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"Without the songs of the movement, personally I believe that there wouldn't have been a movement," says Rutha Mae Harris, one of the original Freedom Singers.

Fifty years ago, the Freedom Singers performed along with artists like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Mahalia Jackson at the March on Washington.

The group came together in Albany, Georgia in 1962. Their mission was to raise money and awareness for the civil rights movement. It's a journey that took them more than 50,000 miles, across over 40 states in less than a year.

Harris tells NPR's Michel Martin that the Freedom Singers were in California when they got a call to board a plane that Harry Belafonte had chartered.

"That's how we got to the March on Washington. We were on the plane with all these movie stars. And the five of us had our own room on the plane," she says. "We thought we were in high heaven."

Conan O'Brien has probably had the most unusual career trajectory of any current late-night host. When he joined NBC's Late Night in 1993, replacing David Letterman, he had virtually no on-air experience. He did, however, have comedy-writing chops: O'Brien edited the humor magazine The Harvard Lampoon as a student, then wrote for Saturday Night Live and was a writer and producer for The Simpsons.

Although it took him a while to get comfortable in front of the camera — many critics initially gave him bad reviews — he eventually did so well on Late Night that he became the host of The Tonight Show in 2009, after Jay Leno's ill-fated move to prime time. But that arrangement was short-lived: Leno's show was canceled, the host moved back to Tonight, and O'Brien eventually landed at TBS in the 11 p.m. slot.

O'Brien spoke with Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 2003, a few days before a special broadcast celebrating his 10th anniversary at Late Night.

In the flood of stories about Steve Ballmer's time at the helm of Microsoft, a troubling symbol of the company's office culture keeps emerging. It's called "stack ranking," a system that had corrosive effects on Microsoft employees by encouraging workers to play office politics at the expense of focusing on creative, substantive work. Kurt Eichenwald explained the system in a Vanity Fair feature last year:

"The system — also referred to as 'the performance model,' 'the bell curve,' or just 'the employee review' — has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor. ...

"For that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings. ...

" 'The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,' one Microsoft engineer said. 'People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people's efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn't get ahead of me on the rankings.'

"Worse, because the reviews came every six months, employees and their supervisors — who were also ranked — focused on their short-term performance, rather than on longer efforts to innovate."

The College Kid

Rico Saccoccio is a junior at Fordham University in the Bronx. He's from a middle-class family in Connecticut and he spent the summer living at home with his parents, who cover about $15,000 a year in his college costs.

According to the U.S. government, Saccoccio is living in poverty. The $8,000 he earns doing odd jobs puts him well below the $11,945 poverty threshold for an individual. In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau recently reported that more than half of all college students who are living off campus and not at home are poor.

Saccoccio has lots of student loans and lives off campus in a Bronx apartment where the elevator, heat and hot water don't always work. Sometimes, he microwaves water in Tupperware to wash his hair.

Still, he says, "I really don't think of the 'poor college' kid as actually somebody who is in poverty. ... It's a temporary investment, and you don't have to live like you do in college after you leave school."

The Single Mom

Marion Matthew, a home health aide and single mom, also lives in the Bronx. She relies on a local food pantry and government benefits like food stamps and housing assistance to support herself and her 17-year-old son.

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