• Charles Chesnutt was a pioneering African-American author who wrote a number of novels about middle class and professional blacks but found that white readers wanted only to hear about black characters from the lower strata, who spoke in dialects reminiscent of slavery.  White author Joel Chandler Harris had created in Uncle Remus a kindly black man who looked back fondly on his slavery days.  In The Conjure Woman, his best known work, Chesnutt created the character of Uncle Julius, who was wily enough to be deferential to the well to do  but told told tales  in which there was no trace of nostalgia for the brutalities of slavery.  Produced for public radio in the late 1996, the program features scholars from Yale, Rutgers and North Carolina State about Chesnutt's legacy, and features a dramatization of Chesnutt's conjure story "Dave's Neckliss."  The cast features:
• Ossie Davis as Uncle Julius
• W.T. Martin as the plantation owner
• Welker White as the owner's wife

Music composed and performed by Donald Stark
Produced, adapted and directed by Robert Clem

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