Word: mason
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Everyone seems to pay attention in February," Judi Ann Mason, the playwright and television writer, said of Black History Month. But what Mason, who died July 8 at age 54, wanted people to understand was that black history happens every day. She once said that as a child growing up in the 1960s South, she failed to appreciate the strides black leaders were making for racial equality--Thurgood Marshall wearing the robes of a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Shirley Chisholm legislating in Congress, Martin Luther King Jr. toiling tirelessly in the struggle for civil rights...
...Mason did her own part to blaze a trail for African Americans. Tapped by legendary television producer Norman Lear to write for the sitcom Good Times, she went on to amass writing credits for shows like A Different World and Redd Foxx's Sanford--programs that brought to viewers an as-yet-unseen depiction of black lives...
...Mason's lingering impact will be felt most strongly through her more than 25 plays about the black experience in America. One of her most highly regarded works, A Star Ain't Nothin' but a Hole in Heaven, portrayed a college-bound woman as she becomes aware of the price civil rights activists paid for the opportunities she is afforded. In 1977 the drama earned Mason the first Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award...
...Shreveport, La., native, Mason wrote about the ravages of Hurricane Katrina in her play Storm Stories, which chronicled the tragedy that befell her community. Through her work, Mason made certain that African-American history was always on display--even if it wasn't February...
...views these young republics as satellite states. From Ashgabat to Astana, the ruling elites are all holdovers from the Soviet era, and sometimes more fluent in Russian than their national tongues. "Their regimes operate," says Eric McGlinchey, a Central Asia specialist and professor of politics and government at George Mason University, "along almost pathological networks of patronage" - and ones that Moscow knows how to navigate. That close working relationship has been on full display recently in Kyrgyzstan: spurred by a Russian promise of $2 billion in aid, the Kyrgyz government signaled its intent to shut down the U.S.'s pivotal...