Melissa Harris-Perry, with her progressive talk show of the same name, is set to join MSNBC’s weekend lineup of cable news shows beginning Saturday.
Ms. Harris-Perry will be the only tenured professor in the United States — and one of a very small number of African-American women — who serves as a cable news host.
The article talks about how Ms. Harris-Perry had given a specific lecture at Tulane on African-Americans being elected as cities go into economic decline:
One day last summer, when Ms. Harris-Perry was filling in for Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, she recast the class lecture as a television segment, invoking Detroit; her adopted home, New Orleans; President Obama; and tax policy.
“I’ve given that lecture a million times — a million times,” Ms. Harris-Perry said in a recent interview. “But I do it once on Rachel’s show, and it was everywhere the next day. It was up on Web sites, people were e-mailing me — that, for me, was a really clear indication of how powerful television is.”
