Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Finding Your Roots) is host, writer and executive producer of Making Black America: Through the Grapevine.
The four-hour docuseries, premiering on PBS Tuesday, Oct. 4, at 9pm ET/PT (check local listings), delves into the unique and vibrant cultural, creative and social spaces at the heart of the Black experience throughout American history — the “Grapevine” that has helped build and sustain communities and communication among African Americans, from the formation of all-Black towns and Historically Black Colleges and Universities, to the ongoing importance of the Black church and the 21st century social media phenomenon of Black Twitter, and more.
“Many of us associate the ‘Grapevine’ with Motown, right?” Gates says, referencing the classic song “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”
“But the Grapevine’s roots in Black America run much deeper than the civil rights revolution of the 1960s,” he continues. “John Adams wrote about the Grapevine in 1775; Booker T. Washington talked about [it] in 1901. The Grapevine consisted of the formal and informal networks which, for centuries, have connected Black Americans to each other through the underground, not just as a way of spreading the news, but of building and sustaining our community.
“We set out in this series to tell the story of the creation of Black America and how, in the making, a people did far more than just survive centuries of enslavement, Jim Crow segregation and structural racism. They also, at the same time, created a world of their own — a world behind ‘the veil,’ as W.E.B. Du Bois so brilliantly described it. [Through the Grapevine,] our ancestors replicated the white world from which they were excluded behind the color line.”