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Perhaps it’s fortunate that PBS’s “Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise” — a four-hour documentary that examines the past 50 years of African American history — is airing a week after the presidential election.
Racial issues were evident throughout the race to the White House, as well as amid conversations about Black Lives Matter.
“You know, frankly, I’m surprised at the pushback,” says Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. when asked about the name of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“It’s such a simple, catchy phrase. On the face of it, who could argue with it? But it has disturbed some people.”
Gates was behind 2013’s Emmy-winning “The African Americans: Many Rivers To Cross,” which looked at black history from slavery up to the election of President Barack Obama.
The historian says he was casting about for a follow-up to “Rivers” when Ken Chenault, the CEO of American Express, suggested the concept for “And Still I Rise.”
“I was 15 in 1965, and Ken and I are about the same age,” notes Gates. “He said, ‘For you, it’s our lifetime, but the last 50 years is really history.’ ”
So the conceit of the new documentary is: What would you tell civil-rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. about what has happened to African Americans over the last five decades?
“You’d say there’s a black man in the White House, right? And that’s good. And he’d say, ‘Wow. Was there a revolution?’ ” jokes the professor.
But Gates — paraphrasing Dickens — believes that for blacks, it is the best of times and the worst of times in America. He sees affirmative action as helping to create a larger middle and upper class for African Americans since 1970. Yet “the child poverty rate in the black community is almost exactly the same” as it was when King was murdered in 1968.
“Yes, symbolically, we have a beautiful black family in the White House, but, on the other hand,” he says, “a huge percentage of our people are still caught in a cycle of poverty, victims of violence, black on black violence and violence visited by the police. All of that is the complicated truth.”
Gates, himself, knows how lucky it is to be able to escape from poverty. He grew up in West Virginia. His father worked in a paper mill and was a part-time janitor, while his mother cleaned houses. He says in 1969 he got into Yale because of affirmative action, and points out only six black men graduated from the university in 1970.
His ’73 class had 96 black men and women graduate, including Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee from Houston, Kurt Schmoke, the first black mayor of Baltimore, and Ben Carson. Yes, the surgeon and politician.
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SOURCE: Rob Lowman
Los Angeles Daily News
