A World of Gain During a Century in the Arts

“I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African-American Arts,” which begins its three-night run on PBS tonight at 9, is the last work of Henry Hampton, acclaimed documentarian of America’s downtrodden social classes and unblinking chronicler of their moral issues.

Probably best remembered for his award-winning documentary tracing the civil rights movement, “Eyes on the Prize,” Hampton died in November of complications from lung cancer treatment as production on “I’ll Make Me a World” was drawing to a close. From the outset, Hampton envisioned a series that would synthesize 100 years of achievements in the arts by a race of people who entered this century just 35 years beyond slavery, with no property, education, wealth, legal entitlements or protections.

Yet by 1900, these newly enfranchised citizens had sewn seeds of blues, jazz and gospel, as well as American popular dance, language, humor and song. How to tell such a complex and expansive story was placed in the hands of screenwriter Sheila Curran Bernard, who won an Emmy for “Ain’t Gonna Shuffle No More,” one of two films she produced and directed for “Eyes on the Prize II” (1990).

But the idea for the documentary series, which was produced by Hampton’s Blackside Inc. in association with New York’s Thirteen/WNET, was based on a concept and design by Barnard College professor Thulani Davis, whose own eclectic career has crossed many art forms. She has two novels--”Maker of Saints” and “1959”--to her credit, and a Grammy for her album notes for Aretha Franklin’s “The Atlanta Recordings” (1993). She is the librettist for three operas including “Amistad” in 1997, and her most recent play, “Everybody’s Ruby: Story of a Murder in Florida,” premieres later this year at the New York Shakespeare Festival.

“Thulani presented the central concepts,” said Sam Pollard, who worked alongside Hampton as co-executive producer of the series. “Questions like: Whom do African American artists create for? How important is it to create for your community? How tough is it to be a creative artist, to sometimes create work that rubs against the general way of thinking?”

Documentary Gathers Threads of Creativity

Unfolding in six discrete segments--two each night--the documentary attempts to answer these questions, sometimes with transcendent effect. But gathering the threads of 100 years of creativity and weaving its stories along the spine of a single theme often seems a bit like trying to pull a Mardi Gras parade through the eye of a needle.

When Hampton told Pollard that he was planning a series to celebrate 100 years of the African American creative spirit, “it was scary,” Pollard said. “There were so many people to cover. My first question was: How am I going to be able to tell all these stories of all these fabulous people?”

Blackside’s solution is to both loosen and extend the vocabulary of the documentary form. In addition to marshaling a mountain of facts, rare archival footage and expert interviews, “I’ll Make Me a World” blends in emotional live performances, and introspective commentary from established modern masters like vocalist Ruth Brown, choreographers Bill T. Jones and Jacques D’Amboise, painter Jacob Lawrence and others.

There are show-stopping performances by song and dance man Ben Vereen, jazz master Marcus Roberts (who also composed and arranged original music for the project) and neo-bop spoken-word artist Saul Williams, which conclude hours one, two and six.

The story is told through the lives of these American masters; some world-renowned, like Paul Robeson and Alice Walker, others little-known outside black intellectual circles. In this way viewers are introduced, perhaps for the first time, to influential teacher and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett and turn-of-the-century comic Bert Williams, whom Ziegfeld Follies co-star W.C. Fields called “the funniest man I ever saw; the saddest man I ever knew.”

Artists Reveal Insights Into Their Predecessors

Filmmakers--Melvin Van Peebles, Julie Dash and Spike Lee, for example--emerge as living analogues of the Depression-era filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, who struggled to bring his cinematic visions to life in 1939. The effect is a kind of golden hall of mirrors, with the living artists echoing and revealing nuanced insights into their predecessors.

“Certainly history has repeated itself,” Dash said. “As filmmakers, we’re working the same way in many instances as Oscar Micheaux did, traveling around with our films. And then you see break-dancing, and you see that it not only goes back to tap-dancing, it goes back even further. Spoken word and break-dancing [go] back to Zulu warriors. So it’s a continuum.”

Along with the performing artists is the documentary’s equally impressive lineup of writers, painters, critics, scholars and historians, including Cornel West, Robert Brustein, Nikki Giovanni, Gerald Early, Betye Saar, Brenda Gottschild, Ron Milner and visual artist Faith Ringgold.

Blackside’s trove of archival footage is another featured star of the series. In a visually rich passage describing the young Bert Williams’ arrival in ragtime Manhattan, Hampton and Pollard include a vintage motion picture sequence that pans from Broadway uptown to Columbus Circle and Harlem, with the broad dirt road crisscrossed by trolleys, jaywalkers and horse-drawn cabs.

In the first installment, “Lift Every Voice” and “Without Fear of Shame” focus on the triumphs and travails of a generation newly born to freedom, picking up their story in 1900 and following it to the Depression. It is produced by Betty Ciccarelli, who won an Emmy for her work on “Eyes on the Prize II.”

While Hampton sought out many of those who had a hand in creating “Eyes on the Prize” to help him piece together “I’ll Make Me a World,” he also brought in a new generation of documentary filmmakers. Two young associate producers, Tracy Heather Strain and Denise A. Greene, were given charge of the second and third nights, respectively. Strain’s segments, titled “Bright Like a Sun” and “The Dream Keepers,” pick up the story of black creativity in 1935, while Greene’s installments, titled “Not a Rhyme Time” and “The Freedom You Will Take,” bring us to the present. It is a two-night tour that goes from Harlem to hip-hop, from seminal black voices like novelist Zora Neale Hurston and poet Gwendolyn Brooks to race-transcending spoken-word dynamos Jessica Care More and Saul Williams.

“We were trying to make sure that we didn’t just do what Blackside had normally done, which was just interviews and archival footage,” said Pollard, who, with Spike Lee, was nominated for an Oscar in 1998 as co-producer/editor of the film “4 Little Girls.”

“If we do our job right, we want to present you the facts, but we want to try to give it a moment of grace; you know, of creative grace,” Pollard added. “So that you walk away thinking, ‘Wow, that was a very complicated man that had a moment where he could do something that resonated.’ And that’s what we tried to do with every one of these stories. You don’t always succeed, because you’re always struggling with trying to make sure you tell the facts but give it another little twist.”

In “I’ll Make Me a World,” Hampton seeks to celebrate a culture, once separate, that now suffuses virtually every facet of American cultural life and art. Indeed, by the dawn of the Jazz Age, African American culture had become American culture.

* “I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African-American Arts” airs at 9 tonight, Tuesday and Wednesday on KCET-TV.