When you think "black pioneering athlete" and "Brooklyn" you likely think Jackie Robinson. But Brooklyn played a role in integrating basketball too. Claude Johnson amateur historian researching the "Black Fives" teams -- to be honored at a ceremony Sunday at the Barclays Center -- discusses the early history of basketball in the area.

The @brooklynnets say "Welcome to BK, birthplace of Michael Jordan." @claudejohnson thinks they should say "birthplace of Black basketball."

— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) February 8, 2013

"America is being forced to face itself," James Farmer proclaims in this 1963 Overseas Press Club appearance, before discussing the upcoming march on Washington and the historical roots of the civil rights struggle.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a jack of all trades — and a master of each. During his 20 year NBA career with the Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers, he won six NBA championships and a record six regular season MVP Awards. He also made a big splash as an actor, debuting in Bruce Lee's "Game of Death" and making notable cameos in films like "Airplane!." And now, he's the author of "What Color Is My World?," a book for children about African-American inventors.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, contributor to Transition Magazine and author of Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, talks about the history and future of Harlem as the center of Black America.

Many of us trace the Civil Rights movement back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Rosa Parks' arrest in 1955. But the true beginning may have been during the summer of 1919, remembered as "Red Summer," when race riots erupted across the country. At that time, NAACP membership grew exponentially, as black World War I veterans returned from fighting for democracy abroad and demanded freedom at home. Despite President Woodrow Wilson's promise to further human rights in the U.S., the federal government turned a blind eye and did little to even to protect African-Americans from racial violence.

An excerpt from "Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America," by Cameron McWhirter.

1. Carswell Grove

[T]here has been nobody suffered in this matter like I have. I did not do nothing at all to cause that riot.

JOE RUFFIN

Belva Davis, broadcast journalist and author of Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman's Life in Journalism, talks about her career as an African-American journalist.

Carla L. Peterson tells the history of African-American elites in New York City, and of her nineteenth-century ancestors and the world they lived in. Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City challenges many of the accepted ideas about African-American history, slavery, freedom, racism, and the cosmopolitan black elite.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, contributor to Transition Magazine and author of Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America, talks about the history and future of Harlem as the center of Black America.

Sharifa will be at the Hue-Man Bookstore and Cafe tonight at 6pm.

The massive migration of black Americans from the South to the North in the early part of last century changed the social and cultural landscape of America forever. Six million African Americans eventually left the South around 1920. Before then, 90 percent of all African Americans lived in the south. By 1970, nearly half lived elsewhere in the country.

“Zora and Me” fictionalizes the childhood of the Harlem Renaissance writer, folklorist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. (Hurston was born in 1891, lived through the Jim Crow south, and died in 1960.) The young adult novel is the first in a planned trilogy which imagines Hurston as a girl detective in her all-black hometown of Eatonville, Florida, at the start of the 20^th century.

The telling of history is a monumental task and responsibility that all historians hold sacred. Historian Thomas C. Holt has gained prominence as the one of the foremost respected historians of American and African-American History.

Officials in Montgomery County, Maryland, have spent $2 million to acquire and maintain a two-story colonial home and log cabin formerly believed to be the residence of Josiah Henson, the model for the protagonist in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin." As it turns out, officials had it wrong and Henson never lived in that cabin. We talk with David Rotenstein, who served on the county's Historic Preservation Commission at the time of the purchase.

The massive migration of black Americans from the South to the North in the early part of last century changed the social and cultural landscape of America forever.  Six million African Americans eventually left the South around 1920.  Before then, 90 percent of all African Americans lived in the south.  By 1970, nearly half lived elsewhere in the country. 

We're asking our African American listeners: Does your family have a story about the Great Migration? If so, we'd love to hear it: When did your family come north? Why did they leave the South? Tell us your story...

Between the 1910s and 1920s an unprecedented social change occurred in the United States when six million black Americans left the South and headed North and West in what came to be known as the Great Migration. Yesterday, we asked listeners to share their stories of the Great Migration. Della Beaver shares her family's story of why her parents moved from South Carolina to Chester, Pennsylvania, and what it was like to travel back to the South to visit their relatives.

Harlem music legends are honored on 125th with commemorative plaques. Janaya Williams reports.