The Black Decade
by Gene Seymour

It was the first full decade after the civil rights movement and black people were rediscovering themselves and their culture for the first time. From Shaft to the Rumble in the Jungle, from Shirley Chisholm's run for the presidency to The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, it was another black renaissance.

"How Come We Overcame and Nobody Told Me?"
by Josh Ozersky

In the 1970s a pioneering producer and a few audacious writers made black people prominent on television shows such as Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, and Good Times. The shows made us all laugh, but had a deeper social meaning than we may have guessed.

Funk expert Rickey Vincent takes us on a historical ride through the era of music that began with the Godfather of Soul and continued with George Clinton, Earth Wind & Fire, Sly & the Family Stone, and others, and shows how funk became the soundtrack for an era of black consciousness and empowerment.