Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

Under the Tree with Bill Ayers

“Under the Tree” is a new podcast that focuses on freedom—a complex, layered, dynamic, and often contradictory idea—and takes you on a journey each week to fundamentally reimagine how we can bring freedom and liberation to life in relation to schools and schooling, equality and justice, and learning to live together in peace. Our podcast opens a crawl-space, a fugitive field and firmament where we can both explore our wildest freedom dreams, and organize for a liberating insurgency. "Under the Tree" is a seminar, and it runs the gamut from current events to the arts, from history lessons to scientific inquiries, and from essential readings to frequent guest speakers. We’re in the midst of the largest social uprising in US history—and what better time to dive headfirst into the wreckage, figuring out as we go how to support the rebellion, name it, and work together to realize its most radical possibilities—and to reach its farthest horizons?

  1. We Who Believe in Freedom with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

    1d ago

    We Who Believe in Freedom with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

    What’s happening? How did we get here? Where are we on the clock of the world? And where do we go from here? Today—and everyday—we need to ask ourselves deep and fundamental questions in order to continue to develop a dynamic and concrete analysis of concrete conditions—a guide to resistance and action. Surrender is not an option, and living in a perpetual defensive crouch is never the way forward. No. In the words of the legendary organizer Ella Baker, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.” In June, 2026 Bill met up with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor at Haymarket House for a wide-ranging conversation about this political moment and what the known demands of us now. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a MacArthur Fellow and the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the co-founder of Hammer & Hope, a magazine of Black politics and culture, and author of several books: Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective.

    1h 26m
  2. RUNNING TOWARD FREEDOM with Walter Riley

    Jun 18

    RUNNING TOWARD FREEDOM with Walter Riley

    Fugitives are on the run—not free yet, they are running and running hard…running toward freedom. Refugees have escaped war or catastrophic climate collapse or extreme social disintegration, and forced to flee their homes, compelled to confront a fresh landscape, they invent new ways of living, learning, loving, and being—on the run. Walter Riley is a long-distance runner—he’s been in the mix and on the move for eight decades. A refugee from the Jim Crow South where as a teenager he was a renowned organizer and activist, and at 19 moderated a conversation with Malcolm X in Durham, NC, Walter Riley is a civil rights attorney in Oakland, California, winner of the National Lawyers Guild’s Champion of Justice Award, and a founder of Haiti Emergency Relief (visit Episode #38 where Walter is in conversation about Haiti with our Beloved late comrade Malik Alim). Walter Riley is a fugitive from our soul-crushing racial capitalist system, and a powerful revolutionary thinker and strategist. His son Boots Riley says that his dad teaches us that “we must participate, we must engage, we must seek to change the world.” In motion and in action we will develop our thinking and figure out with more clarity “how to fight, how to live, how to love…” Arm-in-arm, shoulder-to-shoulder, heart-to-heart, Walter Riley returns to “Under the Tree” for a discussion of movement-building in this political moment as well as his new book (with Jesse Strauss and a Foreword by Boots), Civil Rights and Structural Attacks.

    49 min
  3. …AGAIN with Mark Nowak

    Jun 4

    …AGAIN with Mark Nowak

    We're delighted to be joined—again—by Mark Nowak, a labor activist, organizer, legendary teacher, and prize-winning poet, who is the founding director of the Worker Writers School. I've participated in sessions at the School several times, and the joy and energy that explodes into the room is striking as domestic workers, cab drivers, miners, and other workers embrace and display their intellectual and creative talents. Adrienne Rich praised Nowak for "regenerating the rich tradition of working-class literature." Here we discuss AGAIN, his photo-text commentary on MAGA, touching on mass incarceration, school shootings, environmental collapse, white nationalism, and war.

    1h 1m
  4. Cultural Capital Doesn’t Pay the Rent with Jessica Lawless

    May 21

    Cultural Capital Doesn’t Pay the Rent with Jessica Lawless

    Anarchy is community gardens and potluck dinners, playgrounds and art classes, friends and family in the foreground, and dancing wildly on the ruins of a system that was killing us. Anarchy is spontaneous cooperation without coercion, mutuality and reciprocity, tolerance for confusion, contingency, improvisation, dialogue and debate, experimentation, spontaneity, and the flux that accompanies constant social learning. Anarchy is embracing the cosmic dream boogie and a freedom we’ve never tasted. Anarchy is free people doing all the things that free people do, and respecting other free people doing everything that free people do. We're in conversation with Jessica Lawless, author of Cultural Capital Doesn’t Pay the Rent, a moving account of abolitionist feminist resistance excavated from their decades of organizing and activism.

