Witness: Black History Month
Sunday, February 8 at 9 p.m.
A new special hour-long edition of Witness History from the BBC World Service, bringing together some incredible stories about the Black experience. Told by people who were there, we hear stories that are fascinating, harrowing, and inspiring.
Selected Shorts: Celebrating James Baldwin
Sunday, February 15 at 9 p.m.
Guest host LeVar Burton presents a program celebrating the author he calls “potent and polemical.” Christopher Jackson reads an excerpt from Baldwin’s famous letter The Fire Next Time: in “My Dungeon Shook,” he addresses internalized racism. Next, Anthony Rapp performs an excerpt from Giovanni’s Room, in which an ex-pat comes to terms with his sexuality and loneliness in Paris. And Baldwin contemplates The Great Migration in his novel Go Tell It On The Mountain. We hear an excerpt performed by Charlayne Woodard. Encore from 2021.
Whispers in Wilmington
Sunday, February 22 at 9 p.m.
We’re used to recognizing someone powerful with a statue. But what happens when there’s no statue or memorial to a traumatic event? Whoever lives with the impact of that painful history has to confront the kind of power it takes to keep it hidden for so long. In this episode, we uncover the story of the only successful coup d’etat ever to happen on American soil. This act of racial violence was designed to eliminate all memory of a highly successful Black community in Wilmington, North Carolina back in 1898. That suppression involved racist mobs, as well as historians, city planners, journalists and countless others. They conspired for decades to make a Black community’s onetime prosperity and strength unimaginable. Almost unimaginable.