Black History Month on PBS

The flagship show for PBS last month was The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song (MC-85, PBS), in which Henry Louis Gates Jr. follows up his series on Reconstruction with a survey of music and worship at the heart of the Black American history.  Well-produced and well-illustrated – except perhaps for the repeated shots of PBS "celebrity" Gates walking through various vacant Black churches, alone with his cane – the two two-hour episodes cover a lot of ground, from African roots through emancipation, and between the push and pull of respectability vs. resistance, even to the margins of hiphop and the Nation of Islam.
 
On “American Experience,” they offered an encore of Going Back to T-Town (PBS) to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre in 1921.  At the time the documentary was produced in 1993, there were still personal voices testifying to life in the Greenwood neighborhood, known as “Black Wall Street,” both before and after the murderous white riot that left three hundred Blacks dead, and most of the neighborhood burned to the ground.  It’s vital to remember these buried stories if this country is ever going to confront and repair its history of violent racism.
 
The newest American Experience episode was Voice of Freedom (PBS).  I wasn’t sure that the story of Marion Anderson’s free concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, promoted by Eleanor Roosevelt after the DAR prevented the singer from performing at Constitution Hall, was sufficient to warrant a two-hour treatment, but it turned out to be well worth the time, broadening its scope to include not just her entire against-the-odds career, but the history of the Lincoln Memorial from its dedication in 1922, where African-Americans were ironically segregated and excluded, to MLK’s March on Washington in 1963, when Marion Anderson sang again from the very same spot, covering an arc of America’s history of race relations.
 
On “American Masters,” How It Feels to be Free (PBS) similarly related how six Black female entertainers – including Lena Horne, Nina Simone, and Cicely Tyson – broke down barriers and advanced the cause of Black liberation, from the 1940s into the 1980s.  Again, I found it well worth the two-hour running time.
 
On the other hand, I can neither recommend nor warn you against the “Masterpiece” program The Long Song (MC-78, PBS).  I felt I’d seen enough after the first hour-long episode, but found myself going back for the other two, largely for the lead performance by Tamara Lawrance, as a house slave on a Jamaica plantation in the 1830s, immediately before and after slavery was abolished in the British empire.  I was less taken with Hayley Atwell as the plantation mistress, who verged on caricature, a disappointment to me after I was so impressed by her in Howards End (perhaps the Marvel universe is where she belongs, but I’m never seen any of her many appearances as Agent Carter).  Her performance seemed schizophrenic, while the male lead seemed muddled and befuddled in his relationship to both women, and his switch from freedom-lover to belligerent overseer.  There was, however, a definite aura of authenticity in the plantation’s Black community, and the historical moment is certainly of interest.  Too bad it was so Masterpiece-y.