It’s a relief that Henry Louis Gates Jr. has for now given up his genealogy show and returned to the African-American history that first inspired him.
His new six-part “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” (PBS, 8 p.m.) at once recalls classic black history specials while at the same time going much deeper. He finds obscured stories worth retelling, hobnobs almost exclusively with historians of color and frames the story in radically different terms.
“This isn’t the history of George Washington; it’s the history of his slave Harry Washington,” he said at a session in August at the TV critics press tour. “This isn’t the history of Abraham Lincoln. It’s the history of the contraband slaves whose existence was enabled by the Union army, the Civil War, and the Emancipation Proclamation.
“This isn’t the story of JFK and LBJ making Civil Rights legislation. It’s the story of the people who risked their lives to make court rulings and legislation real, people such as Ella Baker, Diane Nash, John Lewis, Hamilton Holmes …Ruby Bridges and Charlayne Hunter Gault.”
By now the man who prefers to be called “Skip” was on a roll.
“This isn’t the story of ‘American Bandstand,’ he went on. “It’s the story of ‘Soul Train’ and how black culture shaped and became the lingua franca of American popular culture. It’s a story of how black people contributed to the shaping of this country overall and in the most fundamental ways, how their labor and imagination, their wit and their art, their hopes and their dreams, their tragedy and their tears made this country and how they made themselves.”
Gates says he was inspired by the power he saw as a teen in Bill Cosby’s documentary “Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed.” which he said “led me to dream deep down about being able to make a similar series one day for our generation, something showing the whole sweep of the African Americans’ presence in the United States from the time the first slaves came to the election of Barack Obama.”
“Many Rivers to Cross” examines exactly half a millenium of African American history, Gates said, “starting in the year 1513 and ending exactly 500 years later with Barack Obama’s reelection.”
And in tonight’s first episode he begins with the story of a free black man, Juan Garrido, the first black conquistador.
“This guy is amazing. He was born in 1480 in West Africa. He traveled as a freeman to Portugal and Spain, and then he accompanied Ponce de León,” Gates says. “They both arrived in Florida in 1513, more than a century before the first 20 Africans arrived in Jamestown.”
That’s more than a century before the normal start for African American history, 1620 in Jamestown. “In episode one and throughout the six hours of the series, we situate the African American story within the larger story first of American history, but also of black Atlantic history as well, showing connections between what happened in our country with what happened in Haiti, in Cuba, in Mexico, and throughout the Caribbean and Latin America.”
Some 11 million African slaves were shipped to the New World, with about 388,000 of them coming to the United States — “Brazil got 5 million slaves alone,” he says.
“What we’ve done is trace the history of those 388,000 Africans all the way down to their 42 million descendents living today,” Gates says. “We trace in this series the world they created, how they created that world, how they survived, and how they eventually thrived.”
With Gates’ easygoing style, with him asking questions he knew the answer to, adding a sense of humor and chuckling with his guests, “We strove to create the effect of overhearing a conversation that black people have had with each other over the past five centuries about their fate in this country.”