March 11, 2011
This Week on Our World: Grammy Winner John Legend Fights to Educate Our Kids
This week on Our World with Black Enterprise, host Marc Lamont Hill sits down with Grammy Award-winning singer and philanthropist John Legend, who talks about what it took for him to make it in the music industry and his battle to improve access to a quality education for all Americans. On his latest album, Wake Up! a collaboration with The Roots, Legend sings socially and politically driven soul and R&B “protest music†from the ’60s and ’70s to bring some of today’s most pressing issues to the forefront.
“We need to do more to make sure every kid has a quality education,” Legend said when interviewed by Hill. “It’s particularly poignant in the Black and Latino communities because we’re losing so many of our kids, particularly our young men. We end up blaming the students or their parents, but their parents were in the same system 20 years ago and we’re expecting different results but not changing the system.”
Continuing this theme, in this week’s On The Record segment, Hill discusses the state of the education system with Eagle Academy Foundation President David Banks; TheLoop21.com contributor Keli Goff and R. L’Heureux Lewis, assistant professor of sociology and Black studies at City College of New York.
In addition, Our Slice of Life segment profiles Diane Latiker, founder and president of Kids Off the Block, an after-school program in Chicago that works to provide at-risk low income youth positive alternatives to gangs, drugs, truancy, violence, and the juvenile justice system.
Our World with Black Enterprise is the award-winning weekly 30-minute program, hosted by Marc Lamont Hill, providing a fresh mix of interviews with today’s top newsmakers and celebrities, eclectic roundtable discussions concerning the hottest topics affecting African Americans, and profiles of some of the world’s most intriguing people.
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