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Ask Nichelle Gainer why she decided to create Vintage Black Glamour, and her answer is simple: She saw a need.

As a writer, Gainer learned to research, which often led to beautiful historic photographs of African-American artists, actors and political figures, all hidden away in the corners and file cabinets of libraries and academic institutions. Why haven’t more people seen these? she wondered. Out of that question, Vintage Black Glamour was born.

“African-Americans who have an interest in American history that includes black people almost have to become amateur detectives and part-time scholars to track down information and that is ridiculous,” she said from her home in New York City.

Gainer, 44, created Vintage Black Glamour on Tumblr in 2011. She put up photos of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on a 1967 vacation in Jamaica, where he wrote his final book, “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” She unearthed a rare full-color portrait of Zora Neale Hurston from 1940. She reminded readers that Renauld White graced the cover of GQ in 1979, the first African-American man to accomplish that feat.

For Gainer, who attended the creative writing program at New York University, the project is pure “edutainment.” The history buff likes to add context wherever it is available, providing a mini history lesson to match the photos. She has been working with a new imprint, Rocket 88, to bring out a text version this spring.

Gainer said Vintage Black Glamour has a deeper meaning than simple nostalgia over beautiful dresses and sharp suits.

“How we looked and how we put ourselves together…a lot of it was self-preservation and representing an image of how black men and women were,” Gainer explained in a recent interview. “Most vintage photos of African-Americans that get wide exposure tend to be very sober, and even sad.”

These days, Vintage Black Glamour has more than 215,000 fans on Facebook, a popularity that doesn’t surprise its creator.

“People write comments on my social media channels all the time saying things like, ‘I’ve never seen this photo before!’ or ‘I’ve never even heard of this person!'” Gainer said. “And then they go on to talk about what has been left out of the classroom and history books over the years and how that shapes perceptions of African-Americans. But black history is American history — it’s one of my mantras!”


Washington Post
reporter Wil Haygood stood in the pulpit at the Amasa Stone Chapel on the Case Western Reserve University campus, thanking university President Barbara Snyder for an impressive introduction and riffing on whether he was a strong enough high school student in Columbus, Ohio, to have been admitted to the Cleveland research institution.

He doubted it. “I graduated ‘summa cum lucky,’ he riffed.
All joking aside, Haygood’s intellect and credentials are what carried him to the university to deliver its keynote at the annual Martin Luther King Jr convocation. For more than 20 years, Haygood has covered some defining moments across the globe. As an international correspondent for the Boston Globe and Washington Post, he was captured by rebels in Somalia while covering its civil war and stood outside the South African prison when Nelson Mandela was released. He spent 33 straight days on the ground in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And the 2011 Guggenheim fellow delivered his keynote without a single note.
Haygood indicated that his most important assignment might well have been his discovery and coverage of one man, Eugene Allen, a retired White House butler who served eight presidents over his 34 years.

In 2008, Haygood was reporting on then-Senator Barack Obama when a North Carolina campaign stop gave Haygood a strong sense that Obama would win. Reflecting on the historical significance of the first African-American president, he asked for time off the campaign trail to find a White House staffer who served dduring the civil rights movement, for whom the election would have special meaning. With his editor’s limited blessing (he gave Haygood two weeks), he started searching, and took a phone call from a woman who said that a fellow named Eugene Allen would fit the bill.  Haygood called 55 “Eugene Allens” listed in the Washington, D.C. phone book. He struck gold on the 56th call.

Their initial meeting convinced Haygood this Eugene Allen personified the piece of history he had been looking for. As the conversation progressed, Allen invited Haygood into the basement of his quiet D.C. home. As he flicked on the light, Haygood was struck by the testimony of objects: watercolors painted for Allen by Dwight Eisenhower, a tie clip from John Kennedy and framed photographs of the butler with each American president.

