In faith they trust

Just above a traffic-jammed Harlem, in a sprawling work loft for documentary filmmakers, the photograph of a wide-faced African American man with a generous smile rests on a metal shelf. He looks like the world’s most avuncular boss, taking a break in shirtsleeves and suspenders to offer advice.

The picture shows Henry Hampton, whose epic series “Eyes on the Prize” gave the freedom riders, lunch counter sit-ins and mass marches of the civil rights movement their rightful place in history and pioneered multi-episodic nonfiction films on public television. His other films included “The Great Depression” and “America’s War on Poverty.” Hampton died in 1998, but his memory remains distinctly present in this space, entered through a door next to a busy manicurist’s shop on 125th Street.

June Cross, with Hampton’s photo at her elbow, laughs and talks about how she kept “talking with Henry” as she managed Hampton’s last ambitious project, left unfinished at his death. Called “This Far by Faith: African-American Spiritual Journeys,” it consists of six films about black America’s relationship to the divine. The series airs this week on PBS.

It explores the Christian passion that surges from black churches every Sunday, but it goes well beyond the history of the black church. Spread out in pairs of hour-long films at 9 to 11 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday -- viewers will find a mosaic of meditations by six documentary makers who worked to build on Hampton’s socially conscious aesthetic in their separate ways.

The films vary widely in style and subject, but they share several themes, including, prominently, the growing role of Islam among African Americans. In the opening film, a black imam demonstrates a ritual of drinking water poured off a page of holy verses to absorb the word of God. A later one explores the story of the Nation of Islam through the eyes of W.D. Muhammad, the devoutly Muslim, independent-minded son of the Nation’s founder, Elijah Muhammad.

Another filmmaker goes on an interfaith pilgrimage to “heal” the memory of slavery with black and white Buddhists. Yet another re-creates a scene in which a preacher is said to have reached into the body of important black composer Thomas Dorsey to pull out the snake of sin that had led him down the crooked path of the blues, freeing him to write the pure praise of gospel.

If Hampton’s films, over three decades, have an overarching theme, it is the role of African Americans in the struggle to fulfill the promise of American democracy. If this new series blazes a trail, according to longtime PBS producer Judy Crighton, it does so by attempting a study of religion on television, a medium she says is not generally thoughtful on the subject.

“Henry had a particular vision, and it was a coherent vision about how black spirituality contributed to the democratic project,” says Cross, who shares the title of executive producer with filmmaker Dante James. “That vision was given to each one of the six producers to interpret, so what you have are six individual takes on how black faith has developed in America.”

The films range from impressionistic, even quasi-theatrical, presentations of historical scenes and settings in pre-photographic history to the mix of visual records and recollections of modern events in the tradition of “Eyes on the Prize.”

This series about faith tested the faith of those who made it. In the words of series coordinating producer Sharon LaCruise, who is sitting at a laptop next to Cross, “that it is making it to the screen is a miracle.”

The planning was well underway when Hampton, always more an impresario of other filmmakers’ work than a hands-on man with a camera, died. But the six films were incomplete when Blackside Inc., the company where he housed his tightknit group of filmmakers, went into decline amid internal conflicts and financial problems in 2001. Judy Hampton and Veva Zimmerman, Hampton’s sisters, inherited the company.

Hampton’s sisters say today that they found themselves running a business they knew little about, and they acknowledge making some mistakes. Some Blackside veterans, they say, have unfairly blamed them for the company’s problems. In any case, the factions have united in their praise of Cross, who produced one of the six films and ended up overseeing the whole project by the end.

Still, Cross is quick to tell anyone that the series was always a large collaborative effort. It began in 1996 with conversations between Hampton and people at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a Baltimore-based philanthropy devoted to improving the lives of disadvantaged children.

Joy T. Moore, manager of grantee relations and media projects at Casey, which was started by the founder of UPS and is funded at $2.7 billion, recalls the first meetings with Hampton and Blackside staffers in Baltimore: “We’re interested in education reform, juvenile justice issues, foster care. We thought that a documentary on the black church would start a discussion we could use to mobilize other discussions around family strengthening and neighborhood transformation.”

During the discussions with Casey, Hampton already showed debilitating symptoms from the polio that had attacked him as a teenager in St. Louis, the illness his sisters say shaped his steely determination. In 1990 he’d developed a form of lung cancer. Early treatment was successful. As he planned the new series about faith, Hampton faced complications from those treatments. “He’d lost his hearing in one ear,” said Judy Richardson, a Blackside manager who accompanied Hampton to Baltimore. “Still,” Richardson added, “he was articulate. He could get to the core of what a concept might be. He could energize a funder. He was Henry.”

