The Peabody Media Center joins forces with FUSION and The Root to celebrate Black History Month

Series marking Media Center’s first industry programming partnership will bring together award-winning content and diverse voices to elevate important national issues

The Peabody Media Center, FUSION and The Root have launched a content partnership that will bring Peabody’s rich media archive together with FUSION’s diverse voices to explore issues of contemporary social importance. This endeavor marks the first industry collaboration for the Peabody Media Center, a scholarly outreach arm of the prestigious Peabody Awards based at the University of Georgia, since it was launched last November.

The first project produced under the Media Center’s new Peabody Spotlight programming banner, each episode in the Black History Month series revisits African-American history from several perspectives by drawing from the Peabody Archive, the third largest repository of audiovisual materials in the United States. Content from this and future Peabody Spotlight series, in keeping with the spirit of the Peabody Awards, will focus on significant societal issues as represented through the storytelling of Peabody winners and finalists, as well as 75 years of broadcasting’s best programming.

The series will be featured throughout February across the digital, social and OTT platforms of FUSION and The Root, the leading news and culture site for African-Americans, and will include contemporary Peabody-winning programming by some of the most creative storytellers working in television today.

The first installment, “Baltimore: Then & Now” uses archival content to show how the city has been a case study of race relations in America since the mid-1950s and how the city’s conversation about race has evolved over the years.

Future installments will look at the role of African-Americans from behind the lens, featuring conversations with documentarian Stanley Nelson and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the co-founder and chairman of The Root. Peabody continually recognizes stories and storytellers that address the issue of race in innovative, unexpected ways and will also examine a few examples of voices that are changing and continuing the conversation, including Key & Peele.

Baltimore: Then & Now from Peabody Awards on Vimeo.