African-American Issues

In January, DuVernay became the first African-American woman to win Sundance's best directing award for her second feature-length film, Middle of Nowhere. It's about a young woman who puts her life and dreams of going to medical school on hold while her husband is in prison.

Comic W. Kamau Bell's show, produced by Chris Rock, mixes standup, sketches and interviews. Bell tells Fresh Air about the origins of his political humor and why it's important for him to have a multiracial audience.

AIDS is the primary killer of African-Americans ages 19 to 44, and the mortality rate is 10 times higher for black Americans than for whites. A new Frontline documentary explores why.

The stand-up comedian and star of In Living Color was recently nominated for a Tony Award for his portrays of Sporting Life in the opera Porgy and Bess. "I think the character of Sporting Life is a salesman so he has to be flamboyant, the life of the party," he says.

For five seasons, actress Sonja Sohn played Detective Shakima "Kima" Greggs on the critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire, which chronicled life — and death — on Baltimore's toughest streets. When the series ended, Sohn stayed in Baltimore -- to help young people straighten out their lives.

The actress earned her second Academy Award nomination for her portrayal of a maid in the 1960s-era film The Help. She talks to Fresh Air about why she thinks the character is anything but the cliche some have claimed.

Michelle Alexander says that many of the gains of the civil rights movement have been undermined by the mass incarceration of blacks in the war on drugs.

Before the Civil Rights movement, segregated American cities helped give birth to the Chitlin' Circuit, a touring revue that provided employment for hundreds of black musicians. Rock historian Ed Ward profiles two recent books which illuminate the conditions these musicians endured.

Criminologist David M. Kennedy's strategy for reducing gang violence has dramatically reduced youth homicide rates nationwide. In his new memoir, Don't Shoot, Kennedy outlines his community meetings and interventions have worked to curb youth violence in more than 70 cities.

Bell, the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School, died this week at age 80. His 1973 book, Race, Racism and American Law, is a staple at law schools nationwide. He spoke with Terry Gross in 1992.

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz just attended two productions of Porgy and Bess: an operatic performance at Tanglewood and a musical-theater version in Cambridge, Mass. He says it can work either way, "as long as Gershwin's great score remains its heart and soul."

Ameena Matthews is a former gang member who now works to stop retaliatory gang violence in some of Chicago's most dangerous neighborhoods. She is one of the subjects of a new documentary called The Interrupters.

Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. looks at the cultural legacy of African slaves brought to Latin America.

After the Civil War, the United States seemed poised to grant equal rights to blacks. But the Supreme Court's rulings in the late 19th century kept blacks segregated for decades, says constitutional scholar Lawrence Goldstone.

Clarence Jones helped draft Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech and was a close personal adviser and lawyer to the civil rights leader. But he almost turned down the chance to work with King. He explains what changed his mind in his memoir, Behind the Dream.

Set in 1976, Tanya Hamilton's Night Catches Us tells the story of former Black Panther Party member who are partly stuck in the past, even as they try to move on with their lives.

"You can no longer talk about what black America thinks or feels," says Pulitzer Prize--winning columnist Eugene Robinson. His new book, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America, describes how African-American communities are becoming increasingly disconnected from one another.

Abraham Lincoln always thought slavery was unjust — but struggled with what to do once slavery ended. Historian Eric Foner traces how Lincoln's thoughts about slavery — and freed slaves — mirrored America's own transformation in The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.

More than 6 million African-Americans moved from the South to cities in the Northeast and Midwest between 1915 and 1970. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson documents the resulting demographic and social changes in her history of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tenn. For the next two months, the man who shot him, James Earl Ray, was able to evade the FBI during a massive worldwide manhunt. Writer Hampton Sides traces the movements of both King and Ray in his new book, Hellhound on His Trail.