Black History Month will come alive for your listeners with compelling offerings that chronicle the African American experience — from L.A. Theatre Works.

A Raisin in the Sun – One of the great seminal works of American theatre, Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking play chronicles the Younger family on the south side of Chicago. Her compelling portrait of competing dreams earned Hansberry the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play at the age of 29. She became the youngest playwright and the first African-American to win that honor.
Starring Judyann Elder, Corey Hawkins, Deidire Henry, and Rutina Wesley (Tara in HBO’s True Blood).
Available: PRX, FTP (email for info)
Cost: PRX 590 points FTP – $60
Length: 01:57:58 (Can be played as two one-hour programs)

Unquestioned Integrity: The Hill-Thomas Hearings 20th Anniversary Special – (One-hour)”A national disgrace…a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves” as described by Clarence Thomas, or a public referendum on sexual harassment and other gender inequities in late twentieth-century America? Compiled from the official transcripts of the 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings.
Starring Edward Asner, Ella Joyce, and Paul Winfield
Available: PRX, FTP (email for info)
Cost: FREE
Length: 59:00

Also Available:

A Huey P. Newton Story – In this Obie Award-winning show by Roger Guenveur Smith, the life of the controversial Black Panther leader is brilliantly imagined through a series of improvisations based on Newton’s own words and writings.
Written, performed, and directed by Roger Guenveur Smith.
Available: PRX, FTP (email for info)
Cost: FREE
Length: 01:57:54 (Can be played as two one-hour programs)

Ruby McCollum – In 1952, in a small town in Florida, a wealthy African-American woman named Ruby McCollum shot and killed a respected white physician, ostensibly over a bill. Her true motives came to light during her murder trial, which made national headlines. The story is a true-life case, and the stuff of a Southern Gothic novel, complete with interracial romance, drug abuse, mental illness, and the racist attitudes of the Jim Crow South. Starring Paul Winfield and Loretta Devine
Available: PRX, FTP (email for info)
Cost: FREE
Length: 01:57:58 (Can be played as two one-hour programs)

Available for the one year anniversary of the Jan 25 – Feb 11 2011 uprising

In this new one-hour public radio show from Human Rights Watch and Hearing Voices, participants in the people’s revolution give first hand accounts of their historic 18 days in Tahrir Sqaure and discuss the challenges they face in a post-Mubarak Egypt.

Heba Morayef, Cairo-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, who filed regular iPhone-audio reports live from Tahir Square hosts this comprehesive collection of interviews, live music, and sound recorded at the protests. Listeners will hear labor union leaders, musicians, human rights workers, street cleaners, and social media activists.

COST: FREE
LENGTH: ONE HOUR
AVAILABLE: CONTENT DEPOT, PRX

Voices from Tahrir will air on Hearing Voices and The Story,
it is also available to any other stations that are interested in airing it.

Now Available on PRX and Content Depot
RESPONDING TO DISASTERS:From Prediction to Recovery

From re-creating tsunamis in the laboratory to tracking global pandemics, scientists and engineers around the country are seeking new insights into natural and man-made disasters. This one-hour special report looks at what researchers are doing to protect us from and help us survive these life-shattering events.

• Tracking Pandemics
• Tsunami in a Tank
• Disaster-proofing Communications
• An End to Cascading Catastrophe
• Emergency Improv
• New Radios for Collapsed Coal Mines
• Smart Bridges

“Responding to Disasters: From Prediction to Recovery” is part of the Engineers of the New Millennium Series, produced by IEEE Spectrum magazine and the National Science Foundation.

LENGTH: 1 Hour
COST: FREE
AVAILABLE: PRX, Content Depot,  Download (email for info)

Action Speaks! talks Reagan, Unions, & Labor

President Reagan’s firing of the Air Traffic controllers for refusing to return to work, introduced a battle with labor whose echo is still very much a part of our contemporary political discourse.
The Action Speaks! panel of experts look at how this moment was nested into the rise of Free Market Philosophy and how it resonates today in the contemporary conflicts in Ohio, Wisconsin and in many other states and municipalities.

Available: PRX, FTP (email for instructions)

1971 An American Family; Our First Reality TV Show
What’s Real, What’s Not? Does Anybody Care?

Watch An American Family: Introduction on PBS. See more from THIRTEEN Specials.

In 1970-71 a camera was rolling in the house of an upper middle class Santa Barbara family. What was revealed was not Leave it to Beaver. What was introduced was, well, unreal…or was it?
Available: PRX, FTP (email for instructions)

When Directors Alan and Susan Raymond put their cameras–and us–into the lives of an upper middle class white family from Santa Barbara in 1970-1971, California, the schisms in the American Family became readily apparent. What was revealed was not Leave it to Beaver. What was introduced was, well, unreal…or was it?

With panelists Susan and Alan Raymond, Brown Media Studies Professor Lynne Joyrich and Brown History Professor Robert Self, author of American Babylon, we will look at how TV changed through the popularity of An American Family.

With the current proliferation of ‘Reality TV’ and its ‘reality’ which often seems quite suspect, we will wonder what accounts for its popularity, whether or not An American Family can be seen as its direct ancestor and ask what it might be ‘preparing us for.’

Here is a chance to look more deeply at a subject that sits with us in our living rooms, brought to you by an American Family that allowed us to sit in theirs.

LISTEN to an EXCLUSIVE interview with the Parents from An American Family by the host of Action Speaks!
LISTEN HERE
Marc Levitt’s phone interview with Bill and Pat Loud, October 2011 (28,5 minutes)