Race, Identity & Culture

Geoffrey Canada is author of Fist Stick Knife Gun; A Personal History of Violence in America (Beacon Press 1995) It provides a look into the lives of children living in violence. Canada is President and CEO of Rheedlan Centers for Children and Families in New York. He helps at risk children in the inner-city to find alternatives to violence.

Terry Johnson is a local organizer for the Philadelphia contingent headed to Monday's Million Man March. Johnson plans to walk to Washington to help symbolize his determination for a positive change in U.S. race relations. He and others will follow the path once used by the Underground Railroad.

Glenn Loury is an African-American conservative who is an outspoken critic of affirmative action programs. He has just written the book One by One From The Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America. Free Press 1995. In 1987, Loury was nominated to become Reagan's Deputy Secretary of Education. Loury withdrew his name citing "personal reasons." Later that year, Loury was arrested for possession of marijuana and cocaine. He now a Professor of Economics at Boston University.

Mark Harrell (her-ell) is a local organizer for the Philadelphia contingent headed to Monday's Million Man March in Washington D.C. Last year, Harrell chaired a three-day forum in Philadelphia that brought together several hundred African-American men together to discuss problems in the black community. He is the Director of the Youth Gang and Drug Prevention Program for the Philadelphia Mayor's office.

Journalist Jim Crogan is a freelance writer with the L.A. Weekly and Newsweek. He covered the O.J. Simpson trial for the past 15 months, and the Los Angeles Police Department for several years.

Editorial writer for the New York Times Brent Staples. He wrote a memoir last year: Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black & White (Pantheon). In 1984, Staples' younger brother, a cocaine dealer, was murdered. Staples began a process of reconsideration of the major questions in his life: his distance from his family by graduate study at the University of Chicago; the demise and racial divisions of his industrial hometown in Pennsylvania.

Journalist Stephen Adler. He is former legal affairs editor of The Wall Street Journal and is now the paper's investigative editor. Terry will discuss with him the O.J. Simpson trial and the jury process. Last year Adler's book about what's wrong with the jury system and how it can be fixed, was published: The Jury: Trial and Error in the American Courtroom, (Times Books/Random House). Adler looked at the history of the jury system and how our attitudes about juries changed over the years.

Professor Raphael Ezekiel. A former psychology professor at the University of Michigan, Ezekiel has spent the last ten years investigating the leaders and members of the Klans and Neo-Nazi groups. His new book The Racist Mind: Portraits of American Neo-Nazis and Klansmen (Viking) looks into these groups and provides a foundation for understanding the personal and social roots of white racism. Ezekiel is presently based at the Harvard School of Public Health where he is studying youth violence prevention.

Two men influential in their communities: Corner West, professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard, and author of Race Matters, and Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, a magazine of Jewish political and social commentary, and author of Jewish Renewal. They have collaborated on the new book Jews & Blacks: Let the Healing Begin.

Writer/Director Kayo Hatta. Her film "Picture Bride," is the story of a young woman who moves to Hawaii as a "picture bride." Picture brides were Japanese women who moved to Hawaii in order to marry the Japanese plantation workers who settled there. The women would only have seen a picture of their future husband before they were married. The film is Hatta's first commercial release and the first Hawaiian production to gain a commercial release, and also won the 1995 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for best dramatic film.