African-American Issues

Patterson's book Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy looks at the historic Supreme Court case and its aftermath. Patterson also wrote Grand Expectations: The United States 1945-1974.

In 1949, when he was 24, Greenberg joined the Inc. Fund, which would later be called the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He worked on some of the most important civil rights cases, including representing Martin Luther King, Jr. He also led the Fund's campaigns to help integrate the University of Alabama and the University of Mississippi. With others, he tried the Delaware and Topeka cases of Brown v. Board of Education. His memoir and history of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund is called Crusaders in the Courts: Legal Battles of the Civil Rights Movement.

Winfield was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Sounder. He appeared in many television shows, and was a voice on The Simpsons. He died at the age of 62 from a heart attack.

Clayborne Carson of the Founding Director of the King Papers Project, a long-term project to edit and publish the papers of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

As a child, she had a crush on the 19-year-old preacher in her church. He was known as M-L, but later he became Martin Luther King, Jr.

His novel, The Known World, is receiving critical acclaim and has been selected as a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction. It's about a black farmer and former slave who becomes a slave owner. Jones made his literary debut more than 10 years ago with Lost in the City, a collection of short stories about struggling black residents of Washington, D.C. It won the Lannan Literary Award. Until recently Jones made his living as a proofreader for the trade magazine Tax Notes.

John McWhorter's newest book is called The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. He has written on Ebonics, language and African Americans, and the origins of the Creole Language. His other books include Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America and Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of 'Pure' Standard English. McWhorter is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Author Philip Dray is the author of the book, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. Dray chronicles lynching. He looks at the perpetrators, the groups and individuals who courageously took a stand against it (the NAACP, Ida Wells, and W.E.B. Du Bois) and the legacy it left behind. Dray researched his book at the Tuskegee Institute where records about lynchings have been kept from 1882. He is also the co-author of We Are not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi.

Randall Kennedy is a Harvard Law professor. His new book, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (Pantheon Books) is based on a series of classroom lectures he prepared exploring the history and use of the word "nigger." He found the word in literature, political debates, cartoons and songs. And he explores the use of the word from a hateful slur to a term of endearment. Kennedy is a Rhodes Scholar and he served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Kennedy also the author of Race, Crime and the Law.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews John Henry Days, the new book by Colson Whitehead.

Film Critic Henry Sheehan reviews the new film “Men of Honor,” starring Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding, Jr.

Artistic director for the Houston Ballet, Ben Stevenson. He’s been with the ballet for over 25 years, turning it into a premiere dance company. The New York Times’ dance critic said of Stevenson, (he) “is one of the most original figures in the development of regional ballet in America.” Stevenson’s own choreography for the Houston ballet include the full length works: “Swan Lake,” “Cinderella,” “Peer Gynt,” “Dracula,” and “Cleopatra.” Stevenson is a native of Britain.

Principal dancer for the Houston Ballet, and the first African-American to be a principal dancer, Lauren Anderson. She began studying at the ballet’s academy at the age of 7, and working with Stevenson at the age of 11 when he was hired by the ballet. Stevenson choreographed “Cleopatra,” for her.

Earlier this week, Harold Nicolas, the younger member of the famous tap-dancing duo, The Nicholas Brothers, died in Manhattan. The Nicholas Brothers danced in vaudeville, on Broadway, in night clubs and on TV, but may be best known for their appearances in movie musicals of the 1930s and 40s. We’ll listen back to a 1985 interview with Nicolas.

Painter Jacob Lawrence died on June 9th at the age of 82. For six decades, Lawrence had been widely regarded as one of America's most important black artists. His work depicted the black American experience from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement. (REBROADCAST from 5/16/88)

Authors Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor are the authors of American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley, His Battle for Chicago and the Nation” (Little, Brown & Co). In the book, the authors look at Daley’s legacy, how he transformed Chicago into a modern metropolis, but also turned it into the nation’s most segregated city.

Playwright and director George C. Wolfe. He wrote and directed the hit Broadway musical “Jelly's Last Jam,” about Jelly Roll Morton. Wolfe also wrote the play “The Colored Museum,” a satire about the black experience in America. His newest musical is “The Wild Party” based on the long-lost classic poem about the roaring twenties by Joseph Moncure March. (the book was republished in 1994 with drawings by Art Spiegelman). It’s currently playing at the Public Theatre on Broadway.

Andrew Ward is the author of “Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers, Who Introduced the World to the Music of Black America” (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). The Jubilee singers were nine former slaves who who set off from Nashville in 1871 to raise money to rescue their school, Fisk University, from bankruptcy. They toured the U.S., Britain, and Europe introducing audiences to African-American spirituals. The Jubilee singers are also the subject of an upcoming American Experience documentary on PBS. (Monday, May 1, 2000 at 9:00)

Contributing editor for Vanity Fair David Margolick. In his new book “Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights” (Running Press), Margolick traces the history and impact of the song “Strange Fruit,” a ballad about lynchings which became Billie Holiday’s signature song. It was written by a Jewish school teacher who was inspired to write the song after seeing a newspaper photograph of a lynching.

Tens of thousands of African-American men, women, and children were lynched by mobs in the United States between 1882 and 1968. Some of these lynchings were photographed, and the photos were saved as souvenirs, and were even sometimes used as postcards. Antique dealer James Allen came across these disturbing images and began to collect them. His collection is currently on display at the New York Historical Society. The book about Allen’s collection, called “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America” (Twin Palms Publishers) was published earlier this year.