Terry Gross

James Farmer, co-founder of CORE, the Congress On Racial Equality and its National Director from 1961-1966. CORE was one of the Civil Rights groups of the 1960's which followed Gandhi's principles of non-violent resistance. CORE also helped organize the Freedom Rides -- multi-racial busloads of people traveling through the southern states making sure the Supreme Court's decisions on desegregation were being enforced. Farmer's long life as an advocate of civil rights was detailed in in his autobiography, "Lay Bare the Heart" (Dutton).

J. L. Chestnut, who in 1958 became Selma, Alabama's first and only black lawyer. Working with the NAACP, he defended activists during the civil rights movement. Since then he's been involved in what he describes as the longer march...turning the victories of the civil rights movement into grass roots change. The law firm Chestnut founded in Selma is now the largest black law firm in Alabama. Chestnut's autobiography is "Black in Selma" (Anchor), co-authored with Julia Cass, a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Writer Taylor Branch. The first volume of his exhaustive history of the Civil Rights movement - "Parting the Waters, America in the King Years"(SS) - was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1989. In it, Branch covered the period from 1954 to 1963. Branch is a former staff member of Harper's, and Esquire. This interview was originally broadcast on 12/05/1988.

Richard Prelinger is a archivist of films you probably thought were not worth saving: educational, industrial, and public-service films made from the 1930s through the 1960s.

The former head of NBC's television programming Pat Weaver (Sylvester L. "Pat" Weaver, Jr.). He began that job in the early days of the medium - in 1949 - and was the creator of two of television's longest running shows, the "Today" show and the "Tonight" show. Weaver started his career in radio, where he worked with comic Fred Allen. And he was advertising manager for the American Tobacco Company, under the eccentric tobacco magnate George Washington Hill. Weaver has a new memoir of his career, "The Best Seat in the House," (Knopf).

British Journalist Timothy Garton Ash. George Kennan has compared Garton Ash's powers of political observation to those of de Toqueville's. ASH's beat is Eastern Europe, and he has been on hand to chronicle the popular disavowal of Communism there (Garton Ash's classic account of the Prague Uprising in 1986 is "The Magic Lantern"). His most recent book concerns the German Re-Unification, and what Germany's role will be in the new Europe: "In Europe's Name: Germany & the Divided Continent" (Random House).

Medical Examiner and "detective of death", Michael Baden, the former Chief Medical Examiner of New York City. Baden argues that there is a national crisis in forensic medicine. He writes that the search for scientific truth is often sullied by the pressures of expediency and politics. His memoir is "Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner" (Ivy Books).

Contributing Editor and essayist for Newsweek magazine Ellis Cose. His new book, "The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why are Middle-Class Blacks Angry? Why Should America Care?" (HarperCollins) is about what many middle-class blacks feel, but few white americans understand: that middle-class blacks still struggle against racial stereotyping, discrimination, and alienation, despite their financial success and their best efforts to "play by the rules." Cose argues that many white americans make assumptions about Blacks which are at odds with reality.

Harry Wu is a resident scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He came to the U.S. from China where he was held in a prison labor camp for 19 years. The son of a wealthy banker, Wu was a newly graduated college student when he was arrested in 1960 and denounced as an "enemy of the revolution." In the camps he endured torture, starvation, and he learned to "stop thinking in order to survive." In 1979 he was released.

Astrophysicist George Smoot. Since 1974 he's worked on NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, leading the instrument team that detected cosmic "seeds." In 1992 he announced that he and a team of researchers had detected the biggest, oldest objects ever observed in the universe, the "cosmic seeds" that were the origin of galaxies and clusters of galaxies.