William Loren Katz, Historian of African-Americans, Dies at 92

The fountainhead of the historian Bill Katz’s immersion in African-American culture was his father’s passion for jazz. Ben Katz had derived more pleasure from the music and its historical roots than from his day job as an art director for an advertising agency… Mr. Katz recalled in an interview with the Zinn Education Project (named after another progressive historian, Howard Zinn) that his provocative opinions had first surfaced in high school, when, in a school project, he devoted the first three chapters of a 200-page history of jazz to slavery.