“Have you ever told your story before? Has anyone ever written about you?” Haygood asked.
“If you think I’m worthy, you’d be the first,” Eugene replied.
Haygood’s journalistic instincts led to a front-page story, “A Butler Well Served By This Election,” published three days after the 2008 election. It quickly got Hollywood’s attention. The Weinstein Company bought the rights to the story and cast Oscar winner Forest Whitaker to portray Cecil Gaines, the fictional character loosely based on Allen. While the movie went into production, Haygood turned to a book version, “The Butler: A Witness to History,” filling in the dignity and details.
Haygood and Allen were VIP guests on that cold January day that Barack Obama was sworn in as the nation’s 44th president. “You never dreamed that you could dream of this moment,” Haygood recalls Allen saying. “He said ‘dream’ twice – that’s how unbelievable it was.”
Allen died in 2010 at 90. President Obama released a statement read at the funeral, thanking him for his years of service and citing Allen’s life as important piece to American history.

After his 1986 retirement, Allen himself reflected upon his White House years as part of a Smithsonian project on White House staff.

“If I had to do it all over again, I think I’d do the same thing,” Allen said. “After all, there were many things that I never would have seen in life…I’ve seen every leader in the world—kings, queens, prime ministers. I was loyal to the White House, I loved it. After so many years, it was just a part of me.”

Late last year, the New York State Museum in Albany received an ordinary package – reel-to-reel tapes donated by the late Enoch Squires, a radio technician. As staff worked their way through the items, one tape jumped out. It was labeled “Martin Luther King Sept. 12, ’62.” This bequest is the only known recording of King’s speech on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, delivered at the Park-Sheraton Hotel in New York City.  

This 26-minute speech featured a more measured cadence than his “I Have A Dream” speech, but the similarities emphasize King’s discontent with the slow march to justice. He diagnosed U.S. race relations as a “pathological infection” that has hampered the social health of all citizens. King drew upon the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation to reflect on the promises of equality America had not yet kept to African-Americans. 

“We do not have as much time as the cautious and the patient try to give us,” King said. “We are not only living in a time of cataclysmic change – we live in an era in which human rights is a central world issue. The shape of the world today does not afford us the luxury of an anemic democracy.” 

Less than a year later, King and John Lewis (also an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner), Bayard Rustin and three other leaders organized the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, propelling the civil rights movement into primetime and solidifying its place in history. 

Watch here the combined audio and visual here:  

 

When Robert Runcie became the new superintendent for Broward County schools, a populous part of metropolitan Miami, Fla., he knew the rising tide of student arrests needed reversing.

In 2010 and 2011, police made more than 1,000 arrests at his schools, and nearly 70 percent were for non-violent misdemeanors – such as truancy or smoking. These arrests disproportionately affected his African-American and Latino students. Even though students of color were 40 percent of the student body, they accounted for 71 percent of arrests.

A coalition of concerned citizens, community leaders and elected officials pushed for a new policy that would reduce the number of students with criminal records. The new initiative, started at the beginning of the 2013-2014 school year, redirects students to counseling and support services instead of reporting minor infractions to the police.

This initiative lines up with a policy shift advocated by the U.S. Justice Department. “A routine school disciplinary infraction should land a student in the principal’s office, not in a police precinct,” said Attorney General Eric Holder.

Both the Justice Department and the U.S. Department of Education released guidelines in early January asking districts to institute fairer policies, noting that “racial discrimination in school discipline is a real problem.” The guidelines suggest eliminating out-of-school suspensions, providing conflict resolution training for teachers, and collecting data on infractions to monitor any potential discrimination.

The new policy is considered a correction to “zero tolerance” policies that spread in the early 1990s.  Zero tolerance forced school administrators to call the police whatever happened, stripping school staff of discretion and case-by-case judgment.  Under zero tolerance policies, students of color are three times more likely to face suspensions or expulsion than white students. Responding to this data, the ACLU and the NAACP have pressed for better, fairer approaches to school discipline.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan stressed schools can be safe and orderly and “keep students in class where they can learn.”

Affordable classes on African-American topics for anyone who wants to take them — that’s the gist of Professor Zachery Williams’ vision.

Beginning in February, residents in Northeast Ohio will have the opportunity to take classes in spaces around the region as part of his CommUniversity, a grassroots effort to provide low-cost African-American history courses to the general public. Community organizations like the National Institute for Restorative Justice have signed on to lend their meeting spaces for classrooms, and professors from local colleges, as well as community members, have been invited to teach.

