Black Reaction to ‘The Civil War’: Pain and Pride : Television: For some African-American viewers, Ken Burns’ documentary took a bit of the patina off Lincoln’s image as the Great Emancipator.

Initially, Magie Raine had no intention of watching “The Civil War” on public television this week. Like many African Americans, she knew enough about the story to know it wasn’t one she wanted to see again.

And she had little reason to expect that another production by a white filmmaker--even one that took 11 hours to tell the story--would tell her anything new, or even present the story fairly regarding African Americans.

“My feeling was, ‘I’ve been through this. I don’t want to see any more of this,’ ” said Raine, a Los Angeles-based caterer and health food producer. “I’ve seen this too many times and it’s too depressing.”

Then she started watching.

The story was as wrenching as ever, worse in some ways because producer Ken Burns appeared to pull no punches--about racism both North and South, about the political and economic issues that outweighed slavery as a real cause for the war. But Raine was glued to the set. And somehow, out of the pain, came strength.

“I was depressed, but I got a great sense of pride watching the black soldiers,” whose stories producer Ken Burns made a point of telling, Raine said. In the end, the program was no less than cathartic, bringing to the fore feelings that had been long buried and inspiring a new determination to help her people begin to heal.

Raine is not alone in having deep and sometimes painful emotions stirred by “The Civil War.”

The series, which aired last Sunday through Thursday on public television stations across the nation and will be rebroadcast on KCET Channel 28 in Los Angeles tomorrow from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., thrust ugly truths about slavery and bigotry once again into the limelight.

It raised questions about the portrayal of the role of African Americans throughout American history, even raising questions among some in the community about Burns’ depiction of black issues. And for some black viewers, it took a bit of the patina off Lincoln’s image as the Great Emancipator.

While figures showing the ethnic breakdown of viewers are not available, “The Civil War” did garner record ratings for public television. Its first night, an estimated 14 million people watched the program, a record for a Public Broadcasting Service series premiere, and by Wednesday, the ratings had increased by 3% in 24 markets monitored by A. C. Nielsen Co. Overall, the series averaged a 9.0 rating with a 13% share of the viewing audience.

“It just blew my mind,” Kasey Kennedy, a recent graduate of Loyola-Marymount college who lives in Compton, said of the program. What affected him most, he said, was realizing the depth of hatred felt for blacks by whites in the South.

“Never in the history of all mankind have I seen one race of people hate another so,” Kennedy said. “They never let up. Even in their last few minutes on Earth they were talking about killing the niggers . . . It let me see just how real it really was, that racial bigotry and hatred.”

Even Lincoln, revered by most African Americans as “The Great Emancipator,” was no great civil libertarian, according to the series.

Burns painted a picture of a Lincoln who freed the slaves in order to crush the South, in order to gain more soldiers for the North while crippling the economy of the Confederacy.

And that was painful to watch. “Lincoln is still a hero to a lot of blacks,” said Jacques Williams, special assistant to the dean of students at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles. “And while the program makes him out to be a real decent man, he doesn’t come off as a great crusader for the freedom of the slaves. So it puts some holes in that mythology.”

John Connolly, who teaches social studies and geography at the Sheenway School, a private, black-run inner-city school, said that some of the most difficult parts of the program for him came when letters were read from Confederate soldiers to their families.

One letter “referred to something about, ‘the Union has got to see that we Southerners cannot live together with niggers,’ ” Connolly said. “When you hear that letter it strikes a chord in you and you really realize that there are people who are still out there who are like that.”

Still, Connolly said he encouraged his 7th to 12th graders to watch the program and is hoping to obtain videotapes of it to use in the classroom.

“I think they can learn who they are as a people and where they have come from in such a short time,” Connolly said. “We’re not talking about a very long time between the Civil War period and now. And civil rights issues have not been around in this country just since the 1960s.”

The program brought home the hurt in more subtle ways to some members of the black community.

Gerald Horne, a professor of black studies at UC Santa Barbara, said that despite its in-depth presentation and its refusal to accept most myths of the period, the program did not attempt to shake the old romantic image of the South and its leaders. And that, he said, shows that even among many of the best educated and most well-meaning whites, there may still be a tendency to avoid a complete condemnation of the Confederacy and what it stood for.

“The Confederates tried to overthrow the government of the United States so they could continue slavery,” Horne said. “I don’t see anything romantic about that.”

Robert E. Lee, for example, is portrayed as a gentleman who, while torn about whether to remain with his West Point-educated colleagues in the North or fight for his home turf with the Confederacy, nonetheless fought the good fight once he made his decision.

“I don’t think they were sufficiently harsh towards people who were by any definition traitors,” Horne said.

Libby Clark, a community activist and journalist, agreed, and said that while the program did discuss black soldiers, it did not address the extent to which they volunteered in the North and were pressed into service in the South.

“The Southerners that went into the Army, most of them carried their black servants with them,” Clark said. “And they went in and fought alongside them.”

Still, according to Horne and others, “The Civil War” is certainly a far cry from previous attempts to chronicle the period, from “Gone With the Wind” to D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent white-supremacist film “Birth of a Nation.”

“It is a step forward, away from the moonlight and magnolia school of betrayals,” Horne said.

“The other programs that I’ve seen relating to the same thing, didn’t bring out a lot of the things that this program did,” agreed Carol Green, an administrative assistant at the Los Angeles chapter of the Urban League.

Some of the scenes and descriptions were unpleasant, Green said, but they should be viewed and discussed--again and again--despite that.

“To me its like the Jews and the Holocaust,” Green said. “A lot of people say we shouldn’t watch things like (“The Civil War”). In my opinion you, have to watch things like that to be aware, to know what happened. This did happen, and it’s something you have to face.

THE REBROADCAST Here is the schedule for the Sunday showing of the complete “The Civil War” documentary by Ken Burns on KCET-TV Channel 28.

8 a.m. The Cause

9:58 a.m. A Very Bloody Affair

11:05 a.m. Forever Free

12:28 a.m. Simply Murder

1:25 p.m. The Universe of Battle

2:57 p.m. Valley of the Shadow of Death

4:06 p.m. Most Hallowed Ground

5:27 p.m. War Is All Hell

6:35 p.m. The Better Angels of Our Nature