Highlights Archive

Chautauqua at 150: Winton Marsalis’ All Rise • WXXI-TV

This film tells the institution’s story through the voices of its current patrons and partners, including those who have spoken and performed from Chautauqua’s iconic stages over the past several years.

Chautauqua at 150: Winton Marsalis’ All Rise airs Tuesday, February 11 at 10 p.m. on WXXI-TV and streams live on the WXXI app.

Chautauqua Institution, founded in the late 19th century as a place for Americans to make purposeful use of leisure time, has dedicated itself to using arts and education to elevate the discussions that have transformed our nation throughout its history. Through musical performances, original filming, archival footage, photos, and interviews, Chautauqua at 150: Winton Marsalis’ All Rise will artistically explore the impact that the Chautauqua Institution has had in providing a critical platform for some of the most thought-provoking, challenging, and often uplifting conversations in America and beyond.

The documentary is centered around a new production of “All Rise,” written by award-winning trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis. Originally premiered in 1999, this jazz symphony will be performed by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) with Wynton Marsalis as well as Chautauqua’s Music School Festival Orchestra, and the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus.

Known best for its nine-week Summer Assembly, Chautauqua Institution serves more than 100,000 patrons annually with programs and services designed to inspire a love for learning across a lifetime and generations, both during the summer months and year-round.

The historic community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state was described by then President Theodore Roosevelt as, “typical of America at its best.

Photo: Title card/Credit: Provided

Protect My Public Media/ Protect WXXI

Public media isn’t just another channel – it’s a lifeline for our communities. Now, it’s at risk. The White House has formally submitted a request to Congress to rescind $1.1 billion in funding for public media and they have up to 45 days to adopt or reject the request. Your Members of Congress need to hear that you value this essential service. Federal funding ensures that WXXI continues to be the Rochester region’s most trusted media partner providing resources that inform, educate, engage, inspire, and strengthen our community.

Want to help keep WXXI strong in our community? Here are four ways you can get involved:

1. Call your Members of Congress

Go to Protect My Public Media and contact your lawmaker urging them to protect and sustain the essential funding that keeps public media strong and accessible for all. For just about $1.60 per person annually, federal funding supports more than 1,500+ public media stations’ local services.

Call Your Members of Congress

2. Pledge your support

Help us sustain our work here in this region by making a contribution in support of our journalism, our arts and culture coverage, our educational outreach, and our ability to serve every household, regardless of zip code or income level.

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3. Share your story

We’re collecting stories from our neighbors to help illustrate how WXXI Public Media plays a vital role in our community. Share what WXXI means to you on your social media accounts (and be sure to tag us and use #ProtectWXXI). Or, click the “Tell Your Story” button to submit your testimonial using our Google doc form.

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4. Engage with us

Share a story that moved you, go to a movie at The Little Theatre, join us for an Indie Lens Pop-Up screening, attend a Live from Hochstein performance, or pick up CITY Magazine. Public Media works best when the public is truly part of it!

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Urge the New Congress: Safeguard Public Media

Federal funding ensures that your local public radio and TV stations can continue to give you access to essential educational, local, and cultural programming; trustworthy, in-depth news; and emergency and community-based services.

Get updates and take action on efforts to cut federal funding for public media by signing up at protectmypublicmedia.org. Your voice matters.

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Super Drama Sunday • WXXI-TV

For those who don’t enjoy watching the big game, WXXI-TV offers a dramatic alternative – a marathon of PBS’s best dramas.

Super Drama Sunday kicks off Sunday, February 9 at 12:30 p.m. on WXXI-TV.

Beginning at 12:30 p.m. binge on all three episodes of Sherlock on Masterpiece. an exhilarating union of whip-smart writing and star-making performances from a cast including Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, Andrew Scott, and Mark Gatiss among others.

The stellar line-up continues with: Call the Midwife at 5 p.m.. and then your regular Sunday line-up that includes Miss Scarlet at 8 p.m., All Creatures Great and Small at 9 p.m., Funny Woman at 10 p.m. and Death in Paradise at 11 p.m.

Photo: Provided by PBS

The Lincoln School Story • WXXI-TV

Examines the little-known fight for school desegregation led by a handful of Ohio mothers and their children in 1954.

