Mediaculture: Reflections on the effect of media and culture on our faith

An important and gripping documentary series is playing on PBS stations. The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross is a six-hour series that chronicles African-American history, from the origins of slavery on the African continent through more than four centuries of remarkable events up to the present.

Presented and written by Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., the series draws on some of America’s top historians and heretofore untapped primary sources.

Though a scholar, Gates brings a personal dimension to the series, identifying with the subjects, since he is one.

The first episode, “The Black Atlantic (1500-1800),” explores the global experiences that created the African-American people. Beginning a century before the first documented “20-and-odd” slaves who arrived at Jamestown, Va., the episode portrays the earliest Africans, slave and free, who arrived on these shores.

The second episode, “The Age of Slavery (1800-1860),” illustrates how black lives changed dramatically in the aftermath of the American Revolution. For free black people, these years were a time of opportunity, but for most African Americans, the era represented a new nadir.

The third episode, “Into the Fire (1861-1896),” examines the most tumultuous and consequential period in African-American history: the Civil War and the end of slavery, and Reconstruction’s thrilling but brief “moment in the sun.” From the beginning, African Americans were agents of their liberation—by fleeing the plantations and taking up arms to serve in the U.S. Colored Troops.

The fourth episode, “Making a Way Out of No Way (1897-1940),” portrays the Jim Crow era, when African Americans struggled to build their own worlds within the harsh, narrow confines of segregation. At the turn of the 20th century, a steady stream of African Americans left the South, fleeing the threat of racial violence and searching for opportunities in the North and West.

The final two episodes, “Rise! (1940-1968)” and “A More Perfect Union (1968-2013),” are aired on Nov. 19 and 26. Viewers can access the series at pbs.org.

This narrative is one most of us never heard in school. Beyond the broad outlines of history we may know, here we encounter many stories of individuals and details that expand our understanding of the extreme trials African Americans faced and overcame.

One historian points out that when our country was formed, slavery was assumed because the nation couldn’t exist without it. Slaves built much of the infrastructure of the United States, including roads and buildings, such as the White House and the Capitol.

There were many uprisings by slaves, not just that of Nat Turner. And when the Civil War began, a half million slaves ran away.

Of the 950,000 deaths in the Civil War, 40,000 were African Americans.

African Americans influenced much of our culture, including food and music.

We learn about figures unknown to many of us. Ida B. Wells, co-owner and editor of a black newspaper in Memphis, attacked the evils of lynching in her newspaper, risking her own life. By 1900, there were three lynchings per week in the South. She called lynching “an instrument of terror.”

This series is well-worth watching and discussing. We have much to learn from this history.

Gordon Houser is associate editor of The Mennonite.