'Making Black America: Through The Grapevine' Directors On Exploring Harlem Renaissance, All-Black Towns, Black Twitter And More On PBS

One of the major components of white supremacy is entitlement. In addition to racism, white people have felt the need to inject themselves into the lives of people of color. Though they touted segregation, allowing Black people to exist beyond their gaze was something they could hardly bear. Yet, from the moment the first Black person landed on American shores, we’ve learned how to live and thrive beyond the view of the mainstream. The scholar W.E.B. DuBois called it “life behind the veil.” In his latest PBS docuseries, Making Black America: Through the Grapevine, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., travels through the Black experience from the 18th century to the present, unpacking the people, places, and experiences that have helped form who we are as a community.  

Helmed by directors Stacey L. Holman and Shayla Harris, the four-part series unpacks everything from establishing Black schools for formally enslaved post-Emancipation, the Harlem Renaissance, all-Black towns, and even Black Twitter. Countless experts and scholars, including Charles M. Blow, Angela Davis, André Holland, Fab 5 Freddie, Jason King, and Killer Mike, also lend their voices to the series. 

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'The Black Church' Review: A Detailed History Lesson About One of the Black Communities Most Polarizing Institutions

The Black American experience is varied and expansive, but certain heartbeats and pulses ring familiar to vast portions of the community. One of those collective experiences is that of the Black church. Whether you're an active member in a church community, agnostic, or even if you are a member of a different faith, the hymns, stories, histories, and even some sermons might ring familiar. The Black church has been at the center of everything, existing inside of the Black community as we're transformed and evolved across the generations.

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Stanley Nelson's 'Boss: The Black Experience in Business' Rewrites the Narrative On Black Entrepreneurship [REVIEW]

Black businesses have been the cornerstone of Black communities in this country for more than a century. With his new PBS documentary, Boss: The Black Experience in Business, prolific director Stanley Nelson explores the history of Black business. Traveling back in time during the antebellum period and stretching forward into the 21st century, Nelson unpacks 150 years of Black business in America.

Opening with James Brown’s 1973 soul hit, “The Boss,” Nelson turns his lens on Ursula Burns, the former CEO of Xerox. Burns' rise in corporate America wasn't assumed. Like many Black folks, she came from a working-class family and was encouraged to step into a “practical career" like nursing or education to make a living for herself. However, a summer internship at Xerox changed the path she would take. Burns joined the company after college, working her way up to the CEO’s Executive Assistant and eventually taking the top spot herself. As the first Black woman to head a Fortune 500 company, Burns' story seems improbable and in many ways it is. However, what Nelson unveils in Boss is that the roots of Black business in America are literally embedded in the country's soil and history.

rom the 19th century forward, Nelson chronicles the rise of Black business from apprenticeships that enslaved peoples held to the birth of barbershop franchises, Black banks, and insurance companies during the Reconstruction era and into the 20th century. Due to Jim Crow laws that forced Black people out of white spaces, Black businesses became a necessity and a source of pride. Black business owners were able to provide affordable and dignified services directly to their people. By elevating these little known narratives, like the hundreds of businesses on Black Wall Street in Tusla, Oklahoma, or the legacy of Madame C.J. Walker, the film reveals just how tenacious and ambitions these Black business owners were—especially when they had very little capital or knowledge about what it meant to run a successful company.

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Reconstruction: America After The Civil War connects America's troubling present with its horrific past

The circumstances and conditions of the current social and political climate in the United States can seem dizzying, as the civil rights of citizens who are not rich, white, and male are trampled over. Rampant white supremacy has stepped out of the shadows, marching its way back into the White House, and other branches of the United States government. The truth is that racism was never truly snuffed out in our democracy, which is how it’s managed to rise to the surface once again. In his new PBS miniseries, Reconstruction: America After The Civil War, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., unpacks the seldom discussed twelve-year period just after the Civil War. As America tried to restructure itself as a country without the foundation of slavery, while grappling with the status of millions of newly freed African Americans —former slave owners also had their own agenda. They began writing a revisionist history of slavery and the Civil War while using widespread casual violence to terrorize and disenfranchise black people and sympathetic white people.

In the second decade of the 21st-century, little has changed. We have seen the horrors of the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and the massacre of nine black worshipers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina. Though shocking and nightmarish, these conditions and acts of terror are not new. In many ways, America has ignored its history or tried to revise it. But we face our past and reconcile with it, we will continue spiraling in cycles of immense progress and devastating regression.

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Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Talks His New PBS Series 'Reconstruction: America: After the Civil War'

To understand the 2015 massacre of nine Black worshipers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina at the hands of a white supremacist — or to begin unpacking the long history and continued terror of Black people at the hands of whites, we must understand the history of America. Often, the antebellum period, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement are referenced. However, in his new four-hour PBS series, Reconstruction: America After the Civil War, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. argues that much of the racial turmoil, violence, and inequities in this country stem from the collapse of the Reconstruction era.

Ahead of the series premiere, Professor Gates hosted an evening at the New York Historical Society where he discussed Reconstruction, why it was vital to unpack this time period, and what it all means for us now. Shadow And Act was on hand for his keynote address.

"Between 1865 and 1877, Black people experienced more freedom and rights than at any other time in American history," Gates explained. "It's the embodiment of [Abraham] Lincoln's new birth of freedom, from the Gettysburg Address or what scholars later have called America's second founding. But most schools don't teach much about Reconstruction. They’re skipping from [General Robert E.] Lee's surrender at Appomattox to Rosa Parks, Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.], and the civil rights movement."

If you think about the ten year period that was Reconstruction— it seems nearly unfathomable. Black people owned land and were opening businesses. Black men were voted into various branches of the government, and some Black men had the right to vote. So, how did we go from this vision of a new America to Jim Crow, the civil rights movement and the rampant white supremacy of the 21st century?

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MONTREAL INTERNATIONAL BLACK FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW: DR. ANGELOU BARES HER SOUL IN ‘MAYA ANGELOU: AND STILL I RISE’

Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead on Dr. Maya Angelou’s 40th birthday. It was her friend Jimmy, or James Baldwin as we know and revere him, that pulled the late writer out of her devastated stupor, dragging her to a party and encouraging to tell her personal truth through the written word. Those words became her critically acclaimed autobiography, “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.” It was a book that would forever change the landscape of American literature, redefining what was acceptable for Black women to talk about publically. Two and a half decades later, Dr. Angelou extended that simple act of kindness when she comforted a young artist on a film set. This young man was in turmoil, nearly suffocating to death under a rage that he could not contain; we knew him as the great Tupac Shakur.

I was born during the final three decades of Dr. Angelou’s life. As such, she has always been familiar to me, her poems and books readily available; her words at once recognizable and irreproachable. She was this regal figure in many ways; a heroine for a girl born at the tail end of the 20th century. Dr. Angelou was, as director John Singleton called her, “a redwood tree, with deep roots in American culture.” Like her friend James Baldwin, she had a deep and innate understanding of Blackness and what it meant to be Black, not just in America but across the globe. And yet, it was not just her understanding of Black life that made her so prolific; she also understood Black womanhood in a way that spoke and continually speaks to the Black female soul.

Directors Rita Coburn Whack and Bob Hercules’ expansive documentary, “Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise” guides audiences from Dr. Angelou’s very humble beginnings to the final days of her astounding life. The film doesn’t just tell her story, but it shows in great detail how history, cultural events and particular moments significantly affected Dr. Angelou’s world view while galvanizing the activist within her.

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