PBS series 'African American Lives 2' explores roots, race and identity

Jet, Feb 11, 2008 by Clarence Waldron

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This week's PBS series "African American Lives 2" makes you want to stand up with pride and celebrate the historic strength, spirit and survival skills of African-Americans.

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The revealing series helps us to realize that Black History heroes are right there in our family tree.

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., the series host, told JET: "All of us are descendants of people who survived the Middle Passage and survived slavery. If we survived the Middle Passage and we survived slavery, we ought to be able to do anything."

Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, points out, "We need to know that our heroes start at home in our own family tree. Black history starts by interviewing your mother or grandmother in the kitchen or parlor. We come from a great people and so many of us have forgotten that."

Among those who learn about their ancestors on the series are poet Maya Angelou, radio personality Tom Joyner, Johnson Publishing Company President and CEO Linda Johnson Rice, actor Don Cheadle, rock n' roll legend Tina Turner, comedian Chris Rock, actor Morgan Freeman, athlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee, theologian Peter Gomes, author Bliss Broyard and college administrator Kathleen Henderson.

"These discoveries about our ancestors are fascinating stories that everyone, regardless of race, can identify with and draw inspiration from," Gates says. "They're stories that together offer a new understanding of not only the African-American experience, but also of race in America."

Stories uncovered in the series include the tragic account of Joyner's great uncles, who in 1915 were convicted by an all-White jury and executed for the murder of a White man that new evidence shows they did not commit. Rock discovers that his maternal great-great grandfather, Julius Caesar Tingman, a Black Civil War veteran, was twice elected to the South Carolina State Legislature. Cheadle learns that his ancestors had been enslaved by Chickasaw Indians and brought to Oklahoma.

The series airs Feb. 6 and Feb. 13 at 9 p.m. Eastern time on PBS (check local listings). This special builds on the acclaimed "African American Lives" that aired in 2006.

The companion Web site for "African American Lives 2" (www.pbs.org/aalives2) provides resources for those interested in pursing their own family genealogy. A book by Gates, In Search Of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past, will be published in the spring.

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