For Williams, an tenured professor of African-American history at the University of Akron, this is a project years in the making. Williams, 39, grew up in South Carolina, and ventured north for his doctorate at Bowling Green State University, where he studied W.E.B. DuBois’ origins as a black intellectual. His research culminated in his first book, In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926-1970. While at Bowling Green, Williams and his colleagues formed the Africana Cultures and Policy Studies Institute, a think tank that applied African-American studies to long-standing social problems. It was, in essence, the incubator of CommUniversity.

“Too many people for far too long have been left to the margins,” Williams explains. “There’s this view that it’s us versus them. That’s the value of adult education. It’s proof that every day people can create something magnificent. ”

The model of a “community university” has existed in some forms for decades, Williams concedes, but he breaks new ground in two ways: His project is independently funded and he is focusing the courses. He’s particularly interested in the intersection of race and public policy and getting out of the “ivory tower” to find promising solutions.

“We’ve been grappling with income inequality, mass incarceration, and public housing for quite some time, so where these are viable solutions?” he said. “There’s a consensus that everyday people don’t know what’s best for them, but experiences matter in solving issues.”

Williams believes the answer to some of these pressing issues may germinate in a future CommUniversity classroom.

His current fund-raising continues until the end of January. More information at ScholarGifts.com.

Unlike most of us, illustrator Lisa Congdon kept her 2013 resolution, for the entire year. We—and the internet—are better for it. 

In late 2012, Congdon, who lives and draws in Oakland, Calif., decided with writer Maria Popova (a Bulgarian living in Brooklyn, N.Y) to celebrate an influential woman each week in 2013. They titled the resulting collaboration, The Reconstructionists, and set up a Tumblr page to house their work: a new portrait and short essay on each of their subjects went live every Monday. 

“We didn’t intend for this to be inclusive of all noteworthy women or even the top 52,” Congdon said. “That would have been impossible. We didn’t come close to featuring all the women we wanted to, but we are hoping we exposed people to women they might not have known about otherwise.” 

The duo highlighted Margaret Bonds, the gifted black composer and pianist who was the first woman of color to perform with the Chicago Symphony. They featured blues singer Billie Holiday, NASA pioneer Sally Ride, and competitive swimmer Dana Nyad. 

Congdon doesn’t plan to continue, though there is interest in turning the project into a physical book. For now, though, “it lives on the internet where people can learn from and enjoy it for a long time at no cost,” she said. “And that feels like a good thing to us.” 

View some of our favorites from the collection below: 

 

Two years ago, writers Toby Barlow and Sarah Cox got together to discuss Detroit.

Negative headlines pounded the city’s reputation, but the duo knew there was more to Detroit than foreclosures and shuttered factories. Barlow proposed creating a writer’s residency within the city, but Detroit didn’t need temporary residents—it needed permanent ones. A September estimate put the number of vacant homes at 78,000, or one-fifth of the housing stock.

“We wanted more intelligent, interesting writing about Detroit,” Cox said. “So we looked at how we could make that happen.”

A group of Detroit writers and activists formed the organization Write A House. The mission was to rehab some of the city’s vacant homes and give them away, for free, to writers.

The board members pooled their money to buy two homes. A third home was donated to the group. They formed a mutually beneficial partnership with Detroit Young Builders, a vocational training program for city youth. The construction team would provide the labor to rehab the homes. Write A House launched its IndieGogo campaign this week to raise $25,000 to finance the renovation.

Applications for the residences will be available in spring 2014, hoping to select writers who are committed to Detroit for the long haul. “We want people to know what they’re getting into,” Cox said. “You’re living in Detroit and you need to be comfortable with that.”

The judges include former National Poet Laureate Billy Collins, poet Major Jackson, and writer and activist Dream Hampton. Writers don’t need to be Detroiters to apply. The winners will live in the house rent-free for the first two years and will be responsible for paying insurance and property taxes. After that, the writer will receive the deed to the house, free and clear.

Write A House also stipulates that the winners participate in Detroit’s literacy scene, but will let those individual decide how. “They could host a reading series or tutor kids,” Cox explained. “We’ll leave it up to them. We want someone who feels like they’re part of the community.”

When the Grambling State University football team refused to play this October, the eyes of collegiate sports turned to Louisiana and focused on a long-simmering problem at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs): underfunding.

