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Writer Gregory Howard Williams' "Life on the Color Line"

Williams spent the first ten years of his life believing he was white in segregated Virginia, and that his dark-skinned father was Italian. When his parents' marriage ended, his father took him and his brother to Muncie, Indiana, where the boys learned that they were half black. Williams' new memoir "Life on the Color Line" is about the struggle and repression he faced growing up between the races. Publisher's Weekly calls it "(an) affecting and absorbing story."

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Other segments from the episode on February 21, 1995

Fresh Air with Terry Gross, February 21, 1995: Interview with Gregory Howard Williams; Interview with May Berenbaum; Review of the book "The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes."
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16:10

Entomologist May Berenbaum

Berenbaum was afraid of bugs until she took a course on insects in college. Her new book is "Bugs in the System," which tries to show insects in a new light. Berenbaum demonstrates the importance of insects in everyday life and throughout history, and explores the lifestyles of some of the more than ten quintillion insects that inhabit the earth at any given moment. She also hosts the annual Insect Fear Film Festival, which will be held this weekend, February 25 & 26, at the University of Illinois.

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Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy

Randall Kennedy is a Harvard Law professor. His new book, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (Pantheon Books) is based on a series of classroom lectures he prepared exploring the history and use of the word "nigger." He found the word in literature, political debates, cartoons and songs. And he explores the use of the word from a hateful slur to a term of endearment. Kennedy is a Rhodes Scholar and he served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Kennedy also the author of Race, Crime and the Law.

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