Black History

Learn about the celebrated quilts made by a community of African American women in rural Alabama.

The Quilting Women of Gee’s Bend airs Monday, June 2 at 8 p.m. on WXXI-TV and streaming live on the WXXI’s app

explores how an isolated community of women in rural Alabama became respected worldwide as the creators of celebrated woven works of art. Established during enslavement, the nuanced quilting practice in Gee’s Bend was passed down from mothers to daughters for generations, surviving everything from reconstruction to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights Movement to the present day. A legacy woven by hand, the quilts have been embraced by the modern art world and featured in museums across the country, but little is known about the women who make them and the challenges they have faced.

Photo: Quilter Stella Mae Pettway
Credit: Gionatan Tecle, Seen & Held, LLC

Take a syncopated voyage through the history of funk music, spanning from African, soul, and early jazz roots, to its rise into the public consciousness.

Independent Lens “WE WANT THE FUNK!” airs Friday, January 2 at 9 p.m. and streaming live and on the PBS App & WXXI app (iOS & Android)

Featuring James Brown’s dynamism, the extraterrestrial funk of George Clinton’s Parliament Funkadelic, transformed girl group Labelle, and Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat. The story also traces funk’s influences on both new wave and hip-hop.

Retraces the life and legacy of an American civil rights pioneer who set more than 20 world records in speed cycling during the heart of Jim Crow America.

Major Taylor: Champion of the Race airs Monday, February 24, 2025 at 9 p.m. on WXXI-TV and streaming on the WXXI app.

In a word, I was a pioneer, and therefore had to blaze my own trail.” – Marshall “Major” Taylor. He earned nicknames that often equated to the most powerful forces in heaven and earth: The Cyclone. The Whirlwind. The Comet. He earned the respect of civil rights pioneer Booker T. Washington and shook the hand of President Theodore Roosevelt, who sought out the great champion to congratulate him. Marshall Walter “Major” Taylor was the world’s first Black sports superstar. Reporters simply called him “The Fastest Man in the World.”

By the time he was in his early 20s, Major Taylor had claimed victory in the world cycling championship, the American cycling crown, and had set dozens of world speed cycling records all while having to endure withering racial pressures.

Photo: Hazel Scott/ Credit: Everett

The story of Walter White and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

American Experience “Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP,” premiering Tuesday, February 25, 2025 at 9 p.m. on WXXI-TV and streaming on the WXXI app

 As the story is usually told, the civil rights movement began in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus. In fact, the stage had been set decades before, by activists of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who braved the appalling violence and oppression of the Jim Crow era. Some of their names are familiar: W.E.B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall. They all played prominent roles in the NAACP, the preeminent civil rights organization of the era. But Walter White — arguably the most influential Black man in mid-century America and the leader of the NAACP from 1929 to 1955 — has been all but forgotten. American Experience traces the life of this neglected civil rights hero and seeks to explain his disappearance from our history. 

Photo:Dr. Ralph Bunche (right) is greeted at the Dallas airport as he arrives to give address at the closing session of the 45th annual convention of the NAACP. At left is the Rev. Ernest C. Estell, Jr., pastor of the St. John Baptist Church in Dallas and chairman of the Dallas convention committee, and (center) Walter White, NAACP executive secretary, 1954. /Credit: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records