Marybeth Gasman, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Minority-Serving Institutions, said in a recent op-ed that solving HBCU’s budgetary woes starts at the top. “Alumni need to be taught how to give and how to be philanthropic,” she wrote. “And this lesson must begin when alumni are students, during the first week of classes, and it needs to come directly from the president.”

One individual who has gotten the memo is Bennett College President Dr. Rosalind Fuse-Hall, who took the helm of her small liberal arts college in Greensboro, N.C., six months ago. She is continuing its momentum and is maintaining an impressive 20% annual contribution rate from graduates, beating out much larger and better known HBUCs such as Howard University.

Bennett College’s model is simple: touting the school’s strengths and aggressively soliciting donors. It isn’t as revolutionary as it is crucial. Funding for HBCUs has declined, while the day-to-day costs to run a university have soared, leading administrators to pursue to alumni giving more aggressively.

Nelson Bowman III, head of development for Texas’ Prairie View A&M University, is taking a different tact. In 2012, his HBCU rolled out a giving campaign for currently enrolled students with inspiring results—60% of freshmen pledged a gift.

“The potential has probably always been there,” Bowman wrote, “but we’ve only viewed them as students, overlooking their innate passion and willingness to engage.”

As the year concludes with a flurry of fund-raising appeals, some HBCUs have improved their pitches and upped their game. Much more than football is at stake.

The 2010 Census figures tallied Harlem’s black population at its lowest since the 1920s. Such broad demographic changes have left some New Yorkers, like Jacob Morris of the Harlem Historical Society, concerned about the neighborhood’s future.

“Harlem was the capital of black America,” Morris said. “But as demographics change, a city loses awareness of its history. I wanted to do something about it, before the composition of the community changed so much that they didn’t care anymore.”

Naming streets after prominent African-Americans connected to Harlem became a galvanizing idea. Morris pursued the first street co-naming in 2005; two years later, he succeeded. Frederick Douglass Landing was christened on Chambers Street in Manhattan, which commemorated the place Douglass landed in 1838, as a 20-year-old escaping from slavery, on his third try.

Since 2007, the Harlem Historical Society has helped almost 30 luminaries take their place on street signs all over the neighborhood—including (Anisfield-Wolf winner) Zora Neale Hurston Place and (Supreme Court Justice) Thurgood Marshall Place.

Morris is especially proud of the women the society has rallied to recognize, including civil rights activist Ella Baker, who helped launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. “If there was a Mount Rushmore for the civil rights movement, Ella Baker would be on it,” he said.

The latest push is to honor James Baldwin. Morris said he and Herb Boyd, who wrote Baldwin’s Harlem, came up with the idea four years ago to honor James Baldwin, but needed to pinpoint an appropriate location. They chose W. 128th between Fifth and Madison Aves., the site of Baldwin’s elementary school. Because young Baldwin had a transient childhood, “the real continuity in young James’ life was the school,” Morris explained.

Baldwin’s nephew, Trevor Baldwin, joined the campaign, and the resolution passed the city’s traffic and transportation committee this month, with official news coming in early 2014.

African-American tech insiders will talk about their work stories in a new series on National Public Radio’s Tell Me More.

From Dec. 2 until Dec. 20, Twitter users can follow the #NPRBlacksInTech hashtag to follow a day-in-the-life of these “tech thinkers.” Michel Martin, host of Tell Me More, expects this feature will broaden the conversation about who staffs the tech revolution.

“‘A Day in the Life’ allows us to experience in real time the imprint that African-Americans are making on our country’s STEM engine,” Martin said. “The series throws open the door to the worlds of these highly important, but largely invisible, individuals.”

Anjuan Simmons, who this year published the book “Minority Tech,” said he jumped at the chance to give others a glimpse of his work as a software project manager. (He will be live-tweeting his day December 6.)

“We are at a potential inflection point in getting people of color into technology,” Simmons said. “After being left out of past revolutions, the technology revolution needs to be the most inclusive jump in human potential and productivity that we’ve seen in this country.”

