Say Brother is GBH’s longest-running public affairs television program by, for and about African Americans, now known as Basic Black. In April 2000, the GBH Archives in Boston was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Archives and Special Collections Preservation and Access grant to arrange, describe, and reformat master Say Brother programs dating from 1968 to 1982 to keep the collection accessible.
In 2025, coinciding with the reimagining of Basic Black as a digital-first program titled GBH News Rooted, the collection was expanded to include an additional 484 Say Brother programs and 179 Basic Black programs. Nearly 400 full programs from these series are now available in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting's "Online Reading Room".
GBH welcomes you to explore this invaluable programming, whether performance, political commentary, or conversations with distinct voices from the African-American community.
Say Brother clips
Say Brother / Basic Black programs
Related content
The Say Brother Collection (Wayback Machine) web site, now incorporated into Open Vault, was made possible though a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. However, all content on this site is the intellectual property of the WGBH Educational Foundation, which is solely responsible for this work.
Project Archivist: Emily R. Novak
Grant Supervisor: Mary Ide
Grant Consultant: Sarah-Ann Shaw
Preservation Supervisor: Scott Turner
FileMaker Implementation and HTML Export: Thom Shepard
Web Site Producer: Caitlin O’Neil
Interactive Designer: Tyler Howe
Developer: Molly Frey
Technical Oversight: Kevin Carter and Dave MacCarn
Web Rights and Clearance: Julie Ecker
Selene Colburn
Lacey Dean
Jim Deering
Cynthia Johnson
Keith Luf
Lauren Marano
Christopher McNeice
Courtney Michael
Jane Pikor
Jonathan Pipe
Marita Rivero, VP
Anya Vinokour
Leah Weisse
Archives interns Christina Finneran, Dawn Marsh, Jenny Smilovitz
The Winthrop Group, Inc.
The staffs of GBH’s Basic Black and Production Services
