[Update] Heritage and Hope at the Mafundi Building in Watts Trudi Sandmeier 0:00Hey, Save As listeners, co-host Trudi Sandmeier here. We’re bringing you another encore episode from our first season, this one on the Mafundi Building in Watts. It’s had…
Tag: social justice
Surf, Sand, and Self-Determination: Jim Crow-Era Leisure for Black Angelenos
We said “so long” to summer with a trip to the Santa Monica beach with historian Alison Rose Jefferson, whose work at USC launched a deep dive into African American recreation areas in the Golden State. Her master’s thesis on Lake Elsinore led to her widely acclaimed book, Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites in the Jim Crow Era.
Alison shares some of the struggles, successes, and legacies of Black leisure spaces in early twentieth-century SoCal. We also hear from an oral history with the late Verna (Deckard Lewis) Williams, who experienced fun in the sun—and racism from white beachgoers—firsthand.
Tabula Raza: A New Table for People-Centered Conservation
As a kid, Laura Dominguez would sit under the kitchen table during tamale season, listening to family stories as the grownups handed her corn husks to play with. Now she’s one of the people setting a new table for heritage conservation, with community as the centerpiece. In this episode, Laura shares the personal roots of her professional path, her doctoral research into the origins of conservation in Los Angeles, and a glimpse of the future she’s helping to shape.
Robert Kennard, Architect for Humanity
Robert A. Kennard, FAIA (1920 – 1995) led an extraordinary life as an architect, mentor, and humanitarian. The son of a Pullman car porter, Kennard defied steep odds to build a successful career, design more than 700 structures, and create one of the longest-running African American-owned architecture firms in the western U.S. He “believed that people were more important than the spaces they occupied,” wrote USC alum Jerome Robinson in his master’s thesis, An Odyssey in B-Flat: Rediscovering the Life and Times of Master Architect Robert A. Kennard.
Jerome passed away before we could interview him for this podcast, yet he left a trove of stellar research and archival audio. We bring you some of it in this episode. We also hear personal stories of Kennard from his daughter Gail, who still runs the firm he formed in 1957. This episode is longer than usual (around 40 minutes), but stick with it–you’ll find it worth your while, or your money back!
Robert Kennard, Architect for Humanity Trudi Sandmeier 00:00 Today on Save As, we explore the story of two extraordinary men, whose lives crossed, even though they never actually met. [music] Cindy Olnick 00:17 Welcome to Save As, a podcast that…