THE TV COLUMN

PBS African Americans series covers 500 years

PBS has an ambitious new series debuting tonight that puts an important part of our nation’s history into perspective.

AETN will air African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross at 7 p.m. Future episodes of the six-hour, six-part series air at the same time on subsequent Tuesdays.

The series is hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Gates, who also wrote the series, is a scholar and editor with the impressive titles of Alphonse Fletcher University professor at Harvard University and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

The 63-year-old Gates says, “Since my senior year in high school, when I watched Bill Cosby narrate a documentary about black history, I’ve longed to share those stories in great detail to the broadest audience possible, young and old, black and white, scholars and the general public. I believe that my colleagues and I have achieved this goal.”

The six episodes cover the full scope of events, from the origins of slavery in Africa through more than four centuries of history up to the present “when America is led by a black president, yet remains a nation deeply divided by race.”

Gates has assembled some of America’s top historians and previously untapped primary sources to shed new light on the black experience.

Among those interviewed are school integration pioneers Ruby Bridges (the subject of a famous Norman Rockwell painting) and Charlayne Hunter-Gault, former Black Panther Kathleen Neal Cleaver, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, and civil rights activist Diane Nash.

Gates travels throughout the United States visiting key historical sites while exploring the experience of black people, “as well as the multiplicity of cultural institutions, political strategies, and religious and social perspectives they developed.”

“The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself,” Gates says. “[It’s] a universal tale that all people should experience.”

Gates notes that throughout the series, viewers will see that the road to freedom for black people was not linear, “but more like the course of a river, full of loops and eddies, slowing, and occasionally reversing the current of progress.”

Here’s an episode overview.

Today: “The Black Atlantic (1500-1800).” Beginning a full century before the first slaves arrived at Jamestown, the episode portrays the earliest Africans, both slave and free, who arrived in America. But the trans-Atlantic slave trade would soon become a vast empire connecting three continents.

Oct. 29: “The Age of Slavery (1800-1860).” The episode illustrates how black lives changed dramatically after the American Revolution. Cotton fueled the rapid expansion of slavery into new territories, but also fueled resistance, forcing the issue of slavery to the forefront of national politics and the nation to the brink of war.

Nov. 5: “Into the Fire (1861-1896).” This one covers the Civil War and the end of slavery, and Reconstruction. Those years were followed by an era when “an intransigent South mounted a swift and vicious campaign of terror to restore white supremacy.” Nov. 12: “Making a Way Out of No Way (1897-1940).” This episode explores the Jim Crow era “when blacks struggled to build their own worlds within the harsh, narrow confines of segregation.” Also covered is the Harlem Renaissance that “not only redefined how America saw African Americans, but how African Americans saw themselves.” Nov. 19: “Rise! (1940-1968).” The fifth episode examines the long road to civil rights, “when the deep contradictions in American society finally became unsustainable.” Nov. 26: “A More Perfect Union (1968-2013).” More blacks win office and the black middle class makes progress. However, the black urban poor are isolated in the inner cities, “vulnerable to new social ills and an epidemic of incarceration.” Despite electing Barack Obama to the White House, the series reports, the nation “still has much work to be done.” Note: There was some confusion reported by a reader in Mountain Home the last time I highlighted a PBS program. I gave the air time according to when AETN was going to present the show. The reader said the time was incorrect and it caused him to miss half the program.

Investigation revealed the reader was actually getting his PBS programming from Ozark Public Television in Springfield, Mo., not AETN. OPT frequently airs programs at a different time than AETN.

For future reference, whenever you see a PBS program mentioned in this space, the air time will be what AETN plans.

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Style, Pages 28 on 10/22/2013

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