Our History – Tyson Family & Friends

The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

Written and presented by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., director of W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, this six-hour series explores the evolution of the African-American people, as well as the multiplicity of cultural institutions, political strategies, and religious and social perspectives they developed — forging their own history, culture and society against unimaginable odds.

Commencing with the origins of slavery in Africa, the series moves through five centuries of remarkable historic events right up to the present — when America is led by a black president, yet remains a nation deeply divided by race.

By highlighting the tragedies, triumphs and contradictions of the black experience, the series reveals to viewers that the African-American community has never been a uniform entity, and that its members have been actively debating their differences from their first days in this country.

Throughout the course of the series, viewers will see that the road to freedom for black people in America has not been linear, but more like the course of a river, full of loops and eddies, slowing, and occasionally reversing the current of progress. Purchase 2 DVD Set from PBS–>

Episodes include…

The Black Atlantic (1500-1800)
The Age of Slavery (1800-1860)
Into the Fire (1861-1896)
Making a Way Out of No Way (1897-1940)
Rise! (1940-1968)
It’s Nation Time (1968-2013)

The Black Atlantic (1500 – 1800). Full Episode

The Black Atlantic explores the truly global experiences that created the African American people. Beginning a full century before the first documented slaves arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, the episode portrays the earliest Africans, both slave and free, who arrived on the North American shores. Soon afterwards, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade would become a vast empire connecting three continents. Through stories of individuals caught in its web, like a 10-year-old girl named Priscilla who was transported from Sierra Leone to South Carolina in the mid-18th century, we trace the emergence of plantation slavery in the American South. The late 18th century saw a global explosion of freedom movements, and The Black Atlantic examines what that Era of Revolutions—American, French and Haitian—would mean for African Americans, and for slavery in America.

The Cotton Economy and Slavery

What made cotton so desirable? In the 1790s Americas oldest crops, like tobacco, were depleting farmland and dropping in value. At the same time, the textile industry in Great Britain was exploding, creating enormous international demand for cotton clothing. Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, which easily separated cotton fiber from its seeds, was merely a motor for a global economic machine. Slavery was its fuel.

Many stakeholders benefited from the cotton economy — plantation owners in the South, banks in the North, shipping merchants, and the textile industry in Great Britain. Cotton transformed the United States, making fertile land in the Deep South, from Georgia to Texas, extraordinarily valuable. Growing more cotton meant an increased demand for slaves. Slaves in the Upper South became incredibly more valuable as commodities because of this demand for them in the Deep South. They were sold off in droves. This created a Second Middle Passage, the second largest forced migration in America’s history.

To feed “King Cotton,” more than a million African Americans were carried off into the Deep South. That’s two and a half times the number that were brought to the United States from Africa.

Robert Smalls: A Daring Escape

Robert Smalls was a 23-year-old slave pressed into service for the Confederacy aboard a warship called the Planter. For nearly a year, he quietly observed the movements of the ship and its crew. Just before dawn on May 13, 1862, Smalls took his chance. While the ship’s officers slept ashore, he and his fellow slave crewmen pulled anchor and eased the Planter into Charleston Harbor. They had prearranged to meet their family members. Together they embarked on an extremely dangerous journey. Smalls had to navigate the ship past four Confederate checkpoints: Castle Pinckney, Fort Ripley, Fort Johnson and Fort Sumter. After successfully doing so, he then had to safely approach the vessels of the Union naval blockading force.

The vessel was not fired on. As astonished Union officers boarded the Planter, Smalls stood at attention, saluted, and spoke: “I am delivering this war material including these cannons and I think Uncle Abraham Lincoln can put them to good use.”

Smalls went on to serve with the Union during the war, and beginning in 1868, in the South Carolina House of Representatives. Robert Smalls was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives to begin his first term in 1875.