African-American Issues

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz just attended two productions of Porgy and Bess: an operatic performance at Tanglewood and a musical-theater version in Cambridge, Mass. He says it can work either way, "as long as Gershwin's great score remains its heart and soul."

Ameena Matthews is a former gang member who now works to stop retaliatory gang violence in some of Chicago's most dangerous neighborhoods. She is one of the subjects of a new documentary called The Interrupters.

Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. looks at the cultural legacy of African slaves brought to Latin America.

After the Civil War, the United States seemed poised to grant equal rights to blacks. But the Supreme Court's rulings in the late 19th century kept blacks segregated for decades, says constitutional scholar Lawrence Goldstone.

Clarence Jones helped draft Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech and was a close personal adviser and lawyer to the civil rights leader. But he almost turned down the chance to work with King. He explains what changed his mind in his memoir, Behind the Dream.

Set in 1976, Tanya Hamilton's Night Catches Us tells the story of former Black Panther Party member who are partly stuck in the past, even as they try to move on with their lives.

"You can no longer talk about what black America thinks or feels," says Pulitzer Prize--winning columnist Eugene Robinson. His new book, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America, describes how African-American communities are becoming increasingly disconnected from one another.

Abraham Lincoln always thought slavery was unjust — but struggled with what to do once slavery ended. Historian Eric Foner traces how Lincoln's thoughts about slavery — and freed slaves — mirrored America's own transformation in The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.

More than 6 million African-Americans moved from the South to cities in the Northeast and Midwest between 1915 and 1970. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson documents the resulting demographic and social changes in her history of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tenn. For the next two months, the man who shot him, James Earl Ray, was able to evade the FBI during a massive worldwide manhunt. Writer Hampton Sides traces the movements of both King and Ray in his new book, Hellhound on His Trail.

Wilbert Rideau went to prison in 1961 at the age of 19 for killing a woman during a bungled bank robbery. Prison changed him. He became the editor of the award-winning prison magazine The Angolite and was released with time served in 2005. His new memoir, In the Place of Justice, describes his 44 years behind bars.

The photographer, who died Oct. 27 at age 89, dedicated his decades-long career to capturing images of African Americans. Roy DeCarava's subjects ranged from daily life in his hometown of Harlem to the Civil Rights movement.

Journalist and lawyer Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court for The New York Times. He gives us a roundup of this year's most important decisions — some of which were left for the final hours before summer recess.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' pays tribute to his father in his Memoir.

Author Larry Tye discusses Satchel Paige, a negro league pitcher who helped integrate baseball by touring the country and playing exhibition games with white players.

John Hope Franklin died March 25 at the age of 94. As a historian, scholar, and activist Franklin advanced African-American causes throughout his career. Fresh Air remembers the historian and scholar with an interview from 1990.

Atlantic contributing editor Ta-Nehisi Coates describes growing up with a father who was a member of the Black Panthers in his new memoir, The Beautiful Struggle.

Ta-Nehisi Coates grew up in the post-civil rights era, son of a publisher and former Black Panther; he's a contributing editor and blogger for The Atlantic magazine and author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, 2 Sons, and An Unlikely Road to Manhood.

Set in the 17th century, Toni Morrison's new novel A Mercy is the story of a slave girl whose mother gives her away to a stranger in a desperate attempt to secure her a better future. Maureen Corrigan hails the book as a prequel (of sorts) to Morrison's earlier novel Beloved.