Black History Month on WGLT

WGLT will broadcast several specials throughout February to mark Black History Month, in addition to local reporting from the WGLT newsroom. Here’s what’s planned.

World Cafe - weeknights at 7 p.m. throughout February

NPR’s music show will feature Black artists throughout the month. And every Tuesday in February, John Morrison returns with a deeper dive into “The Black Roots of Rock & Roll.”

Thursday, Feb. 3 – noon and 6 p.m.
Witness History

A special hourlong edition of Witness History from the BBC World Service, bringing together some incredible interviews looking at the African-American experience. Told by people who were there, we hear stories that are fascinating, harrowing, and inspiring.

Tuesday, Feb. 15 – noon and 6 p.m.
Celebrating Toni Morrison

Guest host Tayari Jones (New York Times bestselling author) helps us to celebrate Tori Morrison, the American master who died in 2019. Morrison’s novels, including Beloved, Jazz and Song of Solomon, have become an indelible part of the American canon. Her fierce, poetic visions earned her the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Saturday, Feb. 19 – noon
Tuesday, Feb. 22 – noon
Throughline: Marcus Garvey

Amid banana republics and Jim Crow and decades before MLK and Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey had a simple, uncompromising message: Black people deserved nothing less than everything.

Thursday, Feb. 24 – noon and 6 p.m.
Music Life: The Great Black Music Symposium

Where music stars discuss how they make their music. Delving into Chicago’s avant-jazz scene, Angel Bat Dawid invites her friends to discuss major issues in their art. They consider the importance of not conforming, the struggle to find money to do what you love, and the experience of being diasporic African and its influence on your music.

Saturday, Feb. 26 – noon
Throughline: Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler was a deep observer of the human condition, perplexed and inspired by our propensity towards self-destruction. She described herself as a pessimist, “if I’m not careful.” As an award-winning science fiction writer and “mother of Afrofuturism,” her visionary works of alternate realities reveal striking, and often devastating parallels to the world we live in today. Butler was fascinated by the cyclical nature of history, and often looked to the past when writing about the future. She broke on to the science fiction scene at a time when she knew of no other Black women in the field, saying she simply had to “write herself in.”