Strange Fruit #106: Author Frederick Smith on the Right Side of Storytelling

Author Frederick Smith knew he wanted to be a writer since he was a little boy, watching soap operas in Detroit. But folks around him didn't necessarily see him as the writer type. "I had friends say, 'Black boys from Detroit don't write soap operas - we go to work at the auto plant like our dads did.'" Luckily he kept at it, spent some time in Academia, and eventually made the move to writing novels. His writing tells the stories of black and brown people, he says. "[P]eople living lives that don’t make the six o’clock news." In Juicy Fruit this week, you know we had to talk about all the tea from the Grammys! Ledisi vs. Bey, Kanye vs. Beck, Bey vs. "Take My Hand, Precious Lord"...we talk about the winners and the losers, with a pit stop to chat about Kanye's bravado and why white America finds it so off-putting. Speaking of winners, charges were dropped this week against Louisville activist Shelton McElroy, a Louisville activist who'd been arrested after being asked to leave 4th Street Live for violating their dress code. Shelton says plenty of (white) people were violating the dress code, but he was the only one asked to leave (and the club refused to refund his cover charge). Local listeners will know this is just the latest in a long line of racism accusations against the Cordish-owned entertainment complex.