Black history through opera, jazz, archives and classrooms
A UCTV video feed of recorded conversations, panels and talks that reach African American history through opera, jazz, fiction, archives and classroom research. Anthony Davis on his Central Park Five opera, Annette Gordon-Reed on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and a portrait of Peter Biggs in 19th-century Los Angeles show its range.
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Black History (Video) is a feed of programs presented by University of California Television, and it treats African American history as something found in concert halls, novels, newspaper archives and classrooms. The formats change from program to program. Some are one-on-one conversations, some are panels, and one is a department-hosted event built around classroom research. Anthony Davis appears in two of them. In The Central Park Five with Anthony Davis, the interviewer introduces him as an artist who defies description, listed on some albums as a jazz pianist and plainly a composer. Davis works through images from his opera about the case. He explains that librettist Richard Wesley originally folded several figures into a single character, The Mask, and that Davis felt those parts needed different voices. The Mask, he says, is a voice of oppression that can come from the media, the police or the criminal justice system. He is also listed among the panelists for Charles Mingus and Tijuana Moods - Helen Edison Lecture Series, moderated by the music historian Ashley Kahn. There the discussion settles on Mingus's own phrase, 'organized chaos', and on Flamingo, the track that closes the album. The history programs work from the record. Peter Biggs - Former Slave to Pioneering African American Entrepreneur in 19th Century Los Angeles sets a first-person dramatization of Biggs beside a guest who kept finding him in old Los Angeles newspapers, advertising himself as a Southern barber. Memoirs written in the late 19th century, as Lost Cause mythology took hold, dismissed him as a caricature. Their most outrageous claim was that he was arrested for celebrating Lincoln's assassination, and an article the guest came across said it was basically true. On Conversations with History, Harry Kreisler talks with Annette Gordon-Reed about how writing on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was shaped by assumptions about race and class. When less empowered people spoke, she says, they were disregarded. Her parting advice is to question your own assumptions. Fiction and education round out the picture. At the Writer's Symposium by the Sea, Dean Nelson of Point Loma Nazarene University asks Nnedi Okorafor about a raging storm in her book Shadow Speaker, and near the close she recalls that her first story was about an outhouse. The Road Forward: The Future of Black Education in the 21st Century presents research on classrooms where students who elsewhere felt stereotyped and unfairly disciplined were not sent out for expressing themselves. The tone is collegial rather than combative. Hosts thank their guests warmly and invite the room to do the same. For a first listen, the Peter Biggs program shows the feed's method most clearly: a man the memoirists dismissed, pieced back together from his own newspaper ads.
Made for: Suits a listener who likes history told through specific people and documents, and who is happy to follow the subject from an opera stage to a jazz panel to a study of classroom discipline.
What sets it apart: Instead of one host and one format, it draws on recorded university events, from Conversations with History interviews to the Helen Edison Lecture Series. The subject comes through a composer, a novelist, a Pulitzer-winning author and archival newspaper research in turn.
In the telling of American history, African American history is vitally important. Find out more with UCTV programs about American history in all its complexity.
An old barber's ad makes you question how easily a complicated life becomes a tidy story.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Anthony Davis shows how Central Park Five turns media language, hip-hop, and public fear into opera.
Anthony Davis reflects on Central Park Five, his 2019 opera, and the history behind its sound and imagery. He frames The Mask as a gathering of oppressive voices from the media, police, and criminal justice system, while the opera's hip-hop elements root the work in 1989 New…
A thoughtful review of Nigerian futures, lost histories, and the oddly useful writing advice of starting with an outhouse.
Nnedi Okorafor's fiction gives this single-episode review its center: Nigeria, imagined futures, and the stories that keep people connected to what came before.
Peter Biggs's life emerges where newspaper ads, contested memory, and Black enterprise meet.
Peter Biggs comes through as a figure shaped by enslavement, racial caricature, and narrow choices, but not reduced to them. The episode traces his sale in Liberty, Missouri, his westward move with Captain Andrew Jackson Smith and the Mormon Battalion, and his later visibility…
Tijuana Moods opens onto Mingus's organized chaos, political force, and vulnerable inner life.
