Emmy Award-winning Basic Black covers the African American experience in Boston and beyond for PBS’s largest station, WGBH. Since 1968 Basic Black (formerly Say Brother) has featured interviews with a who’s who of prominent local and national public figures, including Muhammad Ali, Halle Berry, Julian Bond, Cornel West, Maya Angelou, Louis Farrakhan, Bobby Seale, John McWhorter, Tavis Smiley, Anna Deavere Smith, Amiri Baraka, Melvin Van Peebles, Bill Cosby, Nikki Giovanni, and Jesse Jackson.
Beginning with its 42nd season Basic Black will debut a new format: starting on October 22 at 7:30 p.m., each episode will be a LIVE discussion about current events and how they impact people of color. The show will be available both on WGBH channel 2 in Boston, and simultaneously through a live stream at www.wgbh.org/basicblack. A live chat function will allow viewers to post real time commentary. The conversation will continue exclusively online after the broadcast.
The regular panelists will include:
Callie Crossley
An award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker, Crossley is a frequent commentator on NPR and WGBH’s Beat the Press. Producer of the Academy Award-nominated hour of the acclaimed documentary series "Eyes on the Prize," Callie has won nearly every top film and broadcast journalism prize, including a national Emmy, a Peabody, an Edward R. Murrow, and the Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia award (Gold Baton). A former producer for ABC's "20/20," she is currently Program Manager for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow, guest lecturing at colleges and universities about media, politics, and the intersection of race, gender and media. Callie also serves a judge for several major journalism awards and is a wine enthusiast and commentator who writes the blog "The Crushed Grape Report."
Latoyia Edwards
Edwards joined the NECN family as a morning reporter in 2005, arriving from WWLP-22 in Springfield, MA, where she had been a weekday anchor. A native of Boston's Dorchester neighborhood, Edwards graduated magna cum laude from Emerson College with a degree in Broadcast Journalism. She began her career as a news writer for WBZ-1030AM radio, and later reported for the Fox affiliate WICZ-TV 40 in Binghamton, NY. She first anchored television for MediaOne cable news network, while also reporting as the morning drive news anchor for WILD 1090AM. Additionally, Edwards has instructed courses for the Connecticut School of Broadcasting. In 2002, Edwards was crowned Miss Massachusetts in the USA pageant. She is married, and greatly enjoys volunteering with youth groups.
Peniel Joseph
A professor of history at Tufts University, Joseph is an expert on the Black Radical Tradition, Pan-Africanism, Black Social Movements, and African American feminism. He is currently embarking on a re-evaluation of the Black Power Movement. Joseph has published over a dozen articles and book chapters related to Black Power (and black radicalism in general) since earning his doctorate in American history at Temple University in 2000 and has been a prolific book reviewer, essayist, and commentator on issues related to African American social, political, intellectual, and cultural history. He is the author of Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America and The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era.
Kim McLarin
An accomplished author, McLarin has written three novels, including the recent book Jump At The Sun. She has also written nonfiction pieces for the New York Times and worked with Ilyasah Shabazz (daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz) on the book Growing Up X. As a journalist, McLarin has written for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Associated Press. She is currently a writer-in-residence at Emerson College.
Basic Black airs every Thursday at 7:30 p.m. and every Sunday at 12:30 p.m. on channel 2. Episodes are also available in streaming video at wgbh.org/basicblack and can be downloaded as audio or video podcasts at the same site or via iTunes.
The series producer for Basic Black and its companion web portal is Valerie Linson. Previous works by Linson include the documentary film “Inheritors of the Faith,” an episode of This Far By Faith: African American Spiritual Journeys, a Blackside, Inc. documentary mini-series that was broadcast nationally on PBS in June 2003. Linson has also been an associate producer on several PBS documentary series including On Our Own Terms: Death and Dying in America (with Bill Moyers); Free To Dance: African Americans in Modern Dance; and the documentary film Soldiers Without Swords: The Black Press. She received Emmy nominations for her research on Free to Dance (1999) and W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices (1995). Linson has also received Emmy nominations for several Basic Black programs.
(read less)Emmy Award-winning Basic Black covers the African American experience in Boston and beyond for PBS’s largest station, WGBH. Since 1968 Basic Black (formerly Say Brother) has featured interviews with a who’s who of prominent local and national public figures, including Muhammad Ali, Halle Berry, Julian Bond, Cornel West, Maya Angelou, Louis Farrakhan, Bobby Seale, John McWhorter, Tavis Smiley, Anna Deavere Smith, Amiri Baraka, Melvin Van Peebles, Bill Cosby, Nikki Giovanni, and Jesse Jackson....
(read more)
