Black History Month (Audio)
by Academy of Achievement
In celebration of Black History Month, the Academy of Achievement presents a host of outstanding African American leaders in the arts, sciences, business, sports and public service. Among the most honored and admired men and women of our times, they include heroes of the Civil Rights movement, trailblazing athletes, brilliant musicians, a pioneering neurosurgeon, a Secretary of State, Pulitzer Prize playwrights, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and a President of the United States. Their words, their music and their stories will enlighten and inspire you to realize the potential that lies within us all. Note: A subset of these tracks is available in SD and HD video. Select SD or HD from the menu on the left to visit the other formats.
Episodes
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Andrew Young (Audio)
Andrew Young was the pastor of a small country church when he faced down the Ku Klux Klan to organize a voter registration drive in South Georgia. He became the leading negotiator for the national Civil Rights Movement, enduring death threats, beatings and jail time to win for African Americans…
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Morgan Freeman Interview
One of the most gifted and admired actors in America, Morgan Freeman was born in Memphis and raised in Mississippi. At an early age, he found his calling acting in school plays. In the seventh grade, he won the state championship in a student theatrical competition. In his teens he was appearing…
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Johnny Mathis Interview & Live Performance Highlights (SD)
Johnny Mathis was only 19 years old when a Columbia Records executive heard him singing in a San Francisco nightclub and decided to sign the teenage singer on the spot. After his first album, recorded in a jazz style, failed to register with the public, producer Mitch Miller guided Mathis to a…
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Chuck Berry Live Performance
In the rock and roll pantheon, Chuck Berry stands alone. Every element of the music existed before he ever stepped onstage, but no one can deny he was the first writer and performer to put it all together. In the 1950s, he combined stinging guitar licks with a jumping rhythm section, sly lyrics…
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Bill Russell
Hailed as the greatest team player on the greatest team of all time, Bill Russell led the Boston Celtics in the longest championship streak in U.S. sports history. With a flair for defense never before seen on a basketball court, allied with an uncanny ability to excel under pressure and an...
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Barack Obama
On November 4, 2008, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois was elected President of the United States. The first African American to be elected to the nation's highest office, his victory is a milestone in American history. The son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, Obama…
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
It would be difficult to name another athlete who dominated his sport as long or as completely as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The greatest all-around player in the history of professional basketball, he ruled the sport through speed, agility and a devastating ambidextrous "sky hook" shot that...
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Toni Morrison
In novels such as the modern classic, Beloved, Toni Morrison has fused history and legend, realism and fantasy, to craft an epic saga of African American life. Although her work is steeped in local history and folklore, the fundamental human values of her art have captured the hearts of readers...
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Suzan-Lori Parks
The most exciting and acclaimed playwright in American drama today, Suzan-Lori Parks is the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Audiences across the country relish her rich blend of fantasy, humor, history and legend, bursting with the music and wordplay of African...
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Dr. Ben Carson (2007 Symposium)
"There is no such thing as an average human being. If you have a normal brain, you are superior. There's almost nothing that you can't do." When Benjamin Carson was in fifth grade, he was considered the "dummy" of his class. His classmates and teachers took it for granted that Ben would take an...
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Sonny Rollins and Savion Glover Live Performance & Interview
He has recorded in a dazzling variety of styles, from the hard bop of his youth to the free jazz, avant-garde, fusion, Latin jazz, funk and R&B of subsequent decades. A formidable composer and bandleader, he is unparalleled in his imagination and expressiveness as a soloist. A 1956 album title...
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Dr. Ben Carson (2006 Symposium)
"There is no such thing as an average human being. If you have a normal brain, you are superior. There's almost nothing that you can't do." When Benjamin Carson was in fifth grade, he was considered the "dummy" of his class. His classmates and teachers took it for granted that Ben would take an...
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Coretta Scott King (2004 Symposium)
"When I went to the movies with other black children, we had to sit in the balcony while the white kids got to sit in the better seats below. We had to walk to school while the white children rode in school buses paid for by our parents' taxes. Such messages, saying we were inferior, were a daily...
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B.B. King Live Performance & Interview
The undisputed monarch of the blues guitar, B.B. King was born on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta. As a child he learned the rudiments of his instrument from his preacher and was soon performing blues and gospel songs on street corners. In 1947 he hitchhiked to Memphis, Tennessee…
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James Brown Live Performance
James Joseph Brown (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006) was an American singer and songwriter. Eventually referred to as "The Godfather of Soul", Brown started singing in gospel groups and worked his way on up. He has been recognized as one of the most iconic figures in the 20th century popular…
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Ray Charles Live Performance
Ray Charles (1930 -2004) was born in Albany, Georgia, at the beginning of the Great Depression. He began to lose his sight in his early childhood, and was completely blind by age seven. At age 15, he was an orphan. At 16, he moved on his own to Seattle, Washington to make a career in music. A...