Charles Mingus's Tijuana Moods comes through here as an entry point into the musician's wider creative life. The phrase "organized chaos" gives the episode its center, framing Mingus as an artist who balanced structure with looseness, control with spontaneity.
Gordon-Reed traces how race and class tilted historical judgment about Jefferson and Sally Hemings.
Annette Gordon-Reed's conversation with Harry Kreisler turns on the habits of judgment that shaped the Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings story. She frames her work less as a hunt for scandal than as a study of how historians decided who deserved belief.
Overlooked lives, read from the sources, talked through warmly.
Mike Duncan narrates Rome's full history solo, from Aeneas to Romulus Augustulus's exile in 476.
["Anthony Davis discusses Central Park Five, his 2019 opera about the 1989 Harlem case, and explains why he treated it as a story about truth and memory.
At the 24th Writers’ Symposium by the Sea, Dean Nelson interviews Nnedi Okorafor about connecting Nigerian history with imagined futures.
Black History (Video) centers on Peter Biggs, a formerly enslaved Black barber and entrepreneur who says he was sold in Liberty, Missouri, then built a life in Los Angeles.
Black History (Video) centers Charles Mingus's Tijuana Moods, a 1957 RCA recording that did not reach listeners until 1962.
Harry Kreisler's UCTV interview with Annette Gordon-Reed centers on how a lawyer-historian used evidence to challenge Jefferson scholarship about Sally Hemings.
UCTV’s special event on The Road Forward: The Future of Black Education in the 21st Century pairs Betsy Brenner with Naila Nasiruddin and Tyrone Howard.
Myrlie Evers-Williams argues in the Helen Edison Lecture Series that Selma remains present because the United States still confronts prejudice, racism, and unequal access to justice.
Gerald Horne argues that the origins of the United States should be traced to the late seventeenth century, especially England’s 1688 Glorious Revolution and the deregulation of the African slave trade.
Professor Jack Lazor and Oakland Police Department Assistant Chief Paul Figueroa examine racial profiling, distinguishing crime-specific suspect descriptions from generalized stops based on race.
Black History (Video) presents a University of California Television conversation with Angela Davis and producer Sidra Smith about the film Free Angela and All Political Prisoners.
Dr.
Melissa Harris-Perry presents Sister Citizen as an analysis of Black women’s interior lives as a form of citizenship shaped by shame, fear, and distress.
Camille Dungy moderates a UC Berkeley panel about Black Nature, an anthology assembled over three and a half years to bring together African-American writing about the natural world.
A panel at UCLA’s Bunche Center reviews the institution’s development from 1986 to the present through reflections by Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, M.
The Black History (Video) episode marks the Bunch Center's 40th anniversary by examining African American Studies at UCLA from its 1969 creation through the present.
Mavis Staples explains how the Staple Singers used church-rooted songs to support civil-rights marches and social-justice campaigns.
Laura Pulido presents research on Latino-Black relations in Los Angeles, rooted in a mid-1970s family conversation about whether African-Americans explained Mexican-American educational underachievement.
The Black History (Video) performance opens with “Understanding Readiness for Kwame Toré,” identifying Kwame Toré as Stokely Carmichael and linking leadership to courage, action, and solidarity.
Julian Bond delivers the keynote for UCSD’s 2007 “Reconsidering Little Rock” commemoration, connecting Brown v.
Black History (Video) presents Terrence Roberts reflecting on the Little Rock Nine’s 1957 integration of Central High School and the continuing effects of Brown v.
Robert Maxwell, a B-25 pilot and president of the B.O.
In Black History (Video), Angela Davis asks how change happens by contrasting her childhood in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, with the collective struggles that dismantled legal segregation.
A lecture by philosopher Anthony Appiah on cosmopolitanism and ethics in a world of strangers, framed within African American history.
Professor Douglas Daniels interviews Dr.