Part 1Part 2

Segment 1&2: During her 13 years as obituaries editor of the Atlanta Constitution Kay Powell developed a wide following for her ability to uncover unexpected, moving and often funny details about the lives of the ordinary people who were the subjects of most of her obits. Kay says her job was to write personality profiles – it just happens the people she wrote about were all dead. She shares wonderful stories about her career.

Segment 2: Stephen L. Carter is a celebrated commentator on black life in the United States. His fulltime job is as a professor of law at Yale University. But he is a prolific author, as well. His best known non-fiction work is “Reflections on an Affirmative Action Baby.” But he is a novelist as well. His new novel “Back Channel” is a fictional account of the true-life spying operation that the U.S. undertook to discover just what it was the Soviets were shipping to Cuba. Carter talks about the book, but we also explore Carter’s perspective on the little known world of wealthy African American entrepreneurs who have been part of American life for hundreds of years. He shares insights about how Atlanta developed a strong black professional class in the early Twentieth Century.