In honor of Black History Month, KOSU is featuring several hours of special shows celebrating the history and experience of Black people every Sunday in February.
Sunday, February 6 at 3-4 p.m.
Witness: Black History Month from the BBC
A special hour-long edition of Witness History from the BBC World Service, bringing together some incredible interviews looking at the African-American experience. Told by people who were there, we hear stories that are fascinating, harrowing, and inspiring.
Segments include: The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, American new pioneer Dorothy Butler Gilliam, Nelson Mandela in Detroit, Nasa's pioneering black women, The "Godfather of Gospel Music" and what the Confederate flag represents in America's battle over race.
Sunday, February 13 at 3-4 p.m.
Selected Shorts: Celebrating Toni Morrison
Guest host Tayari Jones (New York Times bestselling author, most recently of the novel An American Marriage) helps us to celebrate Toni Morrison, the American master who died in 2019. Morrison's novels, including Beloved, Jazz and Song of Solomon, have become an indelible part of the American canon. Her fierce, poetic visions earned her the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was also an editor, advocate, teacher, and mother.
This program features her essay “A Knowing So Deep,” read by Jones; an excerpt from The Bluest Eye, read by Tony Award-winner Anika Noni Rose; an excerpt from Jazz, read by Emmy and Golden Globe winner S. Epatha Merkerson; “Sweetness,” read by NAACP Image Award winner Phylicia Rashad, and a tribute by Morrison’s close friend Fran Lebowitz.
Sunday, February 20 at 3-4 p.m.
Focus: Black Oklahoma
The monthly news and public affairs program Focus: Black Oklahoma focuses on topics relevant to Oklahomans across the Black diaspora. In the meantime, subscribe to the podcast and listen to past episodes.
Sunday, February 27 at 3-4 p.m.
The Black History of the Banjo
The Black History of the Banjo traces the history of this most American of instruments from its ancestors in West Africa through the Caribbean and American South and into the present, as a new generation of Black women artists reclaim the banjo as their own. Rhiannon Giddens, Bassekou Kouyate, Bela Fleck and more talk claw-hammers, trad jazz, Appalachian folk, African ancestors and the ongoing story of American music, which would be woefully incomplete without a Black history of the banjo.
NPR Celebrates Black History Month
NPR has compiled a list of stories, music performances, podcasts and other content that chronicles the Black American experience.
You can find all of that throughout February here.
NPR Music will feature performances and playlists by Black artists like El Debarge, Alexis Nelson, Catherine Russell, Too $hort, Patti Labelle, Kirk Franklin and Pastor Shirley Caesar.
