Race, Identity & Culture

Author and museum director James Cameron. Sixty four years ago, an organized mob of more than 10,000 white men and women dragged Cameron and two other black teenage men from a jail cell in Marion, Indiana. The mob mercilessly beat the three young men. They lynched two. Cameron was spared. In 1984, he recounted this experience in his memoir "A Time of Terror" (Available now from Black Classic Press). Then in 1988, Cameron founded the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee.

Lebanese-born author and journalist Hanan Al-Shaykh. Her novel "The Story of Zahra" (Anchor Books) has just been published in the United States. Several Arab countries have banned the book since its original publication 14 years ago. The Story of Zahra tells of a contemporary Lebanese woman struggling with life in her family and her war-ravaged native city of Beirut. Al-Shaykh's novel "Women of Sand and Myrrh" was published in the United States last year.

Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg on Eurocentric culture.

Caryl Phillips, author of five novels, a work of nonfiction and many scripts for film, theater, radio and television. His new novel,"Crossing the River" (Knopf), tells stories of slavery and the relationships forged by and among some of its perpetrators and victims. Phillips takes liberties with time in following the lives of three African children sold into slavery by their desperate father -- one freed and sent back to Africa as a missionary, one searching for her lost husband and child in the American wild west and one, a World War II GI stationed in Yorkshire, England.

Novelist Albert French. He found inspiration for his first novel, "Billy" (Viking), in the true story of an 11-yr-old getting the electric chair in the 1930's. "Billy," is the story of the "legal lynching" of a ten year old boy in the deep south who inadvertently kills a white girl. French writes in "Delta" dialect, epitomizing racial hatred in America. (Interview by Marty Moss-Coane)

From 1953 until 1989 Helen Suzman served as an Opposition Member of the South African Parliament. Suzman was a pioneering political leader in the fight against apartheid and anti-semitism. For thirteen years she was the sole representative in the Parliament to reject race discrimination.

Wilma Mankiller, the first female chief of the Cherokee discusses her memoir.

Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, who is currently living outside of Paris, describes his experience taking his daughter to EuroDisney.

A new young poet and short-story writer Sherman Alexie. He's a 26 year-old Native American who grew up on the Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation in Washington State.

Palestinian-American Naseer Aruri. He's a professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He's the author of a number of books, his latest is"Occupation: Israel Over Palestine," in it's second edition (1989), which was selected by Choice magazine as one of the "Outstanding Books for 1984/85." Aruri has written many articles on human rights, the Palestine question, Lebanon, Islam, and U.S. policy in the Middle East in scholarly journals and weekly magazines.