Welcome to this bonus episode of Sound Opinions. I'm Jim Deeregatus. My partner is Greg Kot.

Black Girls Rock! Gotta say it with the exclamation point, Greg,

is celebrating its 15th year.

And our special correspondent,

our friend Althea Legosby,

you talked to founder Beverly Bond

about the movement

and the nonprofit organization that has grown into a thriving space and resource

for young black girls.

Let's start with how she launched it.

So she launched it in 2006. In 2005 she started thinking about the idea and it

started with a t-shirt actually just having Black Girls Rock as an affirmation

right and then she realized she started writing down all of the

amazing black women in history who've rocked beyond just like musically, right?

Just rocked period. And after writing pages and pages of

women down she said she had an epiphany and I remember pushing the paper away

from me and I said oh my God I said this is bigger than me. This is actually an affirmation that all of our women, our kids, our grandmothers need to hear because it's not something that we hear or have heard. We have never been put in a position where

black women have been celebrated for all that we are and all that we do. We are

often called out of our names we are marginalized we

objectified you know especially in in our culture in terms of like music and you

know I'm a DJ so like I was paying attention to all the stuff as a model I remember just being removed

remember not we didn't matter our you know I remember the casting agent saying things like we have a black model you know they could say they were actually say that right I knew in that moment that this was bigger than just my own personal game with the t-shirt, although I still did the t-shirt.

...