The foundation gave $200,000 for planning the series. Seed money like that becomes crucial to attracting other foundations to a project. The Ford Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts and others joined in. The Casey Foundation gave $1 million of the total $4.7 million that Blackside eventually raised.

A hallmark of the Hampton method was going to “school,” a formal gathering of scholars, journalists and community leaders expert in the subject of a planned documentary. The students were the producers, editors, writers and directors who would put the project on film. Sometimes sessions took place at Blackside’s building on Boston’s Shawmut Avenue. In this case, about 25 participants from around the country, including many of the leading names in religion -- not just African Americans -- met at Harvard Divinity School over three days.

And the original emphasis on the history of the black church opened up.

Callie Crossley, who became senior producer of the series, says: “Henry was always the skeptic at the table. He had an aversion and curiosity thing going on with the subject of the black church. He kept saying, ‘If I were watching about the black church, what would I want it to say?’ ”

Along the way, Hampton reached out to Juan Williams, the journalist and National Public Radio personality who had written the companion book to “Eyes on the Prize,” asking him to do the same for this new series. The book, also called “This Far by Faith,” was published in February. Williams co-wrote it with Quinton Dixie, who teaches at Indiana University.

Meanwhile, on Nov. 22, 1998, before a full team could be assembled to make the films, Hampton succumbed to his medical problems. He was 58, and the effect on people around him was devastating. “He was the one person who was indispensable,” Cross says. “And we lost him.”

But “This Far by Faith” went forward. and the group picked six topics. In keeping with Blackside tradition, the six filmmakers James hired form a diverse group. They include African Americans, people with biracial backgrounds, an Egyptian (Lulie Haddad) and a Jew (Alice Markowitz).

The films brought separate challenges. Walker started on the opening hour, anchoring the film in history and hitting key ideas. “I was facing 400-plus years of history,” Walker said.

Markowitz was charged with finding the religious underpinning of the civil rights movement. “The Montgomery bus boycott, lunch counter sit-ins -- I worried that these images had already lost their power by being used so often,” Markowitz said. “But I realized that ‘Eyes’ was ultimately a political story, and faith was in the background. In our series, it is in the foreground.”

Post-production was troubled

MidWAY through the series’ production, money problems forced Hampton’s sisters to move Blackside from its longtime building to another that, Blacksiders say, lacked basic equipment, such as phones. James left the series.

Things reached the point where the post-production facility where the last phase of work on the six films was underway refused to release the tapes because it had not been paid. “It was painful, heartbreaking, to see something you’d worked on so hard simply come to a stop,” says Valerie Linson, who made the fifth film, about the Nation of Islam. “But I always believed it would get finished. I never lost faith.”

Then Cross began building a bridge out of the predicament.

She became partners with the Hampton sisters (giving them no management role) in a new company, The Faith Project, which would complete the films. Cross had known Hampton socially , having met him at Bill Cosby’s house three months before his death. James had hired her to produce the second show in the “Faith” series. She had a long resume of credits as a producer on “Frontline” and in commercial television. She had also made a probing “Frontline” documentary about her background as the daughter of the once-prominent black performer James “Stump” Cross and a white mother who had been raised a Mormon. She grew up an Episcopalian and is now a Buddhist.

She was educated at Harvard and has won several important awards as a television journalist. Hampton’s sisters and the Blackside veterans they had alienated both trusted her. She received early encouragement and money from the Annie Casey Foundation and drew renewed support from the other foundations that had watched as things went awry at Blackside.

In the words of Crossley, “June Cross is our Moses.”

Cross raised the $750,000 that was needed to finish key post-production details, from reediting films that didn’t work, to adding narration (by actress Lorraine Toussaint), to clearing the rights to archival material.

“I have always worked for other institutions, like PBS and CBS,” Cross said. “This time I was becoming an entrepreneur and breaking out of my role as a TV journalist.”

Moore, of the Casey Foundation, stayed loyal throughout.

“It is ironic that this is Henry’s last film. He spent his whole career trying to do what others weren’t doing. He brought black history to TV. He allowed people to tell their own stories. He had faith in them and in himself. And faith is the last story by Henry that is being told.”