Gwen Ifill: The Breakthrough: Politics and race in the Age of Obama

Hosted by Neil Henry

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Gwen Ifill is the well-known PBS moderator and managing editor of Washington Week and senior correspondent of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Before coming to PBS, she was chief congressional and political correspondent for NBC News, and had been a reporter for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, and Boston Herald American.

In THE BREAKTHROUGH, this veteran journalist provides an in-depth investigation of black political power in a post-Civil Rights era of promise and peril. She surveys the American political landscape and sheds new light on the impact of Barack Obama's stunning presidential campaign, while introducing the many emerging young African American politicians forging bold new paths to political power.

Ifill argues that the black political structure formed during the Civil Rights movement is giving way to the generation of men and women who are the direct beneficiaries of the struggle of the 1960s. She offers incisive, detailed profiles of such prominent leaders as Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and U.S. Congressman Artur Davis of Alabama, and also covers up-and-coming figures from across the nation. Drawing on interviews with power brokers like Senator Obama, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and many others, as well as her own razor-sharp observations and analysis of such issues as generational conflict and the "black enough" conundrum, Ifill shows why this is a pivotal moment in American history.

Neil Henry is a professor and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. His career has included 16 award-winning years at the Washington Post as a metro, national, and investigative reporter, and a foreign correspondent based in Africa. He has written for Newsweek, Mother Jones, and Smithsonian. He earned his BA degree in political science from Princeton, and his Master's in journalism from Columbia. Dean Henry is the author of two books. The first, Pearl's Secret, published in 2001, was a well-received memoir investigating his family's interracial history dating back to the antebellum South. His most recent book was published last year and is entitled: American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media.