African American issues

Filmmaker Yoruba Richen's documentary, The Green Book: Guide to Freedom, tells the story of the manual that helped African-Americans find safe places to stay, eat, shop and do business on the road.

Edugyan's latest novel, Washington Black, tells the story of a boy who escapes slavery and embarks on a voyage of scientific discovery. It has been shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.

Bell's CNN series is nominated for three 2018 Emmy awards. He talks about his genealogy and why he likes the word "negro" in an excerpt of this 2018 interview with Terry Gross.

Journalist Howard Bryant discusses the history of social protest among African-American athletes. His new book, The Heritage, traces the tradition back to Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali and others.

In Locking Up Our Own, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Forman Jr. argues that African-American leaders helped shape policies that harmed black communities. Originally broadcast July 17, 2017.

When I was a kid, my mom told me a story about her grandfather: That he got in trouble with some white men down south, and escaped lynching by running to Chicago. That he chose his new last name "Jones," because it was the most common name in the phone book. That, for years, he would sit in his chair facing the door, shotgun on his lap, waiting for them to come for him.

In 1957, three years after the Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional, Melba Pattillo Beals was one of nine black students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.

Jonathan Olshefski spent 10 years filming Christopher Rainey and his family, who run a recording studio in a working-class African-American section of North Philadelphia. Then their daughter was shot.

Ward's National Book Award-winning novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, is set in a small town modeled after her own rural hometown. It centers on a biracial young boy confronting the South's racial legacy.