Dempsey Travis presents a jazz program and discusses the life, the music, and the community of Chicago jazz from before The Great Depression until World War II. Travis discusses 1920s-1930s Chicago for Black families including rent parties, breakfast dances, employment opportunities, union strikes, and jazz.

Dempsey Travis, real estate entrepreneur and civil rights activist turned historian and author, recalls his earlier days meeting and listening to many of the African American jazz artists. Some of the musicans mentioned are Louis Armstrong, Jimmie Lunceford, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, Art Tatum, Cab Calloway, Nat King Cole, and Benny Goodman.

Using the backdrop of James Baldwin's "Nobody Knows My Name" and Baldwin's feelings that Blacks were ashamed of where they came from, Terkel interviews Professor and Chairman of the Political Science Department of Roosevelt University on his book coauthored with Stokely Carmichael entitled" Black Power: Politics of Liberation in America". Hamilton states that Blacks were taught to hate themselves and leave school believing that. Institutional racism and the deliberate oppression it creates, holds blacks back. Blacks are left out of crucial decision making processes that concern them.

The American history professor and author talks with Studs about her book, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era. This program also includes excerpts of interviews from Terkel's Hard Times series.*Please note: some sections have been edited out from the original recording due to copyright considerations