Reflections in Black

bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952 in Hopkinsville, Ky. to a poor working class family. As a child, she performed poetry readings for her church community and was heavily influenced by her great-grandmother Bell Hooks. hooks attained degrees from Stanford, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of California-Santa Cruz. In her first major book, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, hooks explored the intersection of race, sex and class at the core of black women's lives.

John Walker was born in Hope, Ark. in 1937. After receiving his law degree from Yale in 1964, he was admitted to the Arkansas Bar Association the same year and opened his own practice by 1965. Walker opened one of the first three racially integrated law firms in the South, and it filed the first lawsuit in the nation on the harmful effects of racially segregated schools in the state. He was later elected to the Arkansas House of Representatives in 2010 and served four terms as representative of District 34. This is his story.

Diahann Carroll was born Carol Diann Johnson in the Bronx in 1935. At a young age, she won a music scholarship and began modeling as a teen. While studying at New York University, she won a TV talent show and sang at the famed Latin Quarter nightclub in 1954. She soon started acting in Hollywood and Broadway productions, and received a Tony award for Best Actress in a Musical for her work in No Strings. She would later perform on Hollywood variety shows such as The Tonight Show and others.

Born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1941, Stokely Carmichael was a major figure in the civil rights movement who introduced the term and concept of "Black Power" to the public. He served in major campaigns like "Freedom Summer," and led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. 

Ernest James Gaines was born in 1933 in Louisiana, but as a teenager moved with his family to California during the Great Migration. He found his voice as a fiction writer who dives into the Black experience. Gaines' subjects are men and women from rural communities navigating day-to-day life with the backdrop of racial injustice. His most popular novel is The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, a fictional personal history from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement. This is his story.