Berkeley recently renamed a street after a South Asian activist Kala Bagai. But her story isn’t the typical one you hear about people who get streets or monuments named after them.
Nearly 100 years ago, Bagai and her family were driven out of town by racist neighbors who didn’t want them to move in. She and her family eventually left the Bay Area, and a lot of her later activism was the kind of work that didn’t make the headlines. But that’s exactly why some people feel like she’s the perfect person to represent the past and the present.
Guest: Barnali Ghosh, curator and community historian with the South Asian Radical History Walking Tour
Click here to read a Mar. 12, 2020 op-ed in Berkeleyside by Kala Bagai’s granddaughter, Rani Bagai, about her grandmother’s story.