Thorne Dreyer :
PODCAST | Historian, activist & pioneering feminist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on Rag Radio

Dunbar-Ortiz wrote the classic ‘Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975,’ recently released in an updated edition.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, May 30, 2014. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Interview by Thorne Dreyer | The Rag Blog | June 6, 2014

Our Rag Radio podcast features Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a scholar and memoirist, and a ’60s-’70s activist who played a pioneering role in the early women’s liberation movement.

Listen to or download the podcast of our May 30, 2014, Rag Radio interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz here:

Rag Radio is a weekly hour-long syndicated radio program produced and hosted by long-time alternative journalist and Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer. The show is recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas. It is broadcast live on KOOP every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) and streamed live on the web.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz with Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Scholar, social activist, and pioneering feminist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was our guest on Rag Radio. Dunbar-Ortiz, who received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and is Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at California State University, is the author of Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975, which was recently published in a revised edition with a new afterword by the author. Her next book, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, published in association with Howard Zinn, will be released this September.

Dunbar-Ortiz, who is part Native-American, was born in San Antonio and grew up poor in rural Oklahoma. In 1968, she helped found the Women’s Liberation Movement. Along with a small group of women in Boston, she was a publisher of the first women’s liberation journal, No More Fun and Games.

Roxanne was an anti-war and anti-racist activist and organizer throughout the 1960s and early 1970s and a public speaker on issues of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and racism. She worked in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade and worked with other revolutionaries across the spectrum of radical politics, including the Civil Rights Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the Revolutionary Union, the African National Congress, and the American Indian Movement.

Dunbar-Ortiz is the author of five books, including Outlaw Woman, the story of her odyssey from Oklahoma poverty to the urban New Left, which gives a working-class, feminist perspective on a time and a movement that forever changed American society. Howard Zinn wrote that “Outlaw Woman is the story, bold and honest, of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s extraordinary journey — political, ideological, personal… She illuminates all those experiences with unsparing scrutiny and emerges with a fierce, admirable independence.”

 
Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer who was a founding editor of the original Rag, published in Austin from 1966-1977. Tracey Schulz is the show’s engineer and co-producer. And we are honored to have noted investigative journalist Ken Martin is our apprentice.

Rag Radio has aired more than 200 shows since September 2009, on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP — and streamed live on the web — and is rebroadcast and streamed on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is also aired and streamed on KPFT-HD3 90.1 — Pacifica radio in Houston — on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. (CST).

After broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Please contact us at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
Friday, June 27, 2014: Scholar and author Robert Sharlet, with his son, Jeff Sharlet, journalist and bestselling author of The Family.