African-Americans in Sports.

Dr. Thabiti Lewis, author of Ballers of the new school : race and sports in America, will share insights into the realities of race in sport culture. Ballers of the New School is one of the first and best books to come along that effectively explains contemporary athletes and the public response to them. It challenges the well-worn narrative of sport as America's most significant site of racial progress by scrutinizing the true role of sport in mobilizing and shaping definitions, social relations, and public life. American sport culture performs and propagates rituals, symbols, and expressions of fear and difference that sustain racism, and notions of racial supremacy and block bridges to racial progress.

Dr. Lewis is the guest speaker at the opening of "Pride and Passion: The African-American Baseball Experience." This travelling exhibit, presented by Multnomah County Library, tells the story of black baseball players over the past century and a half. The exhibition also looks at the origins of the sport and the history of baseball and race relations in Oregon.

http://www.multcolib.org/events/baseball

 Hosts Patricia Welch, Emma Jackson Ford and O.B. Hill, interview Lillian Whitlow about her book A Soldier Without a Country: Based on the Life of Sgt. Carlis Calvin.  

"A Soldier Without A Country tells the story of Sgt. Carlis Calvin's struggle to survive after he was given a dishonorable discharge by his captain, after he was accused of stealing approximately $3.00 worth of food from his mess hall. After he served several months in the stockade, he was stripped of his medals and uniform and was told not to come back on the post again. He endured hardships for forty-seven years. In 1996 President Bill Clinton restored his honorable discharge and his medals were returned."

The guest is Jacqueline E. Luckett, author of Searching for Tina Turner.  In the novel Lena Harrison Spencer is in her mid-fifties, and the time has come for her to face the hard truths of what it means to have it all and still find oneself unfulfilled. When Lena determines that what she needs is the strength to change directions, Tina Turner becomes the icon from whose story she derives strength, even as everyone else tells her she's crazy for giving up her cashmere cocoon.

Hosts Patricia Hill Welch, Emma Jackson Ford and O.B. Hill talk with Pulitzer Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson about her new book “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.”

Isabel Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. She is the first black woman to win a Pulitzer in journalism and the first African American to win for individual reporting.

She is currently Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University.