The Lincoln School Story airs Friday, February 7 at 10:30 p.m. WXXI-TV

In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, school districts nationwide were mandated to integrate. But when African American mothers in Hillsboro, Ohio, tried to enroll their children in the local, historically white schools, the school board refused to comply. Five mothers and their children took the school board to court and eventually their children became the first Black students to attend a high-quality local elementary school. Their judicial victory in the Midwest inspired Black parents in communities across the country.

Photo: (L-R) Zella Mae Cumberland, Gertrude Clemons and Minnie Speach. Photo credit: Press Gazette

American Justice on Trial • WXXI-TV

The untold story behind the murder trial of Black Panther leader Huey Newton.

American Justice on Trial airs Monday, February 3 at 9 p.m. WXXI-TV

This film tells the story of the death penalty case that put racism on trial in a U.S. courtroom in the fall of 1968. Huey P. Newton, Black Panther Party co-founder, was accused of killing a white policeman and wounding another after a pre-dawn car stop in Oakland. Newton himself suffered a near-fatal wound. As the trial neared its end, J. Edgar Hoover branded the Black Panthers the greatest internal threat to American security. Earlier that year, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy rocked a nation already bitterly divided over the Vietnam War. As the jury deliberated Newton’s fate, America was a tinderbox waiting to explode.

At his trial, Newton and his maverick defense team led by Charles Garry and his then rare female co-counsel Fay Stender, defended the Panthers as a response to 400 years of racism and accused the policemen of racial profiling, insisting Newton had only acted in self-defense. Their unprecedented challenges to structural racism in the jury selection process were revolutionary and risky. If the Newton jury came back with the widely expected first degree murder verdict against the charismatic black militant, Newton would have faced the death penalty and national riots were anticipated. But Newton’s defense team redefined a “jury of one’s peers,” and a groundbreaking diverse jury headed by pioneering Black foreman David Harper delivered a shocking verdict that still reverberates today.

Photo: Huey Newton and his defense team Charles Garry & Fay Stender hold a press conference after the verdict/Credit: Ilka Hartmann

Great Performances “Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony” • WXXI-TV

Performed from Highland Park’s Ravinia Festival, Great Performances presents legendary composer Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish symphony featuring the talent of Uniting Voices (formerly Chicago Children’s Choir), Chicago Symphony Chorus and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Great Performances “Leonard Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony” airs Sunday, February 2 at 2 p.m. WXXI-TV

Led by famed conductor and Bernstein protégé Marin Alsop, the work includes music and spoken narrative segments voiced by narrator Jaye Ladymore (“Chicago Med”) and sung by soprano soloist Janai Brugger (Great Performances at the Met: Medea). Recorded July 2022, the symphony examines questions of humanity and faith, exploring the complicated nature of a higher power who governs mortality.

The Niagara Movement: The Early Battle for Civil Rights • WXXI-TV

A powerful hour-long documentary that delves deep into the movement’s pivotal role in shaping the civil rights landscape.

The Niagara Movement airs Friday, January 31 at 10:30 p.m. on WXXI-TV.

The Niagara Movement: the Early Battle for Civil Rights explores the Black elite and intellectual society at the turn of the 20th century and examines the heated debate and conflict W.E.B DuBois and William Monroe Trotter had with Booker T. Washington on how to best uplift the race and secure equality for Black Americans.

In July 1905, a group of 29 men, including Black intellectuals, clergy, writers, newspapermen, and activists, was formed and led by a young sociologist, W.E.B. DuBois. The group adopted the resolutions which lead to the founding of the Niagara Movement. Its Declaration of Principles stated, in part: “We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression, and apologetic before insults.”

The Niagara Movement was, in large part, a repudiation of the methods of Booker T. Washington, the unchallenged leader of Black liberation at the time. This was a time of widespread violence against Black Americans, as the end of Reconstruction brought oppressive Jim Crow laws and widespread lynching. How were Black Americans to respond to this oppression? Washington argued that the progress for Black Americans depended on practical but limited education – that legitimate protest against white supremacy would only make things worse, and that rights were secondary to survival. The formation of the Niagara Movement was a counter-movement: a national group dedicated to accepting nothing less than full civil rights.

Although the Movement was disbanded only four years after its inception, its impact and legacy have proven long-lasting. The Niagara Movement was a critical turning point in fighting inequality and it laid the cornerstone of the modern American Civil Rights Movement. Its influence and legacy are wide: it changed the tone and approach to Black protest in America, it created tactics, such as fighting in the courts for integration, that would be used by the NAACP, and it influenced the ideology of both the “black power” movement of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter movement of the 21st century.