Race, Identity & Culture

Mirta Ojito is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New York Times. Ojito and her family were part of the Mariel boatlift out of Cuba. Her new memoir is Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus. Ojito has interviewed Fidel Castro himself in researching the boatlift.

Writer David Reynolds is the author of the new biography John Brown: Abolitionist: The Man who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights. Reynold's book is considered to be a sympathetic look at the man who he says framed the issue of slavery in stark, uncompromising terms.

Criminal defense attorney Johnnie Cochran died Tuesday at age 67 of cancer, after having been diagnosed in 2003 with an inoperable brain tumor. In 1995, Cochran won O.J. Simpson a not-guilty verdict in the slayings of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Over the years, Cochran defended celebrities as well as lesser-known individuals. He represented football great Jim Brown, as well as rappers Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg and Sean Combs. (Originial airdate: 10/10/96)

The intersection of religion and politics was a subject of dispute this year when the question arose over whether Catholic politicians who support legal abortion should receive communion. McCarrick is the archbishop of Washington, D.C., and heads of the task force on Catholic Bishops and Catholic Politicians.

Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx are the songwriting team behind the 2004 Tony award-winning Broadway musical Avenue Q (which won Best Musical, Best Original Score, Best Book of a Musical). Their subversive show features people and puppets and is about a group of aimless 30-somethings with low expectations and active libidos. It includes such songs as It Sucks to be Me, Everyone's a Little Bit Racist, If You Were Gay, and I Wish I could Go Back to College.

In 1949, when he was 24, Greenberg joined the Inc. Fund, which would later be called the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He worked on some of the most important civil rights cases, including representing Martin Luther King, Jr. He also led the Fund's campaigns to help integrate the University of Alabama and the University of Mississippi. With others, he tried the Delaware and Topeka cases of Brown v. Board of Education. His memoir and history of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund is called Crusaders in the Courts: Legal Battles of the Civil Rights Movement.

Patterson's book Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy looks at the historic Supreme Court case and its aftermath. Patterson also wrote Grand Expectations: The United States 1945-1974.

Book Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews “The Time of Our Singing” by Richard Powers.

Journalist Richard Rodriguez is a regular essayist on PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and is an editor at the Pacific News Service in San Francisco. In his new book Brown: the Last Discovery of America (Viking) he assesses the meaning of Hispanics to the life of America.

John McWhorter's newest book is called The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. He has written on Ebonics, language and African Americans, and the origins of the Creole Language. His other books include Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America and Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of 'Pure' Standard English. McWhorter is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.