    1h 1m
  5. Levitating the Pentagon with Nancy Kurshan

    Apr 30

    Levitating the Pentagon with Nancy Kurshan

    Nancy Kurshan invented a robust, creative, and riotous Movement life. From the early days of the Black Freedom Movement and the anti-war struggles against the US invasion of Vietnam, through the Chicago 8 Conspiracy trial, radical solidarity with Puerto Rican independence and Palestinian liberation, and her feminist insistence on speaking up and being heard, Nancy Kurshan is an extraordinary and wise woman. She was a Red Diaper baby, raised as a child of the communist movement, a veteran of demonstrations for racial equality and against nuclear arms while still in high school. Nancy Kurshan was a founding member of the Yippies—the Youth International Party—engaged in wholesale disruption and widespread resistance as well as ridiculing the kings who had no clothes and dramatizing the hypocrisy of the war mongers, the rulers, and the captains of capitalism. She is the author of Levitating the Pentagon and Other Uplifting Stories, and we’re excited to be joined in conversation with her at Pilsen Community Books.

    59 min
  6. Narrating Palestine: A Conversation on History and Art with Rashid Khalidi and Ismail Khalidi

    Apr 15

    Narrating Palestine: A Conversation on History and Art with Rashid Khalidi and Ismail Khalidi

    Israel and its sponsor, enabler, and co-conspirator, the United States, extends it’s Forever War against Palestine and Palestinians, doubling-down on the genocide in Gaza, escalating ethnic-cleansing in the West Bank, and igniting fresh conflicts in Lebanon and Iran. The madness grows as war fever sweeps the region, and Israel sets itself on a suicidal path. We’re joined at Pilsen Community Books for a public conversation about war, peace, art, history, and resistance with our friends and comrades Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American historian and the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, and author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine and Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness; and Ismail Khalidi, a Palestinian/Lebanese American playwright, screenwriter theater director, and author of Tennis in Nablus, Truth Serum Blues, and a critically-acclaimed adaptation of Ghassan Kanafani's novella, Returning to Haifa---work that tackles the history of Palestine and the modern Middle East, as well as wider themes of race, colonialism, displacement and war.

    57 min
  7. The Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries with Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fischman

    Mar 28

    The Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries with Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fischman

    In the late 1960s Detroit was ripe for revolution: a wave of urban insurrections had swept the country from coast to coast, and the 1967 Detroit rebellion was one of the largest and most consequential; Black auto workers who had experienced marginalization and discrimination in the industry as well as from their own union (UAW) were organizing grass roots resistance; and Detroit was a center of Black radical thought, notably fired by the presence of the Marxist leader CLR James, as well as James and Grace Lee Boggs. On May 2, 1968, 3000 workers at the massive Dodge Main plant participated in a wildcat strike, and soon the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) was born, and workers began organizing radical caucuses at other factories. There are several useful accounts—books, articles, films—about the life of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, its history and its impact, but with Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries Walda Katz-Fischman and Jerome Scott add a necessary and illuminating element: Oral History. The focus is meaning as it’s constructed by human beings—meaning made by actors in their particular situations—and this leads to story, to narrative, to approaches that are person-centered, shamelessly interpretive, and unapologetically subjective. Far from a weakness, the voice of the person—the narrator’s own account—is the singular achievement of this work, a worthy antidote to propaganda, dogma, imposition, and stereotype.

    1 hr
  8. Find Your Joy in Resistance with Vijay Prashad

    Mar 17

    Find Your Joy in Resistance with Vijay Prashad

    We are living through difficult times, tough times, and we’re not alone. Genocide, catastrophic capitalist climate collapse, increasing inequality, unapologetic imperial dreams and white supremacist policies unleashed, fascism on the rise—people all over the world are suffering, they get hurt and they get hard. Our rage and our sadness for all the unnecessary suffering, while understandable, can easily lead to despair and worse. But despair is deactivating, distorting, and destructive—a weapon of the powerful. Activism is a necessary antidote to despair, and activism opens a practical space where hope can come alive. Join us in conversation with one of the most joyful freedom fighters we know: Vijay Prashad, director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research—a primer about everything that matters! Vijay is the author of forty books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of Global South, and (with Grieve Chelwa) How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa. He is an editor at LeftWord Books (New Delhi), Inkani Books (Johannesburg), and La Trocha (Santiago).

    1h 4m
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4.9
out of 5
80 Ratings

About

“Under the Tree” is a new podcast that focuses on freedom—a complex, layered, dynamic, and often contradictory idea—and takes you on a journey each week to fundamentally reimagine how we can bring freedom and liberation to life in relation to schools and schooling, equality and justice, and learning to live together in peace. Our podcast opens a crawl-space, a fugitive field and firmament where we can both explore our wildest freedom dreams, and organize for a liberating insurgency. "Under the Tree" is a seminar, and it runs the gamut from current events to the arts, from history lessons to scientific inquiries, and from essential readings to frequent guest speakers. We’re in the midst of the largest social uprising in US history—and what better time to dive headfirst into the wreckage, figuring out as we go how to support the rebellion, name it, and work together to realize its most radical possibilities—and to reach its farthest horizons?

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