in terms of generationally did not prepare us for the work that needs to happen today. that s the critique i was making about trading on individual success without a sense of social responsibility. who are your parents? my parents are both retired professionals. one was a school teacher and administrator of the chicago public schools for 35 years and my father recently retired was photojournalist. he worked for johnson johnson publishing in the early days, charlotte observer, news day, for past 20 years, new york times staff photographer. are they retired from new york. my mother always lived in chicago. my parent were divorced when i was young. my father lived in new york for over 30 years. what is your lineage? the famous part of my lineage, the part i know as opposed to distantly, i m great-grandson of the founder of elijah mohammed founder of nation of islam. my mother never converted but very much formative to my early years my first cousins aunts and unc
it positioned a black family is traditional. they brought you inside a nuclear black family in a way that was pathology is our caricatured in american literature and popular culture but also did not show in the difficulties in dealing with the challenges of stigma inequality command race in general. continuing the tour. this is a kind of interesting story. currently as i mentioned a part of the collection includes amazing fine art and represents the can of like raise. aa year and a half ago from the bronx reached out to the curator and said i want to give the schaumburg. come check it out. this was purchased by the gentleman father in1941 with the original bill of sale for $125 still on the back of this panel. whatwhat makes it even more interesting is this panel was done during the same year as the great migration series. this series is now exhibition in collaboration with the philips. new york. all 60 panels come together. jacob lawrence himself here s the thing, not o
the u.s. information agency that was part of our show we say cold war apparatus? [laughter] and surveying post-colonial nations and keeping an eye on things so this is a benign side of the cia published topic magazine and richard tsongas was a photographer here taking a picture of james brown and legos nigeria in 1970. he has an expansive body of work and we have the entire collections of the images here are they meet the description of the show which is lesser-known images across the continent starting from pittsburgh to nigeria. it s a pretty the show. there also images of malcolm x for malcolm x for example or elijah mohammad as a rarely seen in terms of what people would find on a google search for example. let s see that elijah mohammad photo down here. this is elijah mohammad at the end, correct? right here, big as life and there is malcolm x. this is a 1961 shot in washington d.c. with a church of god figure. debating the merits of islam. host: do you think we co
african-american history is how bad it is. so the history piece is one thing, but also even in this moment. that s how i started off right? in this moment it s all a about how we are diagnose, right? slow death dying right? at what point do i have any agency to do anything you know, there s a distinction in the world between optimists and pessimists. turns out that optimists get things done. optimists succeed. it turns out that pessimists are right about the world. right. [laughter] right right right right. and i just want to, i want to introduce a term. this is not an academic term, but it s a term that i got from some of the black women that i worked with in detroit who were around 16 years old. and they said there s a difference between a struggle, the struggle and struggley with an ly, and they say a struggle is what we go through as human beings on this planet. the struggle they define as specific to the african-american experience in this country. and they s
that collection arrived at the 135th street public library 90 years ago. he was a bibliophile who migrated from puerto rico in 1891 found a job on wall street work in the mailroom saves his pennies and worked really hard and bought anywhere are unique but he could find that was by or about black people. he eventually became famous for this collection. people would go to his home in brooklyn to see the library to borrow from the library people like langston hughes and eventually people like and when the librarian at the library and library decided she had a lot of lack patrons coming to the library and a large immigrant community at the time she said i ve got to find material for my patrons and ultimately schomberg s collection of 5000 items was purchased by carnegie corporation and a variety of 90 years ago and made up the core of what now today is a 10 million item collection at the schomberg center. host: how did the schomberg center end up at 135th? guest: this was