African American Literature: Media

On this episode of Camera Three, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee perform poetry about the African-American experience. Excerpts include verses from Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sterling Brown, Frank Horne, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Margaret Walker.

Award-winning author Jesmyn Ward writes the stories of the people and places she found absent in literature while growing up. Her new fiction novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, weaves the supernatural with genuine characters that are molded by the rural and poverty-stricken life in her Mississippi hometown. Ward joins Jeffrey Brown to talk about her community and the stories that have come from it.

An American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist, Langston Hughes was first recognized as an important literary figure during the 1920s, a period known as the "Harlem Renaissance," a cultural movement made famous because of the number of emerging black writers, poets and scholars. Hughes, more than any other black poet or writer, recorded faithfully the nuances of black life and its frustrations and was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Embracing the common experience of black Americans, he was the bard of his people because he felt their joys and suffering himself.

This film celebrates Dr. Maya Angelou by weaving her words with rare and intimate archival photographs and videos, which paint hidden moments of her exuberant life during some of America's most defining moments. From her upbringing in the Depression-era South to her work with Malcolm X to her inaugural speech for President Bill Clinton, the film takes us on an incredible journey through the life of a true American icon. Distributed by PBS Distribution.

The Harlem Renaissance was an explosion of African-American culture and creativity that began in 1920s New York.