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What if our Textbooks were Black?

What If Our Textbooks Were Black?: Episode 1

What If Our Textbooks Were Black?

Episode 1

BBC Radio 4 - What If Our Textbooks Were Black?, Episode 1

Naomi Beckwith celebrates Black cultural figures who should be more central to history.

Naomi Beckwith invites artists to suggest Black cultural figures who should be better known – including the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and the dancer Katherine Dunham.

A series celebrating Black cultural figures who should be more central to history.

Naomi Beckwith grew up on Chicago’s South Side. Unusually, her school prioritised the teaching of Black history - when she opened a textbook, she saw people who looked like her. But when she left that school, most black faces from the past disappeared.

Today, Naomi’s an international curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Her exhibitions rebalance the story of art and culture – focusing on African American cultural figures who could and should be better known.

But she argues that we need to go much further - we must reconsider our models of education. If we change our exhibitions without changing our textbooks, then nothing changes at all.

In this series, Naomi invites artists to imagine a new cultural textbook that reinstates some of those Black cultural figures who’ve been sidelined.

In episode 1, the writer and publisher Dr Haki Madhubuti nominates the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, while the choreographer Princess Mhoon remembers two of the dancers and anthropologists who influenced her most – Pearl Primus and Katherine Dunham.

Produced by Natalie Moore and Steve Urquhart
A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 4

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A series celebrating Black cultural figures who should be more central to history.

Naomi Beckwith invites artists to suggest Black cultural figures who should be better known - including the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and the dancer Katherine Dunham.

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