‘Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise’: From Martin Luther King to Black Lives Matter

During a lively press conference about black history over the past 50 years to promote an upcoming PBS series, Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise, educator and series co-producer Henry Louis Gates said that this production would cover a lot of ground. Gates said that he wanted to include the arc of a culture that put “a beautiful and black family in the White House” in the election of Barack Obama, to acknowledging the importance of black TV images of “Bill Cosