Friends----I forward this to the list because of the historical links between slavery and the current USA criminal justice system which sentences so many people of color in the USA to death..... USA: TELEVISION America: Made and Unmade by Slavery By DAVID W. BLIGHT The British colonies in North America were forged out of mercantile and imperial dreams as well as religious visions, on lands that produced money crops and in ports connected to the world of Atlantic commerce. They were built with forced labor, first of indentured servants and then of African slaves. These American colonies had the classic combination of elements for the emergence of slavery -- an abundance of land and a scarcity of labor. In time the American nation forged out of a revolution against monarchy would be a political experiment born of the Enlightenment but made -- so argues a visually stunning, ambitious, but uneven four-hour series on PBS -- by slavery. Black exploitation and bondage spawned white wealth and freedom, setting up a harrowing set of contradictions that led this experiment in republicanism down a road to destruction and a tenuous reconstruction. Slavery and the Making of America comes in the wake of a similar program, Africans in America, the remarkable six-hour documentary produced by Orlando Bagwell for PBS in 1998. Dante James, producer of this new series and director of the first episode, somewhat oddly avoids starting the narrative on the west coast of Africa with the business of the slave trade and the nearly three-and-a-half centuries of the "middle passage" of more than 30,000 slave ships to the Americas. Instead we arrive in Dutch New Amsterdam (later New York City) in 1624 with the first 11 Africans to inhabit Manhattan Island. Geographically that is a deft choice because most Americans still are largely unaware that slavery was very much a Northern as well as a Southern institution. But without West Africa and the slave ships, the program doesn't convey the depth of the cultural and psychological rupture that Africans underwent in their descent into slavery. The series makes effective use of dramatic re-creation. Bagwell did so adeptly in Africans, but James has taken the technique even further. Throughout we encounter actors depicting historical figures, usually in slow motion, with either the narrator, Morgan Freeman, or the voices of 25 talking-head scholars, carrying the story along. James and his three coproducer-directors -- Gail Pellett, Chana Gazit, and Leslie D. Farrell -- have assembled a noteworthy group of historians and writers, and at least one descendant of slaves, to provide expert commentary, with Edward Ball, Ira Berlin, Leslie M. Harris, James Oliver Horton, Nell Irvin Painter, Bernard E. Powers Jr., Deborah Gray White, Peter H. Wood, and Jean Fagan Yellin playing especially important roles. But the stars are the historical figures: Thomas Jefferson with his childhood friend and later slave valet, Jupiter; or a runaway slave in New Jersey named Titus, fighting valiantly with the British for his personal freedom in the Revolutionary War. As the series enters the 19th century, we encounter Harriet Jacobs, a runaway slave, hiding in misery in the cramped attic of her grandmother's house, legs almost crippled, hair overgrown, eyes sullen, as though madness had almost overtaken her; David Walker at a desk crafting his 1829 manuscript, An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, one of the first expressions of black activism and nationalism; and Robert Smalls, the slave-boat pilot in Charleston harbor, stunningly portrayed stealing the Confederate ship, the Planter, and sailing it to freedom in 1862. Those re-creations keep black people, slave and free, famous and unknown, at the center of the story, acting out their own destinies. That is the great strength of the series and its troublesome weakness, because it sometimes sacrifices historical thoroughness, continuity, and perspective. If slavery was, as the program contends, integral to the making of America, the first hour, "The Downward Spiral," explains how slavery itself was made. As most of us do in teaching this subject, the segment relies on the evolving story of the law of slavery to chart the institution's fiendish rise to supremacy in the colonial labor market. American colonists contrived law after law to try to codify people as property. We meet John Punch, the first black indentured servant on record to be sentenced (in 1640) to service "for life" for the crime of running away with two white servants in the Chesapeake region. The Scotsman and the Dutchman received only sentences of additional years on their indentures. Race -- as idea and reality -- mattered increasingly in the 17th century, and it too was "made" in ever insidious ways alongside slavery. "The Downward Spiral" suffers from a slow pace and the absence of a central theme. Clear maps and, perhaps, further stress on how slaves retained African culture in this period might have made it more absorbing. The segment ends with a look at the origins of South Carolina, the first true "slave society" in North America and the site of the bloody Stono slave rebellion in 1739. We learn the significance of rice as the crop that built South Carolina into a commercial success, brought to the new world by Africans. We're left with the understanding that mere survival in this raw, colonial world was the slave's greatest challenge. Spanning nearly a century from the 1740s to the 1830s, the second hour, "Liberty in the Air," manages to sweep from the 1741 slave-conspiracy trials in New York, through the American Revolution, to the growth of slavery in the early republic, and to David Walker's landmark abolitionist tract. Clear