430 Twenty Days in Santa Rita

This week on From the Vault we journey back to 1968 in celebration of Pacifica Radio’s strong and enduring tradition covering the anti-war protests and interviewing anti-war protesters. In the recording Twenty Days in Santa Rita, legendary Pacifica Radio-KPFA Public Affairs Director Elsa Knight Thompson interviews two women who were detained for twenty days in the Santa Rita Jail in Alameda County, California for protesting the Vietnam War. Just released from the Santa Rita Rehabilitation Center, Emily Lewis, public health nurse and wife of a Berkeley doctor, and Lillian Rubin, research assistant in sociology at the University of California, spoke at length with Elsa Knight Thompson about their experiences in jail, which was the result of their war-protest activities at the Oakland Induction Center in December 1967. The Santa Rita Jail became widely-known for holding the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Joan Baez, and others who participated in the anti-war movement and draft resistance movement during the 1960’s.


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