Starting at 8 p.m. on Thursday nights, WLRN celebrates Black History Month with new programs that explore more than a century of history and culture.
The Abolitionists: American Experience Part 1 (8:00 pm)
Premieres Thursday, February 6, 13 & 20 on WLRN.
Radicals. Agitators. Troublemakers. Liberators. Called by many names, the abolitionists tore the nation apart in order to make a more perfect union. Men and women, black and white, Northerners and Southerners, poor and wealthy, these passionate antislavery activists fought body and soul in the most important civil rights crusade in American history. What began as a pacifist movement fueled by persuasion and prayer became a fiery and furious struggle that forever changed the nation.
The opening hour of The Abolitionists features the documentary's five principal characters, whose intertwined lives and shared beliefs came together to form a powerful movement that forever changed the nation. Abolitionist allies Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown and Angelina Grimké turned a despised fringe movement against chattel slavery into a force that literally changed the nation.
African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross – The Black Atlantic (1500 – 1800) (9:00 pm)
Noted Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. recounts the full trajectory of African-American history in his groundbreaking new six-part series.
In this first hour, The Black Atlantic explores the earliest Africans, both slave and free, who arrived in the New World. Through stories of individuals caught in the transatlantic slave trade, we trace the emergence of plantation slavery in the American South. The episode also looks at what that Era of Revolutions — American, French and Haitian — would mean for African Americans and for slavery in America.
Hubert H. Humphrey: The Art of the Possible (10:00 pm)
Many Americans remember former Vice President Hubert Humphrey (1911-1978) as a cheerleader for the Vietnam War — shunned by his own party and mistrusted by a generation of young people. Others considered him a great progressive, a guiding light for the post-New Deal liberal movement that forged
This two hour documentary takes a fresh look at the great body of work of this remarkable American. Ten years in the making, the film uses Humphrey's own words and interviews with President Jimmy Carter, Vice President Walter Mondale, Bill Moyers, Tom Hayden and others, to explore his journey through the major events of the 20th century.
