African American issues

Writer Clifton Taulbert grew up in the segregated South in the 1950s. His experiences growing up black in America are chronicled in his two memoirs When We Were Colored and the Pulitzer Prize nominated The Last Train North, (Penguin Books). Taulbert lives in Tulsa Oklahoma where he is a businessman. (Interview by Marty Moss-Coane)

Singer/Actor Herb Jeffries. In the late 1930's he became the first and only black singing cowboy on the silver screen. Then in the late 1940's he sang with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. At 83, Jeffries has recently recorded his western songs for the first time on an album - "The Bronze Buckaroo (Rides Again)" (Warner). Included on this album are highlights from his work with Earl Hines (who discovered him) and Ellington, including "Flamingo" and the original version of "You, You Darlin."

Gerald Early discusses the film "Glass Sheild," and how it doesn't capture the reality of black police in South Philadelphia.

Commentator Gerald Early remembers one of the most amazing events in professional boxing's history: when Mohammed Ali knocked out former champion Sonny Liston.

Michael Tonry is a professor of Law and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota. His new book, Malign Neglect: Race Crime, and Punishment in America, discusses how our current approach to fighting crime victimizes disadvantaged black Americans. He calls for a reform of sentencing and parole policies.

Chicago police officer Eric Davis, known as "21" in the rap group the Slick Boys. Davis and two other officers founded the group in 1991 to provide positive role models for the inner-city kids they encountered on their jobs every day. The group has received national acclaim for their songs about the importance of getting an education and staying off of drugs and out of gangs. Davis grew up in the Cabrini-Green development of Chicago, where the three officers work.

Williams spent the first ten years of his life believing he was white in segregated Virginia, and that his dark-skinned father was Italian. When his parents' marriage ended, his father took him and his brother to Muncie, Indiana, where the boys learned that they were half black. Williams' new memoir "Life on the Color Line" is about the struggle and repression he faced growing up between the races. Publisher's Weekly calls it "(an) affecting and absorbing story."

Golden in the author of the new memoir, "Saving Our Sons." She writes about bringing up her son in Washington D.C., where homicide is the leading cause of death for Black males between 18 and 24. In the preface, she says, "I stopped work on a novel in order to write this book. The unremitting press of young lives at risk, the numbing stubbornness of annual, real-life death tolls, rendered fiction suddenly unintriguing, vaguely obscene."

Commentator Gerald Early reflects on the black middle class, which he says doesn't enjoy the same benefits of its white counterpart.

Professor of English and Director of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University, Gerald Early. He reflects on the meaning of Motown music to whites and blacks.