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Forty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson vowed to end the Jim Crow machinery that kept African Americans away from the polls. Join Neal Conan and guests for stories of the Voting Rights Act.

Morgan State University professor Ray Winbush and Miessha Thomas, attorney and project director for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund, talk about continuing efforts and obstacles to reclaiming assets decades after they've left a family's hands.

Some white Louisianans are finding common ground with the mostly poor and black evacuees from New Orleans that they are now taking into their communities. Many evacuees will have to start new lives in new towns across the South.

As France suffered weeks of riots last month, the colorful southern port of Marseille was spared. The city has one of France's highest concentrations of immigrants, but residents there do not live in segregated communities.

A new book uncovers the research of John Work, who accompanied folklorist Alan Lomax on a trip to the Mississippi Delta in the early 1940s. They documented the music heard in churches, blues joints and cotton fields of the South.

A combination drug may soon become the first prescription medicine approved specifically for African Americans. The medicine, called Bidl, treats heart failure. Trials show the drug works much better than conventional therapies, but some worry the results could perpetuate myths about racial differences. Hear NPR's Snigdha Prakash.

Shirley Chisholm died over the weekend. She was 80 years old. We remember the first African-American woman to serve in Congress with a bit of a speech from her retirement from Congress, part a recent interview and with a perspective on Chisholm's career with political science professor Ron Walters.

Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman elected to Congress, died at her home in Florida over the weekend. NPR's Melissa Block offers a tribute, and tape of Chisholm's 1972 announcement that she was running for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Music critic Banning Eyre has a review of the latest CD from African superstar Youssou N'Dour. It's called Egypt, and Eyre says it's very different than anything N'Dour has done in the past, and calls it "a work of grandeur and conviction."

Tuesday night in Springfield, Ill., two African-American candidates for the U.S. Senate squared off in a debate. Democrat Barack Obama leads his Republican opponent, Alan Keyes, by 45 points in the latest polls. Hear NPR's Tavis Smiley and NPR's David Schaper.