Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 11, 1995 TAG: 9502150004
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LYNN ELBER ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Long
Based on the acclaimed Nicholas Lemann book of the same name and drawing on newly uncovered photos, films and personal stories, the five-hour documentary details the 1940-1970 migration of more than 5 million people.
``The Promised Land,'' produced by Anthony Geffen, debuts with a two-hour episode Sunday at 9 p.m. on the cable channel. Three more hourlong chapters air Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 10 p.m.
All five hours will be repeated during the day on Feb. 18.
Actor Morgan Freeman, whose own family was part of the exodus, narrates the documentary that elegantly weaves music, art and history into a telling, affecting mosaic.
The move by black Americans from a segregated, agrarian South to booming industrial cities such as Chicago - the film's focus - was among the largest peacetime migrations of any people worldwide, Geffen said.
Yet it has been an oddly unexplored part of U.S. history.
``When this migration took place, nobody held a press conference,'' Lemann says. ``Nobody said the most important demographic event in mid-20th century history is now happening.
``As amazing as it sounds today, people just didn't notice that the migration was happening,'' he says. Until its end, it went unremarked by even the nation's top political leaders.
``In 1970, President Richard Nixon got up and made a speech on TV in which he said, reading between the lines only slightly, this migration has got to be stopped. It's ruining the country,'' Lemann says.
While the migration may have ended in disappointment - with those who made the trip bearing the greatest bitterness, of dreams betrayed - it was born in urgent faith.
``The Promised Land'' opens with a portrait of life in the Mississippi Delta, where many blacks worked as sharecroppers for white landowners.
Virtual slaves in an economic system that prevented them from getting a fair return for their work, victims of unrelenting racism and violence, blacks had little reason to remain in the Delta.
Photographs of businesses resolutely separating ``colored'' and ``white,'' and startling shots of lynchings - some trees heavy with as many as four to five black corpses - make the case.
``I will not stay down here with these people treating us like dogs,'' Uless Carter recalls vowing. Now a frail, bespectacled man, Carter is one of the migrants who gives the weight and texture of personal memory to the film.
``It's not official history,'' Lemann says. ``It's history from the bottom up. That's what I admire so much about the film: that Anthony has found a way to tell this story without having a bunch of experts on the screen explaining the lives of ordinary people.''
The South gave blacks reason to leave; the North gave reasons to come. There were jobs with decent pay (40 cents an hour looked good, says one migrant). And there were lively and growing black communities.
Chicago's was found on the South Side, in an area that became known as Bronzeville - ``the capital of black America,'' the film says.
But the increasingly crowded black section turned from oasis to ghetto, and blacks were prevented from making a new home in white areas. Newsreel footage shows the gleeful anger of white homeowners when integration was attempted.
For newcomers who thought they were escaping such treatment, ``that belief only lasted 10 hours,'' says Freeman.
The black role in the city's political life and the efforts Martin Luther King Jr. made to bring the civil rights movement to Chicago and the North are explored in the comprehensive ``Promised Land.''
Geffen and his production team spent more than two years searching through archives and the records of businesses, churches and families for films and photos.
More than a dozen dust-covered rolls of home movies, shot by a white farmer who captured revealing moments of plantation life, were discovered in an old barn.
Jazz musician Terence Blanchard composed an original score for ``The Promised Land,'' which also features songs from such varied artists as bluesman Howlin' Wolf, Aretha Franklin and Public Enemy's Chuck D. (Recordings featuring music from the film are being released by Columbia.)
Each episode opens with a striking animated sequence drawn from Jacob Lawrence's 1941 series of paintings, ``The Migration of the Negro,'' which were inspired by a smaller turn-of-the-century black migration.
A 60-member staff reworked and condensed Lawrence's narrative into a minute-long piece; the artist, now in his 70s, painted two new panels to reflect life for the migrants and their descendants today.
Sterling Plumpp, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an adviser and participant in the film, says the history in ``The Promised Land'' is revealing and pertinent.
``African Americans, like other Americans, have sought the dream. ... They live with the dream. Strong values of family, a great deal of spiritual belief and incredible endurance,'' Plumpp says.
``I would pay for it to send the Speaker of the House [Newt Gingrich] a copy of this film,'' Plumpp says. ``I think a lot of lessons would be learned there.''
by CNB