TV Review : ‘Roots of Rebellion’

Film maker Orlando Bagwell, who made some of the most charged film segments of the first half of the “Eyes on the Prize” series, has cast his perceptive eye on the first prize sought by African-Americans--freedom from slavery--in “Roots of Rebellion,” the final edition of “The American Experience” (tonight at 9 p.m., Channels 28 and 15).

Bagwell is a judicious, resourceful documentarian with a sense of poetry, which provides his film--on the sources and outcome of the Underground Railroad--with a dimension of the epic.

The Railroad, a clandestine network begun by ex-slaves like Harriet Tubman, formed a human escape hatch for slaves fleeing to the North. It is difficult to say who was more courageous: the slaves, fleeing the plantation, darting through backlands as their former owners pursued them (even into free Pennsylvania); or a woman of the fiber of Tubman, who reentered the South more than 15 times to usher people to freedom.

That courage, of course, had its own precedents. There was the liberation preachments of Nat Turner, the writings of abolition’s intellectual fountainhead, Frederick Douglass, and his few white supporters.

Bagwell mentions these, but the one-hour format hems in his story. You can sense a bigger film aching to break out, if only PBS would allow it.

Still, his film suggests how the Railroad ushered in a fundamental shift in American values. He weaves together threads of historical analysis (care of historian Vincent Harding), memories of slave and slave-owner descendants, period photos and illustrations, audio recordings, an extraordinary range of slave and abolitionist music and unhackneyed dramatic re-creation.