Howard W. French
speaker
832 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 20 Dec
Howard W. French’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.
Appearances
As I said, I come from an African-American family on both sides of my family, and my mother's side, the story I grew up with and experienced actually firsthand was of descending from enslaved people who belonged to some of the grand barons of Africa
revolutionary era of Virginia, friends of Thomas Jefferson.
Somehow we, meaning my ancestors, ended up controlling a small piece of the grand estate that this person, their owner, possessed.
And so I grew up in Washington, D.C., but we spent summers throughout my early life going there.
And this was, you know, the topic of conversation around the dinner table, and it permeated everything.
My
this history.
And so that's the first thing.
The second thing is that as a correspondent for the New York Times, as is true with my previous book, Born in Blackness, my career, in a very unplanned way, took me on an itinerary that just went throughout the world of the book.
I was a correspondent in the Caribbean, the northern tier of South America, where
You know, the African-derived population is quite large.
We are from, even if it's the borderlands, as a family are from the American South.
I spent 10 years of my life living and working on the African continent.
And of course, I speak European languages and I'm quite familiar with Europe as well.
So all of these pieces really are kind of...
laying about as a jigsaw in my background, and it was a matter of putting the jigsaw together.
Born in Blackness really was a big change of direction for me in my writing.
It sort of began with the previous book about China, Everything Under the Heavens, which was much more historically oriented than journalistically oriented.
But Born in Blackness is a straight out history book.
It made me want to continue the story.
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