It is undeniably a good thing that films like “Judas and the Black Messiah” are helping to disseminate the true story of the U.S. government’s coordinated involvement in the murder of Black Panther deputy chairman Fred Hampton. But there are many facets to that story that still need to be told and understood, especially when it comes to the revolutionary, multiracial Rainbow Coalition and the people who organized it. In this special episode of “The Marc Steiner Show,” Marc sits down with two founding members of the Rainbow Coalition, Henry “Poison” Gaddis of the Black Panthers and Hy Thurman of the Young Patriots, to dig deeper into the history of the Rainbow Coalition and the radical threat it posed to the white establishment.

Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Friday on TRNN.

Resources mentioned in the show: “The Murder of Fred Hampton” (documentary) (1971); Hy Thurman, “Revolutionary Hillbilly” (book) (2020).

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Host, The Marc Steiner Show
Marc Steiner is the host of "The Marc Steiner Show" on TRNN. He is a Peabody Award-winning journalist who has spent his life working on social justice issues. He walked his first picket line at age 13, and at age 16 became the youngest person in Maryland arrested at a civil rights protest during the Freedom Rides through Cambridge. As part of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968, Marc helped organize poor white communities with the Young Patriots, the white Appalachian counterpart to the Black Panthers. Early in his career he counseled at-risk youth in therapeutic settings and founded a theater program in the Maryland State prison system. He also taught theater for 10 years at the Baltimore School for the Arts. From 1993-2018 Marc's signature “Marc Steiner Show” aired on Baltimore’s public radio airwaves, both WYPR—which Marc co-founded—and Morgan State University’s WEAA.
 
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