Over Objections, Henry Hampton Keeps His Eyes on Another Prize

For filmmaker Henry Hampton, making “The Great Depression”--his new seven-hour series for PBS about America during its hard-luck, “brother-can-you-spare-a-dime” era of the 1930s--was a natural progression backward.

It is his first work since “Eyes on the Prize” and “Eyes on the Prize II,” the epochal twin series on race and civil rights. And “Eyes” led him to it. While doing research for those series, Hampton began to see “linkages, the people on whose shoulders” the civil rights movement rested “and I began to have this notion of the continuing history--not only going forward but coming backward.”

“The Great Depression,” a $4.2-million work, begins airing tonight and continues for three subsequent Mondays, following reruns of the Southern civil rights drama “I’ll Fly Away.” The first three Mondays feature two-hour programs; the last one, on Nov. 15, is one hour.

“One of the curiosities I had for many years was why the (civil rights) movement happened (when it did),” Hampton explained by phone from his offices at Blackside, Inc. in Boston, “and how it happened so quickly. While it seems like a miracle of social change, it was really based on (people like) those Southern (tenant) farmers”--black and white sharecroppers seen forming a union in the show’s fifth hour--”(Northern union leader) A. Phillip Randolph and Charlie Houston (the lead NAACP lawyer in a Maryland integration case). People had been at the barricades for a long time.”

An African-American, Hampton was born in St. Louis in 1940 as the Depression was fast disappearing in the wake of the arms buildup for World War II. His father was the chief surgeon in the city’s black hospital. So Hampton had no seminal experience to bring to the project as he did in “Eyes on the Prize,” having witnessed the 1965 clash between Alabama troopers and civil rights activists at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the march from Selma to Montgomery.

But the subject appealed to him for much the same reason: The Depression and the civil rights movement are “landmark moments, those crucial points when America shifts gear,” he explained. “The Depression, which has basically been reduced almost to a one-dimensional notion of a (1929) stock-market crash, is really a full-bodied, boisterous, active time.”

To “The Great Depression,” Hampton and his producer teams bring a multicultural, multiregional approach. (Unlike Ken Burns of “Civil War” fame, Hampton rarely goes out on interviews, instead overseeing the work of his field producers.) The first hour is set in Detroit with massive layoffs due to overproduction; the second hour concentrates on rural Arkansas and Oklahoma. In the third, it’s New York City, which began to thrive under the influx of New Deal money--in Harlem, however, unemployment reached 50%--then on to California in the fourth hour--migrants from Oklahoma, movies, socialist Democratic gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair and all.

In each episode, the Depression’s impact on disparate groups is shown, and the sixth hour charts the dual increase in lynchings and anti-Semitism.

“One of the continuing lessons of the series,” Hampton said, “is that when economic times get tight, we push democracy up right against the wall.”

The series’ themes are relevant today, Hampton said, citing race, class, welfare, immigration, civil rights and the environment as examples, along with “the role of government, the responsibility of people to that government, the importance of leadership.”

Yet he didn’t find making “The Great Depression” depressing. “In spite of the imagery and all the problems or the sense of it being a bad time,” Hampton said, “I really was surprised at people’s grit and their capacity to fight it.”

Talk about grit. In the years before the first “Eyes on the Prize” in 1987, with cutbacks in government support for documentary filmmakers, Hampton came close to bankruptcy: “I still remember those lean days.” He laughs. “I wasn’t smart enough to know I was bankrupt. A lot of people in the Depression operated just that way.”

After “Eyes II” in January, 1990, Hampton, who had been stricken with polio when he was 15, was found to have lung cancer. He got a bone marrow transplant in June, 1991. By August, he was attending what senior producer Terry Kay Rockefeller calls “boot camp” with college professors lecturing on the Depression at Tufts. Hampton said it’s been two years since his last sign of disease.

When Hampton first sought funding for this project, there was resistance to his tackling the Depression. As he told the magazine Emerge: “It’s funny, black people aren’t supposed to do American history. . . . (Some people) get kind of huffy and they say, ‘Well, wait a minute, he’s doing Okies, F.D.R. and national politics.’ ”

As for those who objected, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to keep them unnamed,” Hampton said recently. “It’s not an uncommon academic feeling. . . . As long as this kind of thing does not interrupt my intent, it’s relatively harmless. Just as many fine white historians told a lot of strong black history, I think you can be black and have a useful perspective on American history.”