'African American Lives 2'
TELEVISION REVIEW
Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr., director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research (among much else), has made a sequel to his 2006 PBS series "African American Lives" -- "African American Lives 2," this one is called -- in which he traces the ancestry of famous black people as far back as the written record allows, and then a little farther, thanks to the scientific magic of DNA analysis. Apart from adding one ordinary person to the mix -- ordinary, that is, in the sense of "not famous" -- the new edition is very like the first, entertaining and educational in the same even proportion.
It inevitably covers much of the same territory, but as each life is different, so are the rivers that feed it. Although the stories here support Gates' thematic purposes, they also go where they will -- or where they went, this being a trip back into time, from parents, to grandparents and so on into the foggy mists.
The eminent figures whose family trees are climbed include Morgan Freeman, Chris Rock, Don Cheadle, Tina Turner, Maya Angelou, radio host Tom Joyner, theologian Peter J. Gomes, Olympic runner Jackie Joyner-Kersee and writer Bliss Broyard (the daughter of literary critic Anatole Broyard, a black man whose children thought he was white).
Gates visits each with a scrapbook of photographs and primary documents relating to their forebears, and from these bits and pieces stories are spun, almost in the way that a dinosaur is imagined from a jawbone, a couple of vertebrae and a claw. But there is something powerfully concrete about such clues, and the host takes evident relish in presenting them; he wants to widen his subject's eyes and does.
As before, Gates is also a subject. He told Mother Jones magazine that one of his reasons for doing the series, which he calls a " 'Roots' for the 21st century, 'Roots' in a white coat," was, "I really wanted the very best people ferreting out my ancestors."
And he got them. An international array of scientists, historians and unseen researchers apply new technologies and old-fashioned library skills to pull names and faces from a faceless, nameless past and finally "to reverse the middle passage," to make an educated conjectural leap back toward Africa, attempting to identify by DNA cross-referencing regional and even tribal roots.
