Democracy Forum on WERU FM Community Radio

Recent Topics Archive

The League of Women Voters-Downeast in cooperation with WERU FM produces a monthly radio program on topics in participatory democracy. It's called the Democracy Forum.

Broadcasts may be heard from 4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. on the third Friday of the month at WERU Community Radio, 89.9 FM. Listen on the web at WERU FM. The show can also be heard in the Portland area at 2 p.m., the first Sunday of the following month, at WMPG Community Radio, 99.9 FM, streaming at wmpg.org

In September, 2018, the Democracy Forum won top honors from the Maine Association of Broadcasting for public affairs radio.

Broadcasts are available as a podcast from WERU FM.

Here is information about our upcoming broadcast.

April 16 -- Divided We Stand: Can diversity be our strength?

This new episode will be pre-recorded; no listener calls will be taken. Comments and questions may be emailed to news@weru.org with Democracy Forum on the subject line.

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools. " Martin Luther King, Jr., in a speech to a mixed-race audience at St. Louis University in 1964. St. Louis University is the oldest university west of the Mississippi. In 1944, as a Jesuit institution, it opened its doors to black students.

We’ll talk about whether this is one of the most divided moments in American history.  How have these fractured moments come up in our prior history? What role is the emergence of multiracial democracy playing in this current divisive moment? What role has race played in the divisions of the past? Can a polity come back from such serious fragmentation? How have we gotten past it before, or have we?

In case you missed it live, you can listen to this show from the archive at weru.org.

Special Guests: 

• David Blight, Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies at Yale University, and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

• Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at Colby College.

To learn more, follow these links to related content:

• “Three Great Revolutions: W. E. B. Du Bois, African American Women and Social Change,” Cheryl Gilkes in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 2016.  

• "America is exceptional in the nature of its political divide," Pew Research Center, November, 2020.

• "How can America heal from the Trump era? Lessons from Germany’s transformation into a prosperous democracy after Nazi rule," Sylvia Taschka in The Conversation, January, 2021.

• "Appomattox and the Ongoing Civil War," David Blight in The Atlantic, April, 2015.

• "Multiracial Democracy Is 55 Years Old. Will It Survive?," Adam Serwer in The Atlantic, January, 2021.

• Anchor of the Soul, a documentary about Black history in Maine, 1994

• "W.E.B. Du Bois’ Visionary Infographics Come Together for the First Time in Full Color," wherein his pioneering team of black sociologists created data visualizations that explained institutionalized racism to the world, Smithsonian, 2018

• Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy, Edward Ball, 2020