The Cutting Edge presents excerpts from a symposium on Malcolm x, held at the Shombyrg Center after the release of the late Manning Marable's book, :Malcolm X: A Life of Re-Invention. Features Bill Sales, Rosemary Mealy, Amina and Amiri Baraka and hosted by Sam Anderson.

The Cutting Edge presents Angela J.  Davis of  the American University College of Law. talking about her book “Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment”, in which she explores the U.S. criminal justice system’s impact on African American boys and men. The book is a compilation of 12 essays by leading criminal justice scholars and legal experts on several areas of race and law, including racial profiling, implicit bias, the power of police and prosecutors, and mass incarceration. She was speaking at the Atlanta History Center.

Kwame Ture, once known as Stokely Carmichael   was born in Trinadad, later moving to the United States at the age of eleven. He   would become a leading   activist in the 1960s Civil Rights and later, the Pan-African movements. A graduate of   Howard University , Ture rose to prominence in those movements,   first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),   and later as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party, and finally as a leader of the All-African Peoples Revolutionary Party. Dr. Peniel Joseph has just completed Ture’s biography “Stokely: A Life” and was recently at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn to discuss his book at the invitation of the Medgar Evers College’s Center For Black Literature. The discussion was moderated by the Center’s Esmeralda Simmons.

Producer Dred-Scott Keyes interviews film maker Dagmar Schultz about her film "Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984-1992"

Audre Lorde was a   Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist who dedicated both her life and her creative talent to address and fight the injustices of racism, sexism, and homophobia. She was born on February 18, 1934 in New York City of immigrant parents who settled in Harlem. While still in high school, she wrote her first poem, which was published in Seventeen Magazine. She attended  Hunter College   and graduated with a bachelor's degree in Arts. In 1954, Audre spent a critical year as a student at the National University of Mexico. During this period, she started to explore her sexuality and confirmed her identity as a lesbian and poet on both a personal and artistic level. After returning to New York, she continued her education at Columbia University and earned a master's degree in library science in 1961. In 1962, Audre Lorde married attorney Edwin Rollins and had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan. The couple separated in 1970. She published her first volume of poems, “The First Cities” in 1968 and also became the writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. It was here that she discovered her interest for teaching. The success of “First Cities” was quickly followed with “Cables to Rage” and “From a Land Where Other People Live”. During the 1960’s, Audre criticized feminist organizations, including the National Organization for Women and Betty Friedan's “The Feminine Mystique”, for their narrow approach of emphasizing only   the experiences and values of white middle-class women. Even though she showed that the differences between women are wide and varied, she said black women's experiences are different from those of white women, as the experience of the white woman is considered normative, whereas the black woman's experiences are marginalized.  In the same way the experiences of   lesbians, particularly the black ones are considered aberrational. Audre’s other poem collections included “Chosen Poems Old and New” and “Our Dead Behind Us” . Meanwhile, Audre who suffered from breast cancer, wrote “The Cancer Journals”   which won the Gay Caucus Book of the Year award in the year 1981. Her other prose works included “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name”, “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, and “A Burst of Light” which won a National Book Award.In 1980, she co-founded, ‘Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press’, the first U.S. publisher for women of color.  She also founded ‘Sisters in Support of Sisters in South Africa’. It was an organization that was established to raise concerns about women under apartheid. In 1984, Audre accepted a visiting professorship at the Free University in Berlin, Germany which was documented in a full length film- Audre Lourde: The Berlin Years 1984-1992”. Those years not only had a great impact on her health but also had an impact on Black Germans-particularly the Afro-German women whom she encountered. I spoke with film maker Dagmar Schultz about the film and her influence on the movement of Black Germans.

Shout, Sister, Shout! tells the story of "Sister" Rosetta Tharpe, a vocalist and guitarist of the Sanctified church and one of the most remarkable-yet largely forgotten-musicians of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1930s, she commenced a colorful career as gospel's original crossover artist, its first national superstar, and the most thrilling and celebrated guitarist of the music's Golden Age An iconoclastic and electrifying performer, Rosetta Tharpe influenced scores of musicians, from Little Richard and Ruth Brown to Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Isaac Hayes.

While Americans like to insist that we’re living in a post-racial, color blind society, the truth of the matter is that racism is alive and well. The Cutting Edge presents Ibram X. Kendi , author of "Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America" and winner of the 2016 National Book Award   for non- fiction, and Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of "The Condemnation of Blackness", discussing the lingering  history of racist ideology in the Americas and beyond. ", discussing the lingering  history of racist ideology in the Americas and beyond.

While overall access to contraception and other reproductive health services have increased over the last 20 years, access for low-income women and women of color has dropped.

Since the 2010 elections, anti-abortionists have grown more emboldened in their attempts to restrict not only abortion services, but also to basic reproductive care.  

African-American women have been especially targeted in a series of anti-abortion billboards posted across the country. Enraged by this finger-pointing, reproductive justice activist of all colors got together to fight for every woman’s right to health care. On this edition, the fight for access to reproductive health care.

WARNING: This program contains graphic language.

This program was funded in part by the Mary Wohlford Foundation.