Layla June West wrote in the introduction to the Studs Terkel Radio Archive’s African-American History & Culture Section, “Terkel’s archive shows that people, famous or not, act and react with the world around them in the business of love, activism, art, and everything in between. By capturing archiving this fullness, he expands the American collective memory and captures the diversity …

Learn how Lawrence Brownlee, hailed as one of the world’s leading tenors, is developing new works that respond to issues facing men of color today.

Hear a rarely-heard live performance by Mahalia Jackson’s broadcast from the Morrison Hotel in 1975 courtesy of the Studs Terkel Radio Archive.

Frederick Douglass wasn’t just an abolitionist leader, author, and statesman – he was also a music lover. He wrote passionately about the importance of music in communities of enslaved people in his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In fact, he wrote that music gave him his “first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never …