NPT CELEBRATES BLACK HISTORY MONTH; Special Programming Fills February 2007

In celebration of Black History Month, February 2007, Nashville Public Television -NPT-Channel 8 – will broadcast an engaging lineup of new and encore presentations honoring and exploring African-American history.

Highlights of the month include the broadcast premier of NOVA “Forgotten Genius,” which tells the story of one of the great African-American scientists of the 20th century – Percy Julian. INDEPENDENT LENS “Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life” profiles Duke Ellington’s co-composer, arranger and right-hand man. “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,” screened at last year’s Nashville Film Festival, is an in-depth look, through the lens of former college star athlete Byron Hurt, at the sexism, violence and homophobia in rap music and hip-hop culture.

Also new in February is SISTERS OF SELMA: BEARING WITNESS FOR CHANGE, an examination of the role that Catholic nuns played in the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights marches of 1965. THE STORY OF OSCAR BROWN JR., profiles the legendary performer and producer of the landmark musical Opportunity Please Knock. NPT sits down with the seminal civil rights leader in A CONVERSATION WITH JAMES LAWSON. Encore presentations include the NPT original production DEFORD BAILEY: A LEGEND LOST, SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA and Ken Burn’s UNFORGIVABLE BLACKNESS: THE RISE AND FALL OF JACK JOHNSON

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2007

SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA: “The Downward Spiral”
11:00 p.m. – 12:00 a.m. (Four part series; continues on 2/8, 2/15 & 2/22)
Morgan Freeman narrates this groundbreaking series the chronicles the institution of American slavery from its origins in 1619 — when English settlers in Virginia purchased 20 Africans from Dutch traders — through the arrival of the first 11 slaves in the northern colonies (in Dutch New Amsterdam), the American Revolution, the Civil War, the adoption of the 13th Amendment and Reconstruction.

Episode one, “The Downward Spiral” opens in the 1620s with the introduction of 11 men of African descent and mixed ethnicity into slavery in New Amsterdam. Working side by side with white indentured servants, these men labored to lay the foundations of the Dutch colony that would later become New York. There were no laws defining the limitations imposed on slaves at this point in time. Enslaved people, such as Anthony d’Angola, Emmanuel Driggus, and Frances Driggus could bring suits to court, earn wages, and marry. But in the span of a hundred years, everything changed. By the early 18th century, the trade of African slaves in America was expanding to accommodate an agricultural economy growing in the hands of ambitious planters. After the 1731 Stono Rebellion (a violent uprising led by a slave named Jemmy) many colonies adopted strict “black codes” transforming the social system into one of legal racial oppression.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2007

NOVA “Forgotten Genius” (Broadcast Premiere)
7:00-9:00 p.m. CST
His house was firebombed. A scandalous affair got him fired in the middle of the Depression. The doors of academia were slammed in his face, since no one expected an African American to rise higher than teaching high school. Yet Percy Julian overcame every obstacle to become a world-class scientist, self-made millionaire and civil rights pioneer. NOVA presents his dramatic life story in a two-hour “Lives in Science” biography.

THE STORY OF OSCAR BROWN JR. (Broadcast Premiere)
9:00-10:00 p.m. CST
This documentary focuses on Chicago native Oscar Brown Jr.’s work as a writer and performer for over a half a century. Starting at the tender age of 15 he was a radio performer with the network series “Secret City.” He also was a key player in Richard Durham’s “Destination Freedom: Black Radio Days” series from 1948-1950. Brown’s musical explorations included sharing the bill with such greats as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderly. His one-man show Oscar Brown Jr. Entertains led one critic to hail him as “a musical genius.” In 1967, he produced the musical Opportunity Please Knock in conjunction with a huge youth gang known as the Blackstone Rangers and gained national recognition when gang members appeared on the Smothers Brothers CBS television show. He also hosted the popular PBS television show FROM JUMP STREET – THE STORY OF BLACK MUSIC.

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 7, 2007

THE SUPREME COURT “A Nation of Liberties” (Broadcast Premiere)
8:00-9:00 p.m. CST (Episode 4: “The Rehnquist Revolution” follows at 9:00 p.m.)
Episode three of the four-part series, “A Nation of Liberties” focuses on the Supreme Court’s reaction to state and federal legislation on Bill of Rights freedoms, with special attention to the explosion of civil rights cases from the early 1940s to the present. The program highlights the Warren Court as it confronted the issues of race, gender and religion in the post-war period, when six newly appointed justices were just beginning to find their way on the Court. Over the next quarter-century, the belief in individual freedoms and rights would push the nation, and the Supreme Court, towards a new agenda.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2007

INDEPENDENT LENS “Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life” (Broadcast Premiere)
10:00-11:30 p.m. CST
As Duke Ellington’s co-composer, arranger and right-hand man, Billy Strayhorn wrote some of the greatest American music of the 20th century. But as a gay man in the 40s and 50s, Strayhorn had to lead a discreet existence, while Ellington played to thunderous applause on center stage. This film tells the story of the unheralded man who changed jazz and popular music forever, maintaining artistic and personal integrity while challenging prejudice along the way. By Robert Levi.