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Chuck Berry Live Performance & Interview
In the rock and roll pantheon, Chuck Berry stands alone. Every element of the music existed before he ever stepped onstage, but no one can deny he was the first writer and performer to put it all together. In the 1950s, he combined stinging guitar licks with a jumping rhythm section, sly lyrics…
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Garth Fagan
Garth Fagan is one of America’s most original and influential choreographers. Born in Jamaica, Fagan graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and studied in New York with many of the pioneers of 20th Century dance, including José Limon, Alvin Ailey and Martha Graham. Combining...
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Ernest J. Gaines
Ernest Gaines was born and raised on the same plantation where his ancestors once labored as slaves. For nearly a century, they had remained in the same corner of rural Louisiana, living in the same cabins as their forebears, worshipping in the same church, and working for the same family that…
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Quincy Jones
The protean musician and impresario Quincy Jones has been dubbed "a master inventor of musical hybrids," shuffling pop, soul, hip-hop, jazz, classical, African and Brazilian music into unique and extraordinary musical syntheses. He began his career as a young trumpeter with the Lionel Hampton and...
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Dr. Keith Black
From a segregated elementary school in Alabama, Keith Black emerged as an award-winning scientific prodigy, practicing transplant surgery on laboratory animals and publishing his first scientific paper while still in his teens. In medical school, he discovered his life's passion, the human brain....
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Stanley Crouch
Stanley Crouch is a critic, novelist, social commentator and syndicated columnist. A onetime jazz drummer, he first became well-known for his writings on music and popular culture. Although he was originally associated with the avant-garde, he later become an outspoken champion of jazz tradition...
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Coretta Scott King (1999 Symposium)
Young Coretta Scott's gift for music and enthusiasm for education led her far beyond the segregated world of her childhood, but when she met the young Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the two resolved to return to the Deep South together and pursue the cause of justice in her own home state of…
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Sean John Combs
Sean John Combs, also known by his stage name, Diddy (formerly Puff Daddy or P. Diddy), is an American rapper, singer, record producer and record company executive. Combs was born in Harlem, New York. His father, who had underworld ties, was shot to death when Sean was only three. The rest of the...
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William Julius Wilson
William Julius Wilson is an award-winning sociologist and one of only 22 University Professors at Harvard University (the highest professional distinction for a Harvard faculty member). He is Past President of the American Sociological Association. Wilson has received 44 honorary degrees as well…
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John Hope Franklin
John Hope Franklin (1915 - 2009) was a distinguished American historian. Author of more than dozen books, he is best known for his definitive history of the African American experience, From Slavery to Freedom. He was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, the son of an attorney and a schoolteacher. He...
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James Earl Jones
When a five-year-old James Earl Jones moved with his grandparents from rural Mississippi to frosty Michigan, he developed a stutter so severe that he refused to speak aloud, even in school. One day in high school, an understanding teacher, impressed by a poem Jones had written, dared him to…
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Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks, the "mother of the civil rights movement" was one of the most important citizens of the 20th century. Mrs. Parks was a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama when, in December of 1955, she refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. The bus driver had her arrested. She...
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Dr. Louis Sullivan
A distinguished physician, educator and public servant, Dr. Louis W. Sullivan was the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (H&HS) in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. The son of an undertaker in rural Georgia, Louis Sullivan excelled academically and graduated with...
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Walter Massey
Dr. Walter E. Massey has enjoyed a uniquely varied career at the highest levels of science, education, business and public administration. A precocious student from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, he graduated from Atlanta's Morehouse College in 1958, and earned his doctorate in physics from…
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Dizzy Gillespie
John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie (1917 -1993), the American trumpeter, bandleader and composer, was the most visible and durable leader of the generation of musical iconoclasts who revolutionized jazz in the years following World War II. Along with now-legendary figures such as his friend and…
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Herschel Walker
Herschel Walker was born in Augusta, Georgia and grew up outside of Wrightsville, Georgia. For the first eleven years of his life, Herschel Walker showed little interest in sports; he preferred reading books and writing poetry. At age 12, however, he began a crash exercise program. Over the next...
About this show
In celebration of Black History Month, the Academy of Achievement presents a host of outstanding African American leaders in the arts, sciences, business, sports and public service. Among the most honored and admired men and women of our times, they include heroes of the Civil Rights movement, trailblazing athletes, brilliant musicians, a pioneering neurosurgeon, a Secretary of State, Pulitzer Prize playwrights, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and a President of the United States. Their words, their music and their stories will enlighten and inspire you to realize the potential that lies within us all. Note: A subset of these tracks is available in SD and HD video. Select SD or HD from the menu on the left to visit the other formats.
Hosted by
Academy of Achievement