“One of the things that I like to do with all our PBS series is to create that sense of magic that the Black community had for me,” Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. said during a TCA press conference for Making Black America: Through the Grapevine. This four-part series premirred tonight and continues on Tuesdays at 9/8c through October 25th. “A lot of our young people don't know about that world. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to recover that world for them.”
(Courtesy of PBS/McGee Media)
Making Black America: Through the Grapevine chronicles the Black experience in America through an exploration of uniquely Black cultural institutions and creative expression. “I'm so glad this series exists because I think one of the things it's going to do is help challenge stereotypes,” shared Jason King of the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, who helped with research on the project. “You often hear this thing, ‘Black people don't like water; Black people don't like to get next to water; We can't swim.’ And then we’re talking about beaches, and Black beach culture, and you look at that incredible history. As a music teacher, I often hear there's all this listening with prejudice, right? So, people will hear Aretha Franklin, and my students will say, ‘Oh, yeah, so much pain, so much pain.’ Aretha certainly can conjure pain, but she has the full range of emotions in her music. There's pain, there's joy, there's humor. I mean, she was a great humorist, too, right? So, one of the things that I think is really important is to be able to really honor the full humanity of Black people, a multidimensional humanity. And I feel like this series is giving people a way into that so that we can actually really properly talk about Black history and Black culture without prejudice.”
When you read the title of this show, odds are that you started hearing the Motown classic by Marvin Gay. “The Grapevine's roots in Black America run much deeper than the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s,” Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explained. “John Adams wrote about the Grapevine in 1775. Booker T. Washington talked about the Grapevine in 1901. The Grapevine consisted of the formal and informal networks which, for centuries, have connected Black Americans to each other through the underground, not just as a way of spreading the news, but ways of building and sustaining our community, ways large and small, high and low, rural and urban, elite and underground, all in their own image. And we set out in this four-hour series to tell the story of the creation of Black America and how, in the making, a people did far more than just survive centuries of enslavement, Jim Crow segregation, and structural racism, as vicious and pervasive as they've been. They also, at the same time, created a world of their own, a sepia world, a world behind the veil, as the great W.E.B. Du Bois so brilliantly described it. In other words, our ancestors replicated the world, the white world, from which they were excluded behind the color line.”
“They often say that Black people make a way out of no way, which is the essence of rubbing two sticks together to make something happen,” director and producer Shayla Harris said when asked about a discovery that surprised her while making the series. “When you think about something like the Green Book, people talk about that within the context of Black people can't travel in a segregated society. But the other thing about the Green Book is that it was basically a document of 7,000 Black businesses across the country, from restaurants to hotels to beachfronts and just any little stand that people could make to put together. And I think that's something that's really fascinating and kind of uncovered and hasn't really been highlighted so much in African American history. You even think about the aspect of the nadir, which is the lowest point of Black relations, which is also the highest point of Black businesses that have ever been built in the United States. So, there is this sort of dichotomy and these things that aren't often highlighted in African American history and that I think this series really gives a platform to that I think is really exciting.”
“I had no idea about the drag balls at Hamilton Lodge No. 710,” Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. revealed about something he learned from the series. “This was an annual event. African American culture is as homophobic traditionally as any other culture, particularly through the African American church, which played such a central role in the history of our culture. Nevertheless, there were these drag balls, and they were just a part of the culture. And they were really big events, and they were quite popular. And when we think about African American women, we tell the story of the Washwomen Society and then three Black women's national organizations: the Colored Women's League of Washington, D.C., the National Federation of Afro-American Women, and the National Association of Colored Women. So, this is going to be a big surprise to a lot of people, the way that African American women were aware of the potential of their roles as leaders.”
“You look at Annie Malone or even Madam C. J. Walker, what they did for Black women and hair,” added director and producer Stacey L. Holman. “They started it. They were the innovators of that. For me, the biggest surprise was learning about Maggie Lena Walker. Here's a Black woman whose mother was formerly enslaved; her father was a Confederate soldier. And she starts a bank out of a league, and then, she builds it to this huge business. And not just a bank for men and women, but specifically catering to washer women. And a lot of men could not open bank accounts unless they had their wives with them. So, for me, just seeing the empowerment of these Black women. I mean, it's one thing to already have a society that's pushing against you, but also, a society within your society that's predominately male, to still go above and beyond was enlightening, encouraging, and just empowering.”
From stories of thriving against the odds to finding a community and resources by word of mouth, Making Black America: Through the Grapevine promises to educate and entertain at the same time. “If you watch movies about Black people, you think all we do is sit around and talk about white racism,” Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. concluded. “That's just not true. We talk about everything any other human being talks about: love, things that you're anxious about, your kids, school. You talk about what's in the news, of course, and you talk about Lebron and Steph Curry and the Celtics. But you talk about the full range, the gamut of human emotions. That is a story that is not often depicted in documentaries or in scripted films, and that's why we're doing this series.”
Catch new episodes of Making Black America: Through the Grapevine on Tuesdays at 9/8c on PBS and streaming on PBS.org.