DEFORD BAILEY: A LEGEND LOST
9:30-10:00 p.m. CST
Harmonica virtuoso DeFord Bailey was one of the first stars of the Grand Ole Opry. Yet history knows almost nothing of this lost legend. In the 1930s, at the height of Jim Crow, rising country stars like Bill Monroe and Roy Acuff would take DeFord on the road because they knew that his name and talent would draw crowds. Because his medium was radio, listeners never knew that DeFord was black until they saw him live. He would often sacrifice comfort, dignity and safety to travel and perform. Considered one of the most unexplained events in Grand Ole Opry history, DeFord left the stage in the early 1940s and refused to perform professionally. This half-hour documentary – an NPT original production — tells the story of DeFord’s career and early departure from the stage, and reveals how black musicians have influenced many legends of country music. Lou Rawls narrates.

SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA: “Liberty in the Air”
11:00 p.m. – 12:00 a.m.
From the 1740s to the 1830s, the institution of slavery continued to support economic development. As the slave population reproduced, American planters became less dependent on the African slave trade. Ensuing generations of slaves developed a unique culture that blended elements of African and American life. Episode two follows the paths of several African Americans, including Thomas Jefferson’s slave Jupiter, Colonel Tye, Elizabeth Freeman, David Walker, and Maria Stewart, as they respond to the increasingly restrictive system of slavery. At the core of this episode is the Revolutionary War, an event which reveals the contradictions of a nation seeking independence while simultaneously denying freedom to its black citizens.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2007

A CONVERSATION WITH JAMES LAWSON (Broadcast Premiere)
9:30-10:00 p.m.
In this NPT original production, one of the leaders of the civil rights movement in Nashville shares his story and discusses the important role the city played in the national struggle for racial equality. While in college in Ohio in the late 40s, James Lawson joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, America’s oldest pacifist organization, where he was first exposed to the nonviolent teachings of Gandhi and fellow black minister Howard Thurman. Upon arriving in Nashville 1957, he began holding seminars to train volunteers in Gandhian tactics of nonviolent direct action. Drawing on the example of Christ’s suffering, he taught growing numbers of black and white students how to organize sit-ins and any other form of action that would force America to confront the immorality of segregation. Lawson had to convince other blacks that nonviolence was rooted in the spirituality of Jesus and the stories of Old Testament. He coordinated the Freedom Rides in 1961 and the Meredith March in 1966, and while working as a pastor at the Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, played a major role in the sanitation workers strike of 1968. On the eve of his assassination, Martin Luther King called Lawson “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.”

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2007

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE “New Orleans” (Broadcast Premiere)
8:00-10:00 p.m. CST
From director Stephen Ives and writer Michelle Ferrari comes a fascinating portrait of one of America’s most distinctive and beloved cities: a small French settlement surrounded by water that ultimately would become the home of America’s biggest party, Mardi Gras, and its most original art form, jazz; the site of explosive struggles with both integration and segregation, and a proving ground for national ideas about race, class and equality; a mirror that reflects both the best and the worst in America. Jeffrey Wright narrates.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2007

UNFORGIVABLE BLACKNESS: THE RISE AND FALL OF JACK JOHNSON (Part 1)
8:00-10:00 p.m. (continues on 2/22)
This film by Ken Burns chronicles the life and career of boxer Jack Johnson, the first African-American heavyweight champion and one of the greatest fighters of the 20th century. Johnson ultimately lost his title in a bout in Cuba in 1915, after fleeing the United States following his federal conviction for allegedly violating the Mann Act, a progressive-era law intended to crack down on commercialized vice but used against Johnson to create an example against, to quote the prosecutor, “the evils of miscegenation.”