themes and several historical characters give the segment momentum -- modes of slave resistance, both violent and subtle; the Americanization of the slave population; and the appropriation by black people of revolutionary language and ideology. Titus, owned by a Quaker in Monmouth, N.J., turned 21 in 1775 and rode the "gathering storm" of the Revolution by running away to fight for the redcoats, who promised freedom in exchange for service. "Colonel Tye," as he became known, liberated his family and friends and kidnapped some key patriot leaders until he was killed in battle in 1780. Lynne V. Cheney's emboldened advocates of conservative history may squirm at the fact that one of the principal black Revolutionary War heroes fought for the loyalists. But the documentary leaves no doubt: The Revolution triggered the largest emancipation of American slaves outside the ultimate freedom won in the Civil War -- and most of that liberation came through flight to the enemy. No Valley Forge in this documentary, and the minuteman is a fugitive slave. To some Americans not accustomed to seeing American history through the prism of the black experience, and shy of the subject of slavery altogether, this may seem a strange making of the America they want to imagine. But then, when it comes to race and slavery, contradiction is at the heart of American history. The program demonstrates that by vividly pulling out phrases from some of the many petitions drafted by black people to state legislatures and Congress demanding their "liberty" and their "rights" in the wake of the founding. Three figures underline the point. A Massachusetts slave woman, Mum Bett, sued her owner and won her freedom in court in 1781, announcing her new name as Elizabeth Freeman and helping pave the way for the Massachusetts court's abolition of slavery in that state two years later. She is a heroine of the American Revolution, but not the kind we're used to seeing on prime time. Maria Stewart, freeborn in Boston, preached in the 1820s and 1830s a biblical brand of self-reliance and racial uplift to northern free-black audiences and boldly chastised black men for not defending their communities. David Walker, born free in the South, wrote what is often portrayed as the first black-nationalist text in American history. Is it, however, as this program maintains, "the most important abolitionist document of the 19th century," more so than Frederick Douglass's autobiography in 1845 or Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852? It's odd that the segment fails to mention Richard Allen, creator of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1790s, and the series generally underplays the process of slaves' Christianization. Two figures dominate the third segment, "Seeds of Destruction." One is Harriet Jacobs, the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). The other is King Cotton, the great impersonal economic force in making the America in which Jacobs's personal story of sexual abuse and psychological suffering takes place. The choice to give so much attention to Jacobs reflects recent scholarly interest. Jean Fagan Yellin's biography, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Basic Civitas Books, 2004) is the most recent winner of the Frederick Douglass book prize. Jacobs's extraordinary suffering at the hands of her North Carolina owner, her quest to save her children, and her ultimate escape to the North are the thread of this segment. She is mistakenly identified as the first woman to write a slave narrative (Mary Prince holds that distinction -- 1832), but Jacobs is the documentary's most heroic survivor. She is also the model of slavery's damage to women. The choice to feature Jacobs is fresh and wise; most viewers will learn her story for the first time. Cotton is rightly portrayed as the inscrutable monarch whose appetites drive the massive domestic slave trade (one million slaves sold to the Deep South from the upper South in the antebellum era) and, by the 1850s, force into open political conflict the future of labor and life in the American West. The series persuasively shows how Jefferson's dream of an "empire of liberty" became in many ways an "empire of slavery." "Seeds of Destruction" informs American viewers, so conscious of lists and rankings, that slaves were the largest economic asset in the nation by the 1850s. The series essentially bypasses the great outpouring of scholarship in the 1970s and 80s about slave resistance and agency through expressive and religious culture. The bracing power of slave music, folk tales, and especially of the sacred worldview through which slaves forged an alternative daily universe hardly appear here. Instead, we encounter slavery mostly through the terror of the masters' sexual abuse, the sale and separation of families, and the sounds of the lash. Moreover, the hurried approach to slavery's role in the coming of the Civil War will leave many viewers unenlightened. When Morgan Freeman declares at the end of the third hour that the United States "came apart over slavery" in 1861, the audience might not really know why. Early in the fourth hour, "The Challenge of Freedom," the causes of the war get more attention. An odd photo of a large mortar cannon (not used until 1864) is placed in a sequence about the opening of the conflict in 1861, but the series makes clear that secession and war exploded from the crisis over the expansion of slavery into the West. The dominant figure of this segment is Robert Smalls, who grew up the son of a household slave in Beaufort, S.C., and, at age 12, went to Charleston to learn the ways of the sea. Enterprising and skilled as a helmsman, he seized his chance at freedom in