Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men -- bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can...

A musical art form, the American Spiritual, was born out of the folk songs of slaves. Melodies of backbreaking work were hummed, sung, and passed on throughout the Deep South over fields of cotton, greens, cowpeas, yams, rice, peanuts, and okra. Sorrow songs were used to console and transmit secret information. With defiance, sorrow, and anger, the songs traveled, after being hummed in to the ear of the next arranger...Few of these spiritual treasure...

Insightful, irreverent, moving and unpredictable, this episode sets the record straight about what it's really like to go into prison and come out the other side.

Three world renowned masters tell of the blood and treachery of Capoeira in its early days after slavery. A young man gets off the ghetto streets of Salvador Brazil and redeems his life by teaching Capoeira to other troubled youths. In their stories the surprising history and essential truth of Capoeira as a modern self defense art form is revealed.

Working the Boat: Masters of the Craftis a six-part webisode hat captures the golden years of Local 1329 of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). Local 1329 was founded in Providence,.Rhode Island in 1933 by Manuel Q. Ledo, a Cape Verdean community leader. Featured in the webisode are museum-quality photographic portraits of the interviewees taken by Liane Brandon, award winning independent filmmaker and photographer.

Before World War Two, Poland’s 3.5 million Jews made the country the epicenter of the Jewish world. Today less than 20,000 Jews live there. Due to the Holocaust and ensuing Soviet era, Poland’s remaining Jews hid their identity from their children. With the fall of Communism in 1989 a young generation of Jews began learning their long-buried ancestry. The Return focuses on four women in their 20’s who face the unique challenge of trying to create...

Melvin Van Peebles will always be known as the man who not only changed the face of black cinema, but independent cinema forever, when he made his groundbreaking (and taboo breaking) film "Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song." But’s he’s always been a lot more than that, as a playwright, actor, author, stage performer, musician and who knows what else he’s done in his 80 years. And he’s likely not through yet...But how did a guy who grew up...

Since its origin in 1859, the song Dixie's Land has been woven into the fabric of American pop culture. Originally penned as a tune for blackface minstrel troupes, the song became the anthem of the confederacy during the Civil War. Adopted by segregationists during the civil rights movement, the song was protested by students during the 60's and 70's. The song has virtually vanished from college campuses throughout the United States, but younger artists,...

Cape Town 1967. Caucasian Christian Barnard transplants the first human heart, but behind him stood an unknown black man: Hamilton Naki

Mention the game Mah-Jongg to a woman who plays it and something very special happens. Her eyes light up, she smiles and may laugh, and then she begins to speak. Even someone at first shy or reluctant to speak suddenly come alive with impassioned stories of her life, and of the bonds that develop between the women who meet ritually every week, sometimes more, to play, to escape, and most importantly, to be together until all hours of the night. Ask...