Poet Joshua Bennett adjusted the mic stand at Kent State University. “I was raised Baptist,” he warned the audience in Oscar Ritchie Hall. “I need energy from you. I’m open to any and all forms of enthusiasm.”

Dressed in dark skinny jeans, a cranberry sweater vest and Oxford shirt, Bennett steadied himself and spoke of his recent discovery of Lucille Clifton’s poetry. Using the last stanza of Clifton’s “Won’t You Celebrate With Me,” he began his poem, “Say it, Sing it, as the Spirit Leads,” written in the aftermath of the George Zimmerman verdict: “Come, celebrate with me. Every day something has tried to kill me and failed.”

A special guest of KSU’s Wick Poetry Center, the man from Yonkers, N.Y. has entered the national conversation during the past three years, driven in part by his viral poem, 2010’s “10 Things I Want To Say To A Black Woman.” A magna cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Bennett has performed at the NAACP Image Awards, the Kennedy Center, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. He is currently a doctoral candidate at Princeton University.

Bennett said he didn’t begin to explore poetry until he was 17, when a friend invited him to a spoken word event. “Afterward, I bought a CD and a T-shirt, took a couple workshops, and my life changed,” he said. “I was a hip-hop kid before I started with poetry.”

Now in his early 20s, that hip-hop influence still saturates both his content and his delivery. Through his 45-minute set, he veered from racial politics, to love discoveries, to questions of identity, sometimes within the same piece. He wants his poetry, he said, to help eradicate shame.

Bennett has three siblings, each with a disability: his older sister is deaf, his older brother is schizophrenic and his younger brother is autistic. “For Levi,” his tribute to his younger brother with autism, ends with:

Tell them Levi is just shorthand for levitate.

That your calling is to the clouds

and you would pay them a lot more attention

but you are simply too busy having a conversation with God right now.

Then smile for them. Smile big. Smile pretty.

A woman in the audience told Bennett that hearing him speak inspired her to take her poetry more seriously. Bennett looked humbled and then offered her a word of advice. “Poems should be archeology,” Bennett said. “Write the things that cost you. Every poem has to cost you something if it’s going to be good.”

Watch Joshua Bennett perform “Plankton,” a love poem

When Whoopi Goldberg made plans to revive her one-woman Broadway show on Moms Mabley, she ran into a problem: few people  remembered the comedy pioneer, who died in 1975.

Goldberg shelved the show and switched to making a documentary on Mabley and her place in American culture. “She loved to tell stories,” Goldberg told ABC’s Good Morning America. “There’s something about Moms, in finding that she had such a large part in civil rights, that she was the first female stand-up, and how funny she was—the jokes stand up to today.”

Born Loretta Mary Aikin in the Brevard N.C., of 1894, she was one of 16 children.  Loretta ran away to Cleveland at age 14, joined a traveling minstrel show, and came out as a lesbian at age 27. She became one of the most successful performers on the Chitlin’ Circuit, earning $10,000 a week at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem at the height of her popularity.

Goldberg ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund the documentary, which premiers on HBO tonight at 8 p.m. Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, and Joan Rivers lent their time and talent to this project, to help rescue Mabley from the margins of cultural memory.

Despite 50 years on stage, few recordings of the comedian exist, partly because African-American acts often went undocumented through most of the 20th century.  Goldberg and her production crew fill the void with animated re-creations of Mabley’s creative genius. Her material was often blue, as Cosby notes, but she cracked the mainstream during the 1960s, when she performed at Carnegie Hall and on television for “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Smothers Brothers.”

Mabley’s racy jokes and biting punchlines cut to the racial tensions of the era. “I wanted this to be a reminder of what we fought for, how we did it, the various ways people used their artistry to say, hey, we’re going to make a change,” Goldberg said.

Goldberg’s directorial debut airs tonight. Watch this brief snippet below:

“We have all won the lottery of life,” Sheryl WuDunn said she criss-crossed the stage during her recent appearance at Kent State University’s presidental speakers series. Her husband and co-presenter, Nicholas Kristof, sat off to the side and nodded in agreement. “Once you have most of your material needs met, as most of us sitting here have, there are few things that actually elevate your level of happiness, and one of those things is contributing to a cause larger than yourself.”

Co-authors of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, WuDunn and Kristof are a powerhouse couple. The pair won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for their coverage of China’s Tiananmen Square protests; Kristof went on to win an individual Pulitzer in 2006 for his Dafur genocide coverage as a New York Times columnist. The first Asian-American to win a Pulitzer Prize, WuDunn currently serves as a senior managing director at Mid-Market Securities, a boutique investment firm.

WuDunn and Kristof lived in Beijing in the early 1990s and were struck by the degree to which inequalities were targeted at girls. While there, they traveled to a small, rural village and met DiMon Ju, a bright sixth-grader forced to stay home from school because her family could not afford the $13 annual tuition.

Kristof wrote about Ju’s plight and the implications for hundreds of thousands girls just like her in his column. Soon after, letters from readers poured in, many containing $13 checks.

And then, there was one wire transfer of $10,000. Hurriedly, Kristof and WuDunn set up a fund to keep thousands of girls in school. It wasn’t until they called the donor to thank him for his generosity that they learned there had been a mistake: the donor only sent $100. A banking error was the source of the misunderstanding. Kristof quickly secured a donation of the difference from the bank’s president.

That village and the surrounding communities, Kristof noted, have improved drastically since the 1990s, but that particular village that received donations has seen the most progress, a feat Kristof credits to the increased education of girls and women. “The central moral challenge of the world is the oppression of women and girls worldwide,” Kristof said. “Gender discrimination is lethal.”

Kristof and WuDunn exposed the crowd to the horrors of human trafficking—girls as young as toddlers being kidnapped and sold to brothels, where they have no say over the sexual acts they are forced to perform on often violent customers. The couple urged the Kent State community to join the fight for women’s rights.

“I bought two Cambodian girls from a brothel,” Kristof said. “I bought one for $150 and the other was a little over $200. I got receipts. When you get a receipt for buying another human being in the 21st century, something is profoundly wrong.”

Marvel Comics, home to some of the world’s most recognizable superheroes, has widened diversity among its trademark characters with the announcement of its newest superhero — Kamala Khan, a Muslim-American Jersey teen with shape-shifting abilities.

Khan will make her debut in early 2014. Khan’s fascination with Marvel superhero Carol Danvers leads her to adopt the same secret identity: Ms. Marvel.

Editor Sana Amanat used her own American coming-of-age as the basis of the new series. “We strive to show the diverse world that exists out of our window,” she said. “[The series is] to show that outsiders don’t exist — we’re all insiders.”

Axel Alonso, Marvel’s editor-in-chief, called the addition a sign of the times. “The Marvel universe is best when it reflects the diversity of the world around it, but sculpts a narrative that is universal,” he said of the world’s largest comic book publisher.

Rula Jebreal, a foreign-policy analyst for MSNBC, praised Marvel Comic’s decision to cast a Muslim girl as a hero in a post 9/11 world. “Marvel’s work is a watershed moment in breaking down fear and ignorance, and creating greater awareness and familiarity,” she wrote on The Daily Beast.

This isn’t the first time Marvel has flipped the script — in 2011 they introduced Miles Morales, a biracial teen who takes on Spiderman’s identity after Peter Parker dies. The update garnered mixed results. Spider-Man creator Stan Lee praised the story line, and others thought Morales was a great role model for young men of color, but sales were modest.

Culture-watchers will have a sense of Khan’s popularity after her series begins February 6.

Fresh off the paperback release of his newest work, This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz swung by Cleveland State University in October for its Cultural Crossings seminar. We caught up with our 2008 fiction winner for his reflections on winning an Anisfield-Wolf award. “It puts you in remarkably excellent company,” Diaz said, and we couldn’t agree more. 