May 1862, when he abandoned his job working on the Confederate ship, the Planter, stole it in the dark of night, and sailed with his family and comrades out of the harbor to freedom. After the war, Smalls went into politics and became an effective state legislator and U.S. congressman. Some of the best dramatic re-creation in the series is the depiction of Smalls's escape and later career. The segment moves rapidly through the war and emancipation, stopping all too briefly to observe that black people saw beyond any legal or geographical restrictions and gave the Emancipation Proclamation the "broadest possible interpretation." And it documents the crucial service of thousands of African-Americans in the Union forces. It conveys well the brutal discrimination faced by black soldiers, and their sense of the conflict as a "holy war" for their liberation. But the script is in such haste to get through Lincoln's re-election in 1864 and assassination in 1865, and then back to Smalls and a swiftly told story of Reconstruction, that a number of links are missing. There are only brief mentions, for example, of the greatest black leader of the 19th century, Frederick Douglass. His absence is all the more astonishing given the time allotted to Stewart and Walker as key figures in black intellectual history. Sharecropping, the system of labor relations that replaced slavery across the South by the late 1860s, receives no explanation at all. The impeachment of Andrew Johnson is out of chronological order in the narration about the radical Republicans' rise to control early Reconstruction. The complex aftermath of emancipation breaks through from the scholars on camera who address the physical and emotional challenges black people faced in defining what their freedom meant to them. But the Freedmen's Bureau -- which, though limited by budget and politics, aided four million freed slaves with food, medicine, and education -- does not receive much in the way of explanation. Of course, a documentary can often evoke more than it can explain. But this series is so committed to developing the stories of its characters that a good deal of connective history is lost. When Smalls is elected to Congress in 1874 we do not learn the crucial fact that the same year the Democrats took back majority control of that body in a landslide that spelled the doom of Reconstruction. We learn that Smalls is still in Congress at the time of the disputed election of 1876, but are not informed about the actual elements of the Compromise of 1877 that settled that election and, in a real sense, ended Reconstruction. Removing federal troops from the South was only one small feature of the bargain. The series does convey one significantpoint about the Compromise of 1877: Its ultimate message was that the destiny of black people in the minds of most white people was not linked to the destiny of the nation. By carrying the story all the way to the disfranchisement laws in the South of the 1890s, the filmmakers have chosen a swift, sweeping story, punctuated by some brilliant dramatic re-creation of characters and events. Vividly re-enacted is the Hamburg, S.C., massacre of July 4, 1876, in which townspeople prevented black militiamen from marching in an Independence Day parade, then murdered several of them. (The murderers were acquitted in a mockery of a trial.) The hand of a dead black man lying on the ground, shot in the back as he fled after demanding his right to vote in the face of the Red Shirt vigilantes, is a compelling way to remember the enormity of Reconstruction violence against former slaves. An aging Robert Smalls leaning on a fence, pondering the demise of Reconstruction, is a powerful image. But I worry that the series doesn't give viewers enough context to share in Smalls's anxiety. Will they understand the scale and roots of the violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan and its many imitators? Slavery and the Making of America is visually perhaps the finest documentary yet on slavery. Maybe a program that leaves us with a deep sense of slavery's damage, while also delivering several genuine, heroic survivors of its oppression, is the kind of work on this subject necessitated by our current political condition and rising insistence from conservatives that race is no longer an issue. Viewers may not fully understand the complexities of slave culture, how slavery actually destroyed the Union, or why Reconstruction rose and fell so fast. But they will remember Bett in court, Walker at his desk, Titus on horseback, and Smalls at the helm of his ship. Viewers will also know that slavery built America into a powerful, tragically flawed nation. They will have their Whiggish notions of American progress and destiny challenged. And they will see the colonial period and the first century of an American nation depicted through the experience of slaves who demanded freedom, and not through the initiative afforded already free men. The series suggests an alternative way of seeing how property, wealth, liberty, and power came to be defined in America -- how the freedom of some was purchased with the bondage of others. And whatever the program's historical weaknesses, those are remarkable achievements. (source: David W. Blight is a professor of American history and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. His books include Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001; The Chronicle of Higher Education). Slavery and the Making of America, a 4-hour series, will be broadcast on PBS over 2 evenings, February 9 and February 16, each with 2 hour-long segments. For more information and related material, see: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery
