PBS Special on Jim Crow
The Rise And Fall Of Jim Crow
By Herb Boyd
TBWT National Editor
Article Dated 9/26/2002
"Wheel about, turn about
Do jis so
An' ebery time I wheel about
I jump Jim Crow!"
This little ditty was expropriated from a Black performer in the South by Daddy Rice, a white entertainer, in 1828. Performing in black face and dressed in tattered clothes, Rice took this version of black man imitating the hifalutin ways of white folks, put it in his minstrel act, and made a fortune.
By the next generation or so, Jim Crow had come to symbolize the racist, American apartheid form of segregation that denied Black Americans basic civil and human rights. These draconian laws sparked a civil rights movement that gradually brought about social and political change in America.
The story of these restrictions and the resultant fight to knock down what those laws represented is told impressively and in vivid detail in "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow," a four-part series that will run on Tuesday evenings on PBS, beginning in October. Using photos, film footage, and testimony from such prominent historians as Leon Litwack, Nell Painter, W.W. Law, along with the memories of eyewitnesses to this period from the 1860s to the 1950s, the series deftly covers the past, while it underscores a number of contemporary issues.
In the first episode, "Promises Betrayed," some Black New Yorkers will be pleasantly surprised to see Marquetta Goodwine discussing the historical struggle to keep the land in the Sea Islands, where she is among the leading experts on Gullah life in the region. Painter, Law and Moses Jackson, a former sharecropper, assist Goodwine in setting the stage for the subsequent episodes, each of which seems to unfold like illustrated chapters from the research of John Hope Franklin or Lerone Bennett.
On successive Tuesdays will come the other episodes, including "Fighting Back (1896-1917)," "Don't Shoot Too Soon (1917-1940)," and the final segment, "Terror Triumph (1940-1954)."
The current issue of reparations is evoked in the first episode as the words of the informants supply a narrative to the collage of pictures and footage of Black Americans, particularly in Georgia and South Carolina, struggling often valiantly to hold to the land ceded them at the close of the Civil War.
Viewers are provided another perspective of terrorism American style throughout the series, but none more graphically than the brutal attacks of night riders and the Ku Klux Klan as they wreak havoc, burning homes, and lynching Black men and women.
Brief profiles of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Frederick Douglass are among the notables who deliver instances of hope and inspiration into this sorrowful phase of American history and the terrible ordeal Black Americans had to endure.
In several ways the series complement other documentaries on slavery, the Civil War and especially "Eyes on the Prize." And it should be noted that Sam Pollard, who was so resourceful in "Eyes..." is also a producer in this landmark series. Bill Jersey is the executive producer, writer, producer and director, with assistance from Tamara Robinson, William Grant, and Richard Wormser. Actor Richard Rountree is the narrator.
The series is a co-production of Quest Productions, Videoline Productions, and Thirteen/WNET New York. Major funding was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as part of its Diversity Initiative. New York Life Insurance is the series corporate sponsor with additional funding by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
A number of outreach components accompany the series. There's a multimedia timeline that can be accessed on Also, the series includes an interactive Web companion that provides additional historical background and other ways viewers can expand their understanding of this turbulent, dramatic phase of America's odyssey.
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I am a woman, I make mistakes. I make them often. God has given me a talent and that's it. ~ Jill Scott
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