‘THE STORY OF A PEOPLE’ : BLACK PERSPECTIVE ON BLACK AMERICA
Bob Dockery, the executive producer of “The Story of a People,†a four-part documentary about contemporary black life, says he didn’t set out to make a rebuttal to last year’s controversial CBS report on the black family, but that’s the way some people are seeing it.
In “Story of a People,†commented discrimination attorney Melanie Lomax, “blacks didn’t just appear to have only sexual problems or to be (unable) to govern their impulses.â€
The series debuted last Friday with a segment on “The Black Family†and continues tonight and for the next two Fridays at 10 p.m. on KHJ-TV Channel 9. Narrated by Robert Guillaume of “Benson,†the remaining installments cover “Black Youth,†“Images†and “Power.â€
If “Story of a People†is not a rebuttal to Moyers’ 1986 CBS documentary “The Vanishing Family--Crisis in Black America,†what is it?
“A perspective of black America from our (black) perspective,†said Dockery. “We looked at the recognized problems that everyone knows about. We showed some solutions.â€
Besides using footage of civil rights milestones, interviews with prominent black editors and politicians and comments from individuals, “Story of a People†contrasts statistics from the Children’s Defense Fund (which claims black children in America are the poorest of the poor) and other sources with success stories from the black community.
For instance, in the opening “Family†segment, after addressing the sources of disintegration of the black family, Dockery cut to a unique reunion of about 20 families who can trace their American roots to a 200-year-old rice plantation in North Carolina.
Reunions like this are on the rise and demonstrate “that there has not been a sense of dissolution in the black family,†Dockery said.
The CBS documentary had suggested that the stable black family unit was rapidly diminishing.
Lomax said she found the first program “less stilted†than Moyers’ report for CBS.
“I think when the mainstream viewer saw (“Vanishing Familyâ€), they would say that blacks are out of control generally†rather than concluding that “modern life in general stresses the family,†she said.
Similarly, in tonight’s program, the Rev. T. L. Barrett of the Life Enrichment Church in Chicago says he is disturbed about the local high school’s 58% dropout rate, the extraordinarily high numbers of unwed mothers and the school’s dispensing birth control pills to its students. But there is also a scene of a high school boy and the general manager of a popular black radio station stepping out of the latter’s long, white Rolls-Royce for a one-on-one basketball game. The pair are participants in the Life Enrichment Project, which matches an inner-city youngster with a successful adult.
“Images,†airing Feb. 20, strays slightly from the Horatio Alger-pattern of the first two programs, as no single image is held up as a success model and there aren’t any grim statistics about the dearth of minorities in the media. Instead, the segment sets out to prove how inferior treatment of blacks in the media today is due in part to perceptions created after the Civil War. For instance, it traces the concept of blacks being animals to old postcards and food cans that depicted parentless black children as the victims of hungry alligators.
The segment counters those images with comments and pictures from prominent blacks such as Susan Taylor, editor-in-chief of Essence magazine. She says in an interview that she tries to represent the diversity of black women aesthetically and characteristically, as she believes other media have not done.
“Power,†airing Feb. 27, using comments from a new guard of political tacticians, invests the phrase black power with a new meaning--political clout used for economic gain. This segment mainly follows the story of former Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, a benefactor of strong support from the black community, and the making of several black millionaires through a huge city public-works project that brought together blacks and whites.
Dockery’s 7-year-old Syndicate It company has produced radio shows such as “King: A Musical Tribute†and an earlier “Story of a People†series, hosted by Brock Peters and Denise Nicholas, which traced the lineage of black Aericans from Africa to America. Now, Dockery said, his next move is to make a movie.
He won’t say what the subject will be except that “it will be on a long-neglected aspect of the black community. If you wait for the networks and the major movie companies and studios to correct the images that have been so long distorted, you’ll be waiting a long, long time.â€
Dockery, who remembers coming home from school in Louisville and not being able to “wait to get (my) assignments to picket (segregated) restaurants and theaters,†does not consider himself today to be a civil-rights activist. “I consider myself to be a marketing person,†he said.
But he came to the conclusion, after making “The Story of a People,†that “there is hope in black America; there is very little despair. Even among people who are on welfare, there is a purpose and a hope.â€
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