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Credits:
Host: Michael Slate Producer: Christine Blosdale Michael Slate is a revolutionary journalist. He began writing for the Revolutionary Worker in 1979. Slate has covered most of the major urban rebellions in the U.S. since the mid 1980s including the 1989 uprising in the Overtown neighborhood of Miami, the police attack on Black students and youth in Virginia Beach in 1989 and the 1991 uprising of Latino immigrants in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, DC. Slate has also written extensively about Africa since 1980. He provided unique coverage of the South African township uprisings that began in 1984 and eventually brought down the white minority regime. Slate made extended visits to South Africa twice during these uprisings, traveling with activists from the Black Consciousness Movement founded by the Azanian revolutionary leader Steve Biko who was murdered in prison by the apartheid police in 1977. Slate brought back the voices of the people in the townships and the countryside, voices that were not heard anywhere else. His series on South Africa ‑ War Stories and War Stories: Return to South Africa‑ appeared in the Revolutionary Worker and were called a "remarkable feat of reportage" by the late Donald Woods, the South African journalist about whom the film Cry Freedom was made. In early 1994 Slate traveled to Chiapas, Mexico, immediately after the indigenous campesino uprising and spent 3 months talking with the people about their lives, their hopes and aspirations and their New Year's Rebellion. The 9 part series Campesinos With Guns was written as a result of this trip.