late, in the sixties, this actually happened in the spring of sixty-eight. I was in a meeting in Chicago with the Young Patriots, which was the Appalachian white group of guys who came out of a gang in Chicago that worked with the Panthers, you know, the Lord's, that I described earlier. And there was a meeting taking place in Uptown, which was the poor white neighborhood. And the Black Panthers were there talking to this group of mostly poor white folks. And they talked about police brutality, which was affecting both communities. And Bobby Lee from the Panthers said, you know, “We have to stand and march to the police station together, and we have to stand and fight these cops, we can't allow this brutality to go on.” And an older white guy jumps up out of the back with this deep Southern accent, And he says, literally, he jumped up and said, “Well if that's what them N’s said, then I'm walking with them.” And everybody stopped, he said “What?” Because he used the word you know? And then Bobby Lee and the other Panther over there went over to him, put their arms around him and said, “That's right, brother, we're marching together.” And one of the things that came out of that was that that affected this man's attitude about race and racism and what he said and how he said it and what he had thought, that it was common struggle. And I say that because, to me, that's where the truth is in every corner. You have to listen and not put your own thoughts and feelings sometimes into what you hear. You got to really hear what the other person has to say. Listening is key to making media work. And not just spouting but listening, and that's how you begin to change people's hearts and minds, if you're willing to listen, and then you build on that listening. And so to me, that has been kind of what I really learned the most. And I think I picked that up. And I really learned that in media because when I first started out in radio, I did some work for the John Hopkins Center for American Indian Health, and I went to a couple of reservations, and there was one meeting, and there was this guy who was Cherokee, he was like a holy man and a writer and a thin