African Americans--Social conditions

Peele says that his turn as the director of a horror/thriller film comes from a "deeper place in my soul" than his previous comic work. Originally broadcast March 15, 2017.

In his book Rising from the Rails, journalist Larry Tye examines the social history of the African-American men who provided service to railroad passengers traveling in George Pullman's sleeping cars.

In her new book, journalist Jill Leovy studies the epidemic of unsolved murders in African-American neighborhoods and the relationships between police and victims' relatives, witnesses and suspects.

In Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward recalls the deaths of five young men in her life, which she believes were all connected to being poor and black in the rural South. "It made me feel that I wasn't promised some long life. ...That's not a given for me."

From the comedian and digital director of The Onion, a satirical self-help book for anyone who has a black friend, wants to be the next black president or speak for the black community.

Coulson Whitehead's novel Zone One is a post-apocalyptics tale ofd a Manhattan crippled by a plague and overrun with zombies. He explains that he created the novel, in part, to pay homage to the grimy 1970s New York of his childhood.

The stand-up comedian and star of In Living Color was recently nominated for a Tony Award for his portrays of Sporting Life in the opera Porgy and Bess. "I think the character of Sporting Life is a salesman so he has to be flamboyant, the life of the party," he says.

"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.

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.

Rapper and actor ICE-T...one of the original "gangsta" rappers. He’s got a new CD,”Greatest Hits: The Evidence” (Atomic Pop). Greg Knot of The Chicago Tribune has written that "ICE-T is that rare gangster rapper who leads with his brain instead of his gun or his crotch." ICE-T's 1992 song "Cop Killer" landed him at the center of a controversy about gansta rap--is it a legitimate form of expression or is it incendiary hate-mongering? In addition to his singing career, ICE-T is an actor.