“We were really fortunate to get two incredible actors to participate in the films,” Emmy Award Lifetime Achievement recipient Stanley Nelson said of the two new documentary films he helped make for PBS – Becoming Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom. During a recent TCA press conference to promote the films, the director explained how he settled on the narrators for each piece. “Alfre Woodard is just an incredible actress. We were looking around for who might just be a great voice as a narrator. We knew from the very beginning that we had to have a narrator on the Harriet Tubman film and that we could probably do Frederick Douglass without a narrator, using his own words. And then, when Wendell Pierce, the great actor who's going to be on Broadway starting in the fall in Death of a Salesman, agreed to do it, we just knew we had a great voice. One of the things that he said to me early on when we started talking about Frederick Douglass's voice, is he said, usually people, when they read Frederick Douglass, they kind of shout and scream and have his voice in anger, I want to do it in a different way. And he has that voice so that he can do that and make it come across.”
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Becoming Frederick Douglass premieres tonight at 10/9c and Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom is available to stream through the PBS app. “There were no recordings of either one,” co-director Nicole London added, who previously collaborated with Stanley Nelson on the Emmy-winning Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool. “That kind of actually freed us in a lot of ways creatively, because we didn't have a template to follow. So we just went for who we thought would best fit the material and fit the spirit of the films.” The same was applied to the on-screen interviewees and if you watch both films, you may notice some overlap. “Because we were dealing with two figures from the same part of the country, and also shooting during COVID, we did try to target scholars and historians and people who knew the work of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and we wanted to maximize their expertise over two films as much as we possibly could. Pretty much everyone that we interviewed, we tried to straddle for both films.”
“There was nothing ordinary about him,” Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin said of Frederick Douglass, one of the interviewees in the series who is an author and professor at Columbia University. “What I find most compelling is that he never had any self-doubt in that way. He knew what he was. He knew that slavery could not hold him or contain him.” Even the most well-read history buff may learn something new from both films, with the inclusion of how white women behaved toward their slaves. “Scholarship has been more attentive to women in general and to women as owners of slaves, as mistresses of slaves. We have fabulous work by all kinds of historians, Stephanie Evans, and different kinds of people who have focused on that. So we have a much more complex, detailed sense of the role of slave mistresses in the institution of slavery, and I think that's because of the rise of women's history actually that we're able to speak with much more confidence about that than beyond the myths that we're used to hearing.”
“When Tubman's first biography came out in 1868, there was an essay attached to the back of the biography, and the title of it is ‘Woman Whipping,’” added Dr. Kate Clifford Larson, author of Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman. “It was about mistresses and their proclivity to whip their enslaved people. And so it was known then, and somehow the myths started. You know, the kind mistress in the Deep South and et cetera through the late 19th century into the 20th century.” For one of the most studied people in the life of Harriet Tubman, Dr. Kate Cliffor Larson is eternally surprised by her story. “She may not have been lettered like Frederick Douglass was, but she was brilliant, and she too knew that slavery was not going to contain her. It is remarkable that she freed herself and then freed family and friends and then led a raid during the Civil War and was a spy and a suffragist and an advocate for the elderly and civil rights. She never stopped until the day that she died. And I think that's why she's been sort of famous since she died in 1913 and we're celebrating her more today. And with this film, people will see the real Harriet Tubman, not the myths, and the real Tubman is far more exciting and incredible than the myths that many of us grew up with.”
“Frederick Douglass is a real symbol of hope, of progressiveness, of change,” Stanley Nelson concluded. “He changed in his lifetime and became somebody different over and over again. And that's part of what the film is about.”
You can pair Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom, now streaming on the PBS app, with Becoming Frederick Douglass, premiering tonight at 10/9c on PBS