Part One follows Johnson’s remarkable journey from his humble beginnings in Galveston, Texas, as the son of former slaves, to his entry into the brutal world of professional boxing, where, in turn-of-the-century Jim Crow America, the heavyweight champion was an exclusively “white title.” Johnson lived his life out loud, wearing fancy clothes, driving fast cars and openly flaunting the conventions of the time by dating and then marrying white women. Despite the odds, Johnson was able to batter his way up through the professional ranks, and in 1908 he became the first African-American to earn the title Heavyweight Champion of the World. Johnson’s victory set in motion a worldwide search for a “white hope” to restore the title to the white race. On July 4, 1910, in Reno, Nevada, ex-champion Jim Jeffries, the new “Great White Hope,” came out of retirement to challenge Jack Johnson. Johnson easily won the contest, billed as the Battle of the Century, despite a hostile crowd and a steady stream of racial epithets hurled from Jeffries’ corner. Johnson’s victory provoked race riots all around the country, but his troubles were only just beginning.

SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA: “Seeds of Destruction”
11:00 p.m. – 12:00 a.m.
One by one the Northern states, led by Vermont in 1777, adopted laws to abolish and phase out slavery. Simultaneously, slavery in the Southern United States entered the period of its greatest expansion. Episode three, which starts at the beginning of the 1800s, examines slavery’s increasing divisiveness in America as the nation develops westward and cotton replaces tobacco as the country’s most valuable crop. The episode weaves national events through the personal histories of two African American slaves — Harriet Jacobs and Louis Hughes — who not only managed to escape bondage, but also exposed the horrific realities of the slave experience in autobiographical narratives. These and other stories of physical, psychological, and sexual exploitation fed the fires of a reinvigorated abolitionist movement. With a diverse membership comprised of men and women, blacks and whites, and led by figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Amy Post, abolitionist sentiment gathered strength in the North, contributing to the widening fissure and imminent break-up of the nation.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2007

SISTERS OF SELMA: BEARING WITNESS FOR CHANGE (Broadcast Premiere)
9:00-10:00 P.M. CST
This program is an unabashedly spiritual take on the Selma, Alabama, voting rights marches of 1965 from some of its unsung foot soldiers – Catholic nuns. Following the violence of “Bloody Sunday,” sisters from around the country answered Dr. Martin Luther King’s call to join the protests in Selma. Never before in American history had avowed Catholic women made so public a political statement. Risking personal safety to bring change, the sisters found themselves being changed in turn – and they tell viewers how. Selma blacks testify about the importance of Catholic clergy in their lives, and explain why it took until the year 2000 for them to become fully enfranchised. Newfound dramatic archival footage carries much of the story. In 2003, director Jayasri Hart reunited the nuns to let them view themselves and the protests on tape for the first time. Their recorded reactions help narrate the film. Other Selmians, Catholic and Protestant, white and black, give their views on the nuns’ contributions to history.

INDEPENDENT LENS “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes” (Broadcast Premiere)
11:00 p.m. -12:00 a.m. CST
This film takes an in-depth look at machismo in rap music and hip-hop culture — where creative genius, poetic beauty and mad beats collide with misogyny, violence and homophobia. By Byron Hurt.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2007

UNFORGIVABLE BLACKNESS: THE RISE AND FALL OF JACK JOHNSON (Part 2)
8:00-10:00 p.m.
By the end of 1910, as Part Two begins, Johnson was on top of the world, the undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the World; the most famous — and the most notorious — African-American on earth. But forces were gathering in America to try to stop him. When no one could be found to beat the champion in the ring, the U.S. government set out to destroy him in the courts, using his sometimes-troubled relationships with white women as the excuse to prosecute him. Unfairly charged with violating the Mann Act, a progressive era piece of legislation designed to stop commercialized vice — not relationships between consenting adults — Jack Johnson was convicted and sentenced to jail. Skipping bail, Johnson fled to Europe, where he remained a fugitive for many years. In 1915 in Havana, Cuba, he defended his title in a still-controversial fight against Jess Willard, a fight that went on for 26 rounds in 105 degree heat. Determined to live his life regardless of the confines imposed by his color, Jack Johnson emerges as a central figure in America’s ongoing struggle to deal with the question of race.

SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA: “The Challenge of Freedom”
11:00 p.m. – 12:00 a.m.
Episode four looks at Civil War and Reconstruction through the experiences of South Carolina slave Robert Smalls. It chronicles Smalls’ daring escape to freedom, his military service, and his tenure as a congressman after the war. As the events of Smalls’ life unfold, the complexities of this period in American history are revealed. The episode shows the transformation of the war from a struggle for union to a battle over slavery. It examines the black contribution to the war effort and traces the gains and losses of newly freed African Americans during Reconstruction. The 13th amendment abolished slavery in 1865, the 14th and 15th amendments guaranteed black civil rights, and the Freedmen’s Bureau offered aid to former slaves throughout the 1870s. Yet simultaneously, the formation of militant groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan threatened the future of racial equality and segregation laws began to appear across the country. Slavery’s eradication had not brought an end to black oppression.