Community Voices

In 2014, Loud As The Rolling Sea guest host Dr. Kevin McGruder spent a warm summer afternoon talking to Jewel Graham in a wide ranging oral history interview that covered pretty much her whole life. She was a much loved faculty member at Antioch College for many years, deeply involved in supporting the Black students in the Antioch program for interracial education during turbulent times.

Joshua and Ethan have been BFFs for life...well, actually since middle school. Ethan came into the studio to help his friend tell this Dayton Youth Radio Story.

Now in his 90s, Paul Graham is a soft spoken, retired chemist living in Yellow Springs, where he went to college, launched a career and a family, and eventually became a prominent civil rights activist. His parents had come north, like so many blacks in the early 20th century, and moved to Dayton, where they joined other family members and settled down.

In this installment, we’ll hear about student activism in the 1960s and 70s in Greene County, home to two historically Black colleges – Central State and Wilberforce University AND Antioch College. Students at all three schools organized protests, marches, sit-ins, rallies, pickets and more during those years, pressing hard and relentlessly for civil rights for African Americans.

It's time for parties and celebrations as the class of 2021 gets ready to take on the world, and it's also time for many of our teenagers to turn 18. In our next Dayton Youth Radio season finale, a story from a Centerville High School senior reflecting on independence and becoming an adult.

Our new series from the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices is called Loud as the Rolling Sea. It brings us the voices from a generation of African Americans in Yellow Springs, Ohio, who were the civil rights activists of their day. In our first profile, we meet Dr. Yvonne Seon, founding director of the Bolinga Center at Wright State University.

If you’ve been to the new Gem City Market in Dayton, you may have noticed bold, colorful patterns on its walls, like the grid of diamond shapes over the entrance. That’s the original artwork of Dayton textile designer Yetunde Rodriguez.

In the next month, you're going to hear stories that began as a community oral history project 10 years ago in Yellow Springs, when citizens came together to gather the stories of the Civil Rights generation of activists, both Black and white, who were born in the 20s and 30s.

This Saturday Dayton and many communities across the Miami Valley will hold Juneteenth celebrations that mark the end of slavery in the United States. Eichelberger Center for Community Voices Senior Producer Basim Blunt interviewed local historian Larry Crowe to get some details about Juneteenth.

Today we have the first of three season finale stories from Dayton Youth Radio. It's about a Kettering teenager who discovered something valuable during his after school job.

Kamisha Thomas is a filmmaker, writer, director, co-founder of the Returning Artists Guild in Columbus and a returned citizen. Kamisha was a filmmaker before she went to prison, but finished her short film while she was inside. There were a lot of projects in prison, she says, that helped her continue her filmmaking.

We’ve been reflecting on Black Joy on West Dayton Stories and our final commentary on the topic is from amaha sellassie.