2008 Winner Junot Diaz Speaks On Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards from Anisfield Wolf on Vimeo.

At the conclusion of this year’s ceremony, a number of Nigerians in attendance approached our lifetime achievement winner Wole Soyinka, for a chance to get close to the man they admired. A few bowed in his presence. He returned their kindness, speaking with a few before being whisked away to the book signing. We spoke with Soyinka to hear his thoughts on being honored for a lifetime of work and what it means to get that type of reception at this point in his career:  

2013 Lifetime Achievement Winner Wole Soyinka from Anisfield Wolf on Vimeo.

A. Van Jordan made an October appearance at Market Garden Brewery’s Brews & Prose event, sharing snippets from his latest work, “The Cineaste,” in front of a packed crowd. We caught up with the Akron native for a brief chat on the personal significance of winning the 2005 Anisfield-Wolf award:  

Eugene Gloria‘s My Favorite Warlord earned praise from the Anisfield-Wolf jury for his “vivid and striking” work examining masculinity, identity, and heritage. His 2012 collection of poetry helped him snag his latest literary prize, the 2013 Anisfield-Wolf award for poetry. Prior to this year’s ceremony, we talked to Gloria about what winning the award meant to him and where he sees his career headed next. 

Eugene Gloria On Winning A 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Award For Poetry from Anisfield Wolf on Vimeo.

If you follow Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Twitter or Facebook, you are probably already privy to the bevy of heavy hitters he has recruited for his new PBS series, “The African Americans: Many Rivers To Cross,” premiering Oct 21. The six-part documentary features names as varied as the Black Panther Party’s Kathleen Cleaver to Roots’ drummer Questlove. Gates has mentioned that he is particularly proud of procuring the insights of General Colin Powell.

The chair of the Anisfield-Wolf book awards serves executive producer, host and writer for the series, using his unparalleled knowledge of African-American history (and access to some of the nation’s foremost historians) to flesh out what most history books only skim. The series aspires to document the entire 500-year history of African-Americans, from the beginnings of the slave trade to the present-day occupant of the White House.

In a recent interview, Gates said this series was 40 years in the making. His inspiration for “The African Americans” was the 1968 program, “Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed,” hosted by Bill Cosby, a seven-part look at the unheralded contributions of blacks in film, science and other endeavors. Gates’ series is a deeper dive into narratives much enhanced by leading historians, including former Anisfield-Wolf winners Ira Berlin, David Eltis and Annette Gordon Reed.

After the premiere on October 21, a new hour-long episode will air each Tuesday until the finale on November 26. Join us on Twitter as we tweet with Gates during each episode, using the hashtag #ManyRiversPBS. Catch a peek at the first episode with this two-minute video on a slave girl simply known as Priscilla: 

As guests began to trickle in to the Ohio Theater at Playhouse Square, an older woman surveyed the crowd and winked at me. “Good—not everyone here has gray hair,” she said.

I was on hand to see Stephen L. Carter, the third author to come to Cleveland for the Writers Center Stage series, sponsored by the Cuyahoga County Public Library and Case Western Reserve University. My father introduced me to his work by keeping his nose in a well-worn copy of The Emperor of Ocean Park, winner of a 2003 Anisfield-Wolf award for fiction.

The Yale law professor, 58, warmed up the crowd with a few quips about football, poking fun of his favorite team, whose name “no one says any more.”

A graduate of both Yale and Stanford, Carter began his career as a law clerk for Judge Spottswood W. Robinson, III, of the United States Court of Appeals, and then to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court of the United States. His relationship with Marshall taught him valuable lessons, one of which is “being strategic in which battles you’re willing to fight,” he said. He spoke at length of his reverence for the justice, who, Carter recalled, was able to praise the opposition in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, which Marshall served as lead counsel.

Transitioning from law to a career as a writer wasn’t difficult, Carter told the crowd of almost 500. “All lawyers do is somewhat fiction,” he quipped, drawing a laugh from the crowd. However, he did acknowledge his lawyer training taught him to anticipate the “What ifs,” which translates to skillfully keeping the reader surprised at the plot twists in his novels.

Crafting his most recent novel, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln, which explores what might have happened if Lincoln survived the assassination attempt, took months of deep digging. “I like to get my facts right. I used photos, maps, personal diaries…anything I could. I wanted to capture an authentic D.C.” He called the process of writing novels “emotional agony,” but enjoyed the satisfaction from completing them.

During the Q&A portion of the evening, an audience member alluded to the government stalemate in Washington and asked what, if anything, voters could do to improve civility at the federal level. “Civility will come to politics when people decide it’s more important than the outcome,” he responded. “Politics ought to appeal to the best in us and hardly ever does. The best thing we can do is have a greater involvement in local politics, where our votes really matter.”