Changing the Narrative

James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a writer and civil rights activist. He wrote more than a dozen novels and essay collections, including Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, and If Beale Street Could Talk. Though he expatriated to Paris in 1948, Baldwin’s work deals primarily with the social and cultural issues of being black and homosexual in America before and during the civil rights movement. His unfinished work, Remember This House, was adapted into the award-winning documentary I Am Not Your Negro in 2016, and a film adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk was released in 2018. Today his legacy lives on through the National James Baldwin Literary Society and the James Baldwin Scholars program at Hampshire College.

Marsha Stephanie Blake has appeared on Broadway in The Merchant of Venice, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and The Crucible. Her many Off-Broadway credits include performances at the Lincoln Center Theater, Signature Theatre, Culture Project, and Vineyard Theatre, among others. Her television appearances include The Madness, Law & Order, The Accidental Wolf, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, The Blacklist, When They See Us, This Is Us, How to Get Away with Murder, Orange Is the New Black, Girls, Getting On, Elementary, and Happyish. Her film credits include the Laundromat, The Photograph, I’m Your Woman, Brother, The Courtroom, The Architect, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, Crown Heights, and Person to Person.

Wren T. Brown is a fourth-generation Angeleno and a fourth-generation theatrical. His film appearances include Remember Me: The Mahalia Jackson Story, Beyond the Lights, Waiting to Exhale, Heart and Souls, Under Siege 2, and Edmond. On television, he co-starred as Whoopi Goldberg's brother in Whoopi and was a regular in Flipper: The New Adventures, and Bless This House. He has also appeared on The Orville, Dear White People, The Practice, Frasier, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Everybody Hates Chris, Grey’s Anatomy, and as Virgil Simpson on The Simpsons. His theater credits include Shakespeare's As You Like It, for which he won a Drama-Logue Award; Borrowed Time; and Burning Hope. In 2008, he founded Ebony Repertory Theatre (ERT), the first African American professional theatre company in Los Angeles history.

Shirley Chisholm (1924 - 2005) was the first black woman elected to Congress, serving from 1969 to 1983. She was also the first black female candidate to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. She was a founding member of both the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Women’s Caucus. She is the subject of the Peabody Award-winning documentary Chisholm ‘72: Unbought and Unbossed, and she authored two autobiographies, Unbought and Unbossed and The Good Fight. In 2015, Chisholm was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Crystal Dickinson recently starred in The Blood Quilt and Broke-ology at Lincoln Center. She won the Theatre World Award for her Broadway debut in the 2012 production of Clybourne Park and subsequently appeared in You Can’t Take It With You on Broadway in 2014. Her additional theater credits include A Raisin in the Sun, Seven Guitars, Wine in the Wilderness, and Gem of the Ocean at Two River Theater, Lessons in Survival at the Vineyard, The Low Road and Cullud Wattah at The Public, Covenant at the Roundabout, The Trees at Playwright’s Horizons, and Blues for an Alabama Sky at the McCarter. Her film and television credits include The Accidental Wolf, I Origins, The Good Wife, Feed the Beast, New Amsterdam, and recurring roles on The CHI and For Life. Dickinson has taught at Stella Adler Studio, Spelman College, Pace University, Princeton University, the Juilliard School, NYU, University of Illinois, and Seton Hall.

Percival Everett is the author of the novel James, which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC, whose previous books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University, and the Stowe Prize for Literary Activism. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Christopher Jackson is a Tony Award–nominated actor and Grammy and Emmy Award–winning songwriter and composer, best known for starring as George Washington in the musical Hamilton. He was also featured on the latest #Hamildrop hit “One Last Time (44 Remix)” alongside President Obama, and has performed sold-out concerts at Carnegie Hall and The Kennedy Center. Additional Broadway credits include Holla If Ya Hear Me, Bronx Bombers, After Midnight, In the Heights, Memphis, and The Lion King. Film and Television credits include And Just Like That…, Bull, When They See Us, Space Oddity, tick, tick… BOOM!, Tracers, Afterlife, Freestyle Love Supreme, The Good Wife, Nurse Jackie, White Collar, Oz, Person of Interest, and Gossip Girl.

DeRay Mckesson is a civil rights activist focused primarily on issues of innovation, equity and justice. Born and raised in Baltimore, he graduated from Bowdoin College and holds honorary doctorates from The New School and the Maryland Institute College of Art. DeRay has advocated for issues related to children, youth, and families since he was a teen. As a leading voice in the Black Lives Matter Movement and a co-founder of Campaign Zero, DeRay has worked to connect individuals with knowledge and tools, and provide citizens and policy makers with commonsense policies that ensure equity. He has been praised by President Obama for his work as a community organizer, has advised officials at all levels of government and internationally, and continues to provide capacity to activists, organizers, and influencers to make an impact. DeRay hosts the award-winning podcast Pod Save America and is the author of On the Other Side of Freedom: The Case for Hope.

Poet, playwright, educator, and activist Sonia Sanchez is the author of seventeen books including Homecoming, We a BaddDDD People, Under a Soprano Sky, Wounded in the House of a Friend, Does Your House Have Lions?, Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums, Shake Loose My Skin, and Collected Poems. Among hundreds of honors she has received are the Langston Hughes Poetry Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Edward MacDowell Medal, and the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award. Homegirls & Handgrenades won the 1985 American Book Award, and Does Your House Have Lions? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Sanchez has taught and lectured at more than 500 universities and colleges in the United States and has traveled extensively, reading her poetry in Africa, Australia, Cuba, England, the Caribbean, Norway, Canada, and the People’s Republic of China. She was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she held the Laura Carnell Chair in English until her retirement in 1999.

Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among other novels. A musical of The Interestings is in development. Wolitzer was the guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017, and also writes books for young readers. She is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program at Stony Brook University, where she co-founded and co-directs BookEnds, a yearlong intensive for emerging novelists.

CREDITS

Excerpt from Unbought and Unbossed by Shirley Chisholm (Houghton Mifflin, 1970). Copyright © 1970 by Shirley Chisholm.

“My Dungeon Shook,” collected in James Baldwin: Collected Essays (Library of America, 1998). Previously appeared in The Fire Next Time (Dial Press, 1963). First appeared in The Progressive (December 1962). Copyright © 1962 by James Baldwin. Used by permission of Ayesha Pande Literary.

“Homegirls on St. Nicholas Avenue,” by Sonia Sanchez, from Wounded in the House of a Friend (Beacon Press, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Sonia Sanchez. Used by permission of Beacon Press.

“The Appropriation of Cultures” by Percival Everett, from Callaloo (Winter, 1996). Copyright © 1996 by Percival Everett. Used by permission of Graywolf Press.