African-American Issues

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner talks how the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments relate to current debates about voting rights, mass incarceration and reparations for slavery.

The Nobel laureate died Monday at 88. Terry Gross talked with Morrison in 1987 after she wrote Beloved, in 1992 after she authored Jazz and in 2015 when she published God Help the Child.

At the height of America's Jim Crow era, Taylor broke barriers by becoming the country's fastest and most famous cyclist. Michael Kranish tells his story in the new book, The World's Fastest Man.

Singleton, who died April 29, spoke to Fresh Air in 1991 about his semi-autobiographical movie, which centered on kids growing up surrounded by drug addiction and gang violence in South Central L.A.

Gates says white supremacy was born in the years after the Civil War, as white Southerners looked for ways to roll back the newly acquired rights of African-Americans. His new book is Stony the Road.

Filmmaker Yoruba Richen's documentary, The Green Book: Guide to Freedom, tells the story of the manual that helped African-Americans find safe places to stay, eat, shop and do business on the road.

Historian David Blight's new biography describes Douglass' escape from slavery, his passionate leadership in the abolitionist movement and his gift as a writer and orator.

Edugyan's latest novel, Washington Black, tells the story of a boy who escapes slavery and embarks on a voyage of scientific discovery. It has been shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.

Michael Arceneaux's new book, I Can't Date Jesus, is a collection of essays about his early years. Beyoncé, he says, taught him a valuable lesson: "Just be yourself and be very good at what you do."

Comic W. Kamau Bell talks about his new comedy special, searching his ancestry, and raising his bi-racial daughters in the Trump era.

Journalist Howard Bryant discusses the history of social protest among African-American athletes. His new book, The Heritage, traces the tradition back to Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali and others.

When I was a kid, my mom told me a story about her grandfather: That he got in trouble with some white men down south, and escaped lynching by running to Chicago. That he chose his new last name "Jones," because it was the most common name in the phone book. That, for years, he would sit in his chair facing the door, shotgun on his lap, waiting for them to come for him.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan has been reading some newly reprinted novels from the Harlem Renaissance. She says these novels about American racism hardly feel dated at all.

In 1957, three years after the Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional, Melba Pattillo Beals was one of nine black students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.

Jonathan Olshefski spent 10 years filming Christopher Rainey and his family, who run a recording studio in a working-class African-American section of North Philadelphia. Then their daughter was shot.

Mudbound follows two families — one white and one black — just before, during and after World War II. Rees says her experiences growing up in Nashville, Tenn., in the 1980s informed her new film.