PBS A window into blacks' lives today

Both powerful and underprivileged are featured in a four-part documentary.
By LYNN ELBER
ASSOCIATED PRESS
LOS ANGELES -- Ask scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. about the problems facing black Americans and how to fix them, and the words pour out.
He talks about personal responsibility, government obligation and the importance of successful blacks' reaching out to "brothers and sisters left behind."
But in "America Beyond the Color Line," a four-part PBS documentary Gates wrote and produced, he gives others the floor. The mighty and rich, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, are heard.
So, in equal measure, are those who often are voiceless.
Following in the footsteps of acclaimed oral historian Studs Terkel, Gates lets people living with poverty, crime and stunted dreams tell their stories and offer their answers.
Variety of perspectives
There's the mother who, living with her daughter and grandchildren in a Chicago housing project, rises above its drugs and gangs. The young man who gave up crime to choose morality and minimum wage at a fast-food restaurant but sees little chance to advance.
Meet the man who's wasted much of his life behind bars: "If I was Jesse Jackson and I was trying to keep those black men from even going to prison, or trying to get them out of prison, I would encourage everybody in the neighborhood ... to grab a person that they feel needs help."
We also hear from those who have excelled.
Gates talks with a successful young couple who moved from Detroit to Atlanta and are content to live in an affluent black neighborhood -- a new kind of segregation, but one they chose, not one forced upon them -- and others who are emblematic of black achievement.
"America Beyond the Color Line" (airing 9-11 tonight and Wednesday, PBS) comes during Black History Month, when television remembers to pay attention to black Americans and usually does it literally: by relating the past.
The documentary is firmly in the here and now, using history to illuminate where we stand and where we need to go.
By region
The first hour, "South: The Black Belt," scrutinizes the region that was home to the civil-rights movement and how it has changed for blacks who have returned, including actor Morgan Freeman and poet Maya Angelou.
"Chicago: Streets of Heaven," is the ironic title of a look at the poverty of the city's South Side housing projects and the contrast with an expanding black middle class.
Blacks who have emerged as political, business and cultural leaders, including Powell and Simmons, and what their success means for the overall progress of black America are featured in "East Coast: Ebony Towers."
In "Los Angeles: Black Hollywood," the final hour, actors Don Cheadle and Samuel L. Jackson and musician Alicia Keys are among those weighing in on the role of race in the entertainment industry.
A companion book, "America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues With African Americans" (Warner Books) compiles and extends Gates' film interviews.
What filmmaker learned
What Gates found was both encouraging and discouraging, including a black middle class that is the largest in U.S. history but an underclass that is unchanged since the 1968 slaying of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
"For the African-American community, it's the best of times, the worst of times," Gates, a Harvard University professor and chairman of the school's Department of Afro-American Studies, said in an interview.
He was inspired in his quest by black leader and scholar W.E.B. DuBois' contention that "the color line" between whites and blacks was the major 20th-century issue facing black Americans.
Gates found a very different perspective emerging as he queried a broad cross-section of fellow 21st-century blacks.
"What was really interesting to me is that so many people focused on the poor choices that we as a people are making," he said. "We can't wait to be liberated by an Abraham Lincoln galloping down Main Street on a white horse anymore.
"We have to reach into the community, insist we stay in school, learn our ABCs, learn our math tables, embrace deferred gratification, stay away from drugs, ignore the bling-bling and return to values that we were raised on."