Forum Network

Film producer and former SNCC activist Judy Richardson was born to autoworker William King Richardson and seamstress Mae Louise Tucker Richardson in Tarrytown, New York. Richardson grew up in the "under the hill" section of Tarrytown. Her father helped organize the United Auto Workers (UAW) local at the Chevrolet plant in Tarrytown and died "on the line" when she was seven years old. Richardson graduated from Sleepy Hollow High School in 1962 and was accepted to Swarthmore College on a full, four-year scholarship. Later, Richardson would also attend Columbia University, Howard University and Antioch College. In 1968, Richardson and other former SNCC staffers founded Drum and Spear Bookstore in Washington, D.C. It became the largest Black bookstore in the country. She was also Children's Editor of Drum & Spear Press. In 1970, she wrote an essay on racism in Black children's books, published by Howard University's *Journal of Negro Education*. In 1979, Richardson began working with Henry Hampton/Blackside Productions on an early version of what became the* Eyes On The Prize* series. Major production for that Academy Award-nominated, six-hour PBS series began in 1986, and she became researcher and content advisor. For *Eyes On The Prize II*, the subsequent eight-hour series, she was Series Associate Producer. Richardson later co-produced Blackside's 1994 Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary, *Malcolm X: Make It Plain*. Currently a senior producer for Northern Light Productions in Boston, Richardson produces historical documentaries for broadcast and museums, with a focus on African American historical events, including: a one-hour documentary on the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre (South Carolina) for PBS; two History Channel documentaries on slavery and slave resistance; and installations for, among others, the National Park Service's Little Rock Nine Visitor's Center, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center (Cincinnati), the New York State Historical Society's "Slavery in New York" exhibit, and the Paul Laurence Dunbar House (Dayton). Richardson has also edited, with five other SNCC women, *Hands on the Freedom Plow: The Personal Testimonies of Women in SNCC*. Richardson is the recipient of an Image Award for Vision and Excellence from Women in Film and Video. She lectures, writes and conducts professional development workshops for teachers about the history and values of the Civil Rights Movement and their relevance to issues we face today.

Jim Madigan joined WGBY/57 Public Television in December, 1990, serving first as Senior Producer for Public Affairs and now as Director of Public Affairs. He currently hosts two weekly programs -- *Doctors on Call*, a medical information and call-in program, and *The State We're In*, which focuses on Massachusetts politics as well as national and international affairs.

John S. Carroll retired as editor of the *Los Angeles Times* in July. The paper's managing editor, Dean P. Baquet, will succeed him. Carroll had been with the *Times* since 2000 and was praised as an editor with a broad and deep vision for the newspaper and for his support for aggressive, in-depth reporting. During his tenure as editor, the *Times* won 13 Pulitzer Prizes, the most successful stretch of the paper's 123-year history. And a series on the Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, which provided care so poor that it put the health of some patients in danger, won the Gold Medal for Public Service this year from the Pulitzer board.

Leonard Barkan is the Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature. He has been a professor of English and of Art History at universities including Northwestern, Michigan, and NYU. Among his books are The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, which won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the College Art Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, Phi Beta Kappa, and the PEN America Center. He is the winner of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been an actor and a director; he is also a regular contributor to publications in both the U.S. and Italy, where he writes on the subject of food and wine. He has recently published Satyr Square, which is an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and himself. His current projects include a scholarly study of the relations among words, images, and pleasure from Plato to the Renaissance, and a book on Michelangelo's drawings and writings.

Dava Sobel has spent her entire professional life writing. Beginning fresh out of college as a technical writer for IBM, she moved quickly into journalism in January of 1970, just in time for the first Earth Day. Her two all-time favorite full-time jobs were as science writer for the *Cornell University News Bureau*, where her beat included everything from astronomy to veterinary medicine, and staff reporter in the Science News department of *The New York Times*, covering psychology and psychiatry. For twenty years she wrote freelance for numerous magazines, most notably *Harvard Magazine*, *Omni*, *Science Digest*, and *Discover*, as well as *Audubon, Life*, and *The New Yorker*. Sobel saw her first total solar eclipse in 1991, as a columnist with *Travel Holiday*, and attended Space Camp for an article in a retirement magazine called "New Choices". Sobel was born in 1947 in the Bronx.