Episode 123: Deep Cover with Dr. Walter Greason and Tim Fielder
In 1992 Bill Duke teamed up with Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum to create one of the best film noirs ever made and a masterpiece of Black cinema. Walter Greason and Tim Fielder join in to talk about it, the rise of hip hop, and the early 90s.
Walter Greason is the founding scholar and historian of Afrofuturist Design. He is an author, editor, and contributor to more than twenty books, mostly notably the award-winning books Suburban Erasure, Illmatic Consequences, The Black Reparations Project, and The Graphic History of Hip Hop. His work on the Timothy Thomas Fortune Cultural Center has garnered international acclaim for the innovative use of digital technology, leading to multiple urban revitalization projects in Minnesota, Florida, New Jersey, and Louisiana. He appeared on dozens of mass media outlets in the United States and around the world.
He was a Future Faculty Fellow at Temple University where he completed his Ph.D. in History and contributed to President William J. Clinton’s National Dialogue on Race. As a Presidential Scholar at Villanova University where he studied History, English, Philosophy, Peace and Justice Studies, and Africana Studies, he organized a social justice campaign that established the first Strategic Plan for Cultural Diversity in American history. The principles of the plan were adopted by the Board of Trustees in 2006 and led to a massive capital expansion of the university, culminating in the Vatican’s election of Pope Leo XIV in 2025.
His most recent project, The Graphic History of Hip Hop, with Afrofuturist illustrator Tim Fielder, has been featured at the United Nations, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum for African American History and Culture, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Schomburg Center in the New York Public Library system, and San Diego Comic-Con in 2024.
He is the Wallace Endowed Chair of History in the Department of History at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and holds research affiliate positions with Brandeis University’s Institute for Economic and Racial Equity, Rutgers University’s Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, the Center for New American History at the University of Richmond, and the University of Minnesota’s College of Design.
Tim Fielder is an Illustrator, concept designer, cartoonist, and animator born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and raised in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He has a lifelong love of Visual Afrofutuism, Pulp entertainment, and action films. He holds other Afrofuturists such as Samuel R Delany, Octavia Butler, Pedro Bell, and Overton Lloyd as major influences.