In a time of advancing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights and an energized women’s movement, Donna Bryson writes for The Christian Science Monitor about what three artists are contemplating. 

Sergeant Eugene Putney bought his parents a radio in 1948. His niece, Cyndi Duran, remembers that the gift sat in her grandparents’ kitchen throughout her childhood.

Though she never met him “I always knew I had an Uncle Gene. He was that present in my grandparents’ home,” Duran said. 

The mood is ecumenical at a Seder I frequent, with a Haggadah featuring the words of Martin Luther King Jr. as well as Torah scholars. It resembles a Quaker meeting. Guests are encouraged to depart from the Haggadah to add personal commentary. This year I was moved tell a story I’d heard from cousin Andre on a visit to the small Georgia town where my father was born and raised.

Andre says he remembers walking around town with his grandfather and noticing that the older man, who surely understood that violence underpinned Jim Crow, never looked a white person in the eye and addressed white men of all ages as "boss." Now Andre, back after college and working 25 years for the federal government in DC, busies himself on the town planning commission and education foundation. He told me about a mayor who was in the habit of accusing him of arguing.
 

Readers of my book about post-apartheid race relations among young South Africans send me updates from the frontlines of the battle for tolerance.

I got emails about the sudden death of the 60-year-old first black vice rector of Stellenbosch University who was reportedly exhausted and dispirited by the opposition he faced from white alum for pushing for more black students and for a less racist, sexist and homophobic campus atmosphere . My Facebook timeline buzzes with reports of white students at yet another South African university who, costumed as maids for a costume party, painted their faces black and stuffed their pants with pillows to emphasize their buttocks.

I recently finished “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption,’’ Bryan Stevenson’s extraordinary memoir.

The chapter Stevenson calls “Mitigation’’ feels like the most important passage I have ever read anywhere.

Stevenson, a lawyer who works to free the unjustly convicted or egregiously sentenced and to end the death penalty, starts the chapter with this assertion: “America’s prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill.’’

He goes on to introduce Avery Jenkins, imprisoned for the murder of a man who was stabbed multiple times, as if his attacker were in a frenzy of fear.

Perhaps I should call them book listens.

When I give a book talk, I get so much out of hearing what others are experiencing and thinking about. That was certainly the case at the Ujamaa Holiday Market, where I spent two hours at a book table organized by the Colorado Committee on Africa and the Caribbean.

One woman I spoke with mentioned that a boy at her son’s middle school came in the day after the U.S. presidential elections declaring: “I’m glad I’m not black. They’ve been killing the black people. Now they will kill them all.’’

When the credits rolled after a screening of “Hidden Figures,” my fellow movie-goers applauded enthusiastically. I joined in the clapping for the black women scientists we’d seen portrayed on the big screen and for a movie that made us feel good.

I’m glad I also read Margot Lee Shetterly’s book on which the movie is based. Shetterly made me think.

A movie that exactly replicated a book would be unwatchably long, talky and confusing. Screenwriters need to make choices. They roll several characters into one who can represent the stories without cluttering the narrative. They add a bit of drama to transform events into emotionally resonant metaphor. They crank up the romance to keep us cheering.