Nonfiction

Here’s a heartfelt message from a talented poet about the power of Black bodies and voting…produced by colleagues, students and alumni from my Howard University Department of Media, Journalism and Film academic family.

The lives of iconic leaders El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have been dissected and analyzed by a host of scholars and writers of all strips ever since assasins’ bullets ended their lives in 1965 and 1968.

Minister Malcolm and Rev. King’s seemingly contradictory approaches to the Black struggle for freedom and justice inspired legions of admirers and detractors – many of whom believed that these men of deep faith (Islamic and Christian) had nothing in common.

Dr. King often is remembered solely as the “I Have a Dream” believer in nonviolent protest. Minister Malcolm X is deemed to be the fiery, and more violent, proponent of “the Ballot or the Bullet.”

And yet…

A new biography released this spring,  The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (Basic Books, 2020),  shines another light on these men. Historian and author Peniel E. Joseph (University of Texas, Austin), contends that Malcolm and Martin’s philosophies actually converged as they moved through the 1950s and 1960s, making them more alike in their revolutionary activism than not.

Really? Well if you’re not convinced, check out Dr. Joseph’s explanation of his research and his conclusions during my recent interview with him.

Some serious food for thought, reflection and even inspiration during these contentious times.

In the Spring and Summer of 2018, two university professors – Dr. Carol Anderson of Emory University and Dr. Robin DiAngelo of the University of Washington, offered salient insights on America’s racial divide.

These scholars pulled from in their respective best selling books, White Rage:The Unspoken Truth of our Nation’s Divide and White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, to deliver  throught-provoking, heart-wrenching and even humorous presentations that continue to resonate in the tumultuous times we are living through today.

To experience Dr. Anderson’s and Dr. DiAngelo’s brilliant reflections, see the links below.

Please also note that Dr. Anderson, along with award winning YA biographer Tonya Bolden (who I interviewed last year about her prolific YA writing career), created a  primer for young people titled We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide.

I highly recommend these titles.

As we move through the beginning of a new decade in the 21^st century, we should continue to celebrate the legacy of the women of the 19^th and 20^th centuries and who paved the way for us all.

So here are links to audio profiles of just three inspiring trailblazers;  trombonist/composer/arranger Melba Liston

jazz singer/bandleader Betty Carter

and abolitionist/Civil War freedom fighter Harriet Tubman

I produced the Melba Liston and Betty Carter shows for NPR’s award-winning series Jazz Profiles in the mid-1990s.  In 1948, pioneering writer Richard Durham created a dramatic portrait of Harriet Tubman in “Railway to Freedom,” just one of the more than 90 episodes his historic Destination Freedom series on WMAQ radio in Chicago.

Please enjoy them all!

On WAMU-FM in Washington, this station’s daily, nationally distributed program 1A recently explored the magic and significance of radio drama through the lyrical and “radical” storytelling of writer Richard Durham (1917-1984).  Durham, a pioneering media writer, journalist and activist, firmly believed (and demonstrated) that you could tell compelling aural stories that could be used in the service of positive social change and justice.

Click on the link below to hear the program – in which I am one of the featured interviewees – and be amazed!

The Radical Storytelling Of ‘Destination Freedom’