Many Rivers to Cross: From Black Power to the Black PresidentPosted in Articles, Barack Obama, History, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2013-11-26 21:57Z by Steven |
Many Rivers to Cross: From Black Power to the Black President
The Root
2013-11-26
Peniel E. Joseph, Professor of History
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts
In the sixth and final installment of his PBS series, Henry Louis Gates Jr. leads us from the black power movement to the historic election of Barack Obama.
Americans have notoriously short memories when it comes to race and history, especially black history. And it’s in that context that Harvard professor and The Root’s editor-in-chief, Henry Louis Gates Jr., has looked back through time to bring us The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, a six-part documentary film, airing on PBS, that concludes tonight and that has offered an important capstone to a year full of important civil rights anniversaries.
Over the past five weeks, the series has taken viewers to locations around the world to explore the origins of trans-Atlantic slavery, plumb the depth of America’s antebellum era and chronicle the exploits for black political, economic and cultural self-determination in the Civil War’s bloody aftermath.
And after watching this series, which is a timely corrective to contemporary discourse around race relations, all Americans will gain a better understanding of the way in which both the distant and recent past continue to shape and inform our national present…
Read the entire article here.