Putting a Face on Slavery

Vocal critics of “The Secret Life of Desmond Pfeiffer” are mighty worried about the trivialization of slavery they insist is implicit in UPN’s barely breathing speck of a comedy about a black British butler who is the only person of intelligence in a cartoonish version of Abe Lincoln’s White House.

As “Desmond Pfeiffer” gets feebler by the week and gasping for viewers despite the publicity, here’s hoping its loudest foes can find time on their soapbox to comment on a television venture that is really about slavery. And which, coincidentally, opens tonight opposite doomed “Desmond.”

The secret lives of Venture Smith, Richard Allen, Gabriel, Harriet Jacobs and Anthony Burns? They’re no longer secret on TV, thanks to the new PBS documentary “Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery,” one of the medium’s best and most vibrant, artful and revealing U.S. history lessons in some time.

Just as the Jewish Holocaust has been a steady performer at the box office through the years, slavery is clearly hot in the late ‘90s, from last year’s botched “Amistad” to Oprah Winfrey’s much-praised new “Beloved,” with more such movie projects in the works.

Yet these 90-minute PBS episodes more than hold their own in any crowd, running back to back across four nights this week while depicting in scholarly yet stirring fashion the lives of Africans in this land from the early 17th century to the start of the Civil War.

Chronologically, “Africans in America” is a prologue to Henry Hampton’s pair of fine “Eyes on the Prize” documentaries on PBS. And some of its message about many slaves seeing British forces as allies during the Revolutionary War resonated earlier in another first-rate PBS documentary, “Liberty.”

But its scope and black point of view are extremely rare for TV.

Slavery’s codification of evil and inhumane cruelty is not seen here merely as the drumbeat leading to a Civil War fought primarily by whites, but as a thick strand in a noose that not only lynched Africans but also loomed, symbolically, above the entire nation. Most importantly, “Africans in America” is not about slavery being imposed on some faceless, dehumanized black monolith, but on fully formed individuals. This account of their suffering and occasional triumphs against all odds emancipates them from the obscure corners of history where they had been buried until fairly recently.

Rebellious slave Nat Turner and heroic Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman are here, of course. But so are lesser-known figures who include Smith, who was captured in West Africa and sold to a Rhode Islander but who bought himself and his family out of slavery, only later to purchase slaves himself.

They also include Allen, a freed slave who opened an African church in Philadelphia and later forged 40 delegates from four states into the first National Negro Convention.

And the African known as Gabriel, whose aborted slave insurrection in 1800 predated Turner’s brief, bloody revolt by 31 years.

And Jacobs, an escaped North Carolina slave who hid in the South for seven years before being smuggled by sea to an uncertain future in Philadelphia.

And fugitive slave Burns, whose plight triggered a violent clash between Boston abolitionists and the federal government in 1854.

Their stories and many others become the nubby fabric of this tragic odyssey. It’s told superbly by executive producer Orlando Bagwell and his colleagues through a fine narration delivered beautifully by Angela Bassett, voice-overs from such actors as Danny Glover, Carl Lumley and Andre Braugher, insightful comments from many historians and inspired use of extravagantly creative reenactments, along with Bernice Johnson Reagon’s aching, wailing, gospel-style music. Quite an impressive package.

“Africans in America” is especially notable for its ironies. Not only Venture Smith’s metamorphosis from slave to free man to slave owner, but also the entire “contradiction,” as historian David Blight puts it, “of slavery in a land of liberty and freedom.” A contradiction exemplified by founding father Thomas Jefferson, whose platitude for the ages about all men “being created equal” clashed with his slave ownership and insistence that Africans were biologically inferior and as unable as children to care for themselves.

One of the most striking segments here makes Harriet Jacobs--whose escape to Philadelphia did not guarantee her continued freedom--and Anthony Burns metaphors for the betrayal implicit in the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which found Northerners and the federal government helping to return former slaves to their masters.

This leads to the infamous Dred Scott ruling that Africans “who came to this country, whether free or slave, were not intended to be included in the Constitution” or thought of as having rights “which the white man was bound to respect.”

Then it’s 1859 and time, notes Bassett, for the “greatest sale of human beings in the history of the Unites States,” when 429 slaves are auctioned off at a racetrack outside Savannah, Ga., to pay the debts of their master. As some of their names--Alexander, Daphne, Oscar . . . --appear on a ledger sheet, you try to imagine their faces and what they were thinking when sold like furniture by a man who had called them his family.

It’s a deeply haunting moment among many in “Africans in America,” affirming that, unlike men, all documentaries are not created equal.

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* “Africans in America” airs tonight through Thursday at 8 p.m. on KCET-TV, with repeats each evening at 9:30 p.m.