Making Black America: Through The Grapevine
A four-part PBS series from executive producer, host, and writer Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Making Black America draws viewers into an extraordinary world that showcased Black people’s ability to collectively prosper, defy white supremacy and define Blackness in ways that transformed America itself.
Excluded from White society on so many fronts, African Americans in the long years from slavery to desegregation constructed their own society and, in doing so, established networks that resisted, and eventually toppled, Jim Crow, while giving birth to new cultural forms that transformed world culture, from literature to jazz.
Throughout the series, Professor Gates inverts the standard narrative of history as a battleground over the repressive, violent forces of white supremacy and of African Americans making “progress” by crossing the color line, and instead center the arc on the private and communal lives of those who, trapped by Jim Crow rule, nevertheless created a diverse, and vibrant, world of their own.
The series begins on the heels of the American Revolution with the establishment of the first African American fraternal order, the Prince Hall Masons in 1775, that helped lay a foundation for self-determination, mutual care, and economic independence in the dawning 19th century. After Emancipation and Reconstruction, the borders of the color line were drawn as rigidly in the North as they were in the South. For the African American community, survival became a form of resistance.
Under the constant threat of racial violence, they built Black enclaves, settlements, and towns, and used these spaces to strengthen communities, fight for full citizenship, and educate their children for the future.
Professor Gates sits with noted scholars, politicians, cultural leaders and old friends to discuss this world behind the color line and what it looks like today. Making Black America takes viewers into an extraordinary world that showcased Black people’s ability to collectively prosper, defy white supremacy and define Blackness in ways that transformed America itself.
Professor Gates, with directors Stacey L. Holman and Shayla Harris, chronicles the vast social networks and organizations created by and for Black people beyond the reach of the “White gaze.”
Learn more about the series at www.pbs.org/weta/making-black-america.
