Black History Month 2020: Special Radio Programs
Special programs for Black History Month 2020
This February, NWPB celebrates achievements by African Americans and recognize their central role in U.S. history with four special programs, airing Fridays at 7 PM on the NPR news service.
February 7: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Path To Nonviolence
Martin Luther King Jr.’s journey to a philosophy of nonviolence and his lasting legacy as a peace proponent is recalled in archive interviews with his daughter, the late Yolanda King, and one of King’s top colleagues in the civil rights movement, Dr. Dorothy Cotton.
February 14: Audrey and Frank Peterman
On a 10-week tour of 16 national parks in 1995, Frank and Audrey Peterman were awed by the beauty of America but saw only two other African-Americans. After discovering that many blacks felt no connection with the parks, the Petermans started a program to encourage black Americans to visit the nation’s parks and other public lands.
Alfre Woodard hosts “Can Do: Stories of Black Visionaries, Seekers, and Entrepreneurs”
February 21: Can Do: Stories of Black Visionaries, Seekers, and Entrepreneurs
Stories come from The Kitchen Sisters collection — stories of black pioneers, self-made men and self-taught women, neighborhood heroes and visionaries. People who said “yes we can” – and then did. Hosted by Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winner Alfre Woodard.
February 28: Re:Defining Black History
Black History Month frequently highlight the battles won for Civil Rights, Martin Luther King Jr. and the horrors of slavery. This program zeroes in some of alternate narratives – a more complicated understanding of the impact of the Civil Rights Act of ’64 on Jackson, Mississippi; a city in Oklahoma still trying to figure out how to tell the history of one particular race riot; and one woman’s wrangling with her own personal racial history.
