July 4, 1996 - Midday rebroadcasts the award-winning MPR documentary about "Freedom Summer" in Mississippi in 1964. It's called "O Freedom Over Me."
May 28, 1996 - The eldest member of the Shakopee Mdwakanton Dakota tribe, Louise Bluestone Smith, died recently at the age of 85. In the last few years of her life, Smith received some half a million dollars a year in profits from the Mystic Lake casino -- along with the other 150 or so members of the Shakopee tribe. But until the end, Smith lived in the modest trailer in which she'd spent most of her life in poverty. She spent her last years in a tireless and unsuccessful legal effort to stop tribal chairman Stanley Crooks from enrolling new tribe members. Smith said many of the new members did not meet the tribe's requirement of one-quarter Shakopee Mdwakanton blood. Smith insisted that her fight with the tribal leadership was not about money, but about the integrity of the tribe. In an interview with Minnesota Public Radio in 1994, Louise Bluestone Smith said the casino business has brought her people dramatic wealth, but also introduced greed -- a concept that she says was foreign to the Dakota people when she was a child.
April 24, 1996 - With spring weather finally moving in, the air is filled with chirping birds... buzzing bees... and -- the chest-rattling thumps of car stereos. As Minnesota Public Radio's John Biewen found out, young men with big woofers in their backseats spend the winter pining for spring, and the chance to share their 'bumps' with the rest of us.
April 17, 1996 - New statistics released this week are fueling concern that the Minnesota system for people with mental retardation and other developmental disabilities... does not serve minorities fairly. The report says minorities are admitted disproportionately to at least one state hospital... and are more likely than whites to be on waiting lists for more desirable home-care services. In part two of our series, Minnesota Public Radio's John Biewen reports the findings are consistent with those in other states.
April 16, 1996 - A new state report says Twin Cities minorities with developmental disabilities are more likely to be sent to Cambridge state hospital than are whites, and are less likely to get the more sought-after home-based services. Minorities make up twenty percent of new admissions to the Cambridge state hospital since 1992, a proportion more than three times that of minorities in the state, and twice the minority population of Hennepin County. State Senator Linda Berglin of Minneapolis says she finds the report "disturbing." She asked for the data after several African-American parents complained they'd been denied in-home services that are routinely given to white families with disabled children. State officials say the higher rate of institutionalization among minorities is not necessarily the result of discrimination. In the first of three reports on state programs for the developmentally disabled, Minnesota Public Radio's John Biewen examines the case of an African American mother who charges that she and her mentally retarded son
September 22, 1995 - An MPR retrospective of the late former Minnesota Governor Rudy Perpich. Highlights various reports, speeches, interviews and commentary. Following the MPR radio scrapbook, Hy Berman, history professor at University of Minnesota, discusses Perpich and his political legacy.
February 8, 1995 - MPR’s John Biewen reports on Hmong women breaking tradition by going to work, changing the family dynamic. The friction between traditional and new gender roles have led to divorce for some in Hmong community.
August 2, 1994 - Midday presents a community policing MPR documentary entitled A New Kind of Cop, followed by a discussion and call-in with Lucy Gerold, director of Community Services Bureau for the Minneapolis Police Department. Gerold comments on local efforts on community policing and National Night Out.
June 21, 1994 - MPR’s John Biewen and Kate Cavett, both producers of the documentary O Freedom Over Me, discuss excerpts, interviews, and outtakes that did not make it into final production. The documentary focused on the 30-year anniversary of Freedom Summer.
June 20, 1994 - Documentary is a look at Freedom Summer, 1964.