Starting at 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, February 13, WLRN explores more than a century of history and culture in honor of Black History month.
The Abolitionists: American Experience Part 2 (8:00 pm)
This three part series continues to intertwine the stories of Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimké, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown.
In this second hour of The Abolitionists, Frederick Douglass escapes slavery in 1938 and eventually joins William Lloyd Garrison in the antislavery movement. In the North, Douglass became a powerful orator, and reached tens of thousands more with the 1845 publication of his autobiography. When threatened with capture by his former owner, Douglass fled to England, where he experienced life as a free man for the first time. Returning to the U.S. in 1847, he launched his own antislavery paper, The North Star, out of Rochester, New York, causing a rift with his mentor Garrison.
African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross – The Age of Slavery (1800 – 1860) (9:00 pm)
Episode two of the six-part series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., illustrates how black lives changed dramatically in the aftermath of the American Revolution. For free black people in places like Philadelphia, these years were a time of tremendous opportunity. But for most African Americans, this era represented a new nadir. The cotton industry fueled the rapid expansion of slavery into new territories, and a Second Middle Passage forced the migration of African Americans from the Upper South into the Deep South. Yet as slavery intensified, so did resistance. From individual acts to mass rebellions, African Americans demonstrated their determination to undermine and ultimately eradicate slavery in every state in the nation.