Whether it’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities or the Black Twitter community, Black people have long found ways to create spaces for themselves in America.
PBS plans to celebrate those spaces with a new documentary, “Making Black America: Through the Grapevine,” that airs on PBS stations nationwide, including WNED PBS, starting next month.
The four-part series chronicles the vast social networks and organizations created by and for Black people. It will recount the establishment of the Prince Hall Masons in 1775 through the formation of all-Black towns and business districts, HBCUs, destinations for leisure, and even the social media phenomenon known as Black Twitter.
“‘Making Black America’ is not just about struggle,” said series producer and director Stacey L. Holman in a statement. “It's about the beauty, the love, the joy, and the laughter that African Americans created in spaces for us and by us.”
The executive producer, host and writer is Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. An acclaimed Harvard scholar and documentarian, Gates will sit with noted scholars, politicians and cultural leaders, and explore how Black Americans under segregation launched a renaissance that revolutionized American culture and opened up spaces where Black citizens could rise as leaders within their communities.
The film concludes with an accounting of what the dismantling of legal segregation created in America meant for the world’s Black people, and what remains for the present generation to draw upon.
“It was profoundly meaningful to work on this series at a time in history when we’ve needed community more than ever,” Gates said in a statement. “Through centuries of enslavement and segregation, repressive violence and insidious structural traps, Black Americans shut out of the ‘American Dream’ did anything but fold. Instead, they created their own dazzling array of social, political, and economic spaces — beyond the ‘white gaze’ — that gave birth to an entirely novel Black culture that would transform the nation and the world.”
“Making Black America” is a production of Inkwell Media, McGee Media and WETA. Inkwell Media, founded by Gates, and McGee Media have both produced documentary films for PBS, while WETA is the second-largest producing-station for the PBS system and is responsible for producing “PBS NewsHour.”
The series will premiere Oct. 4 at 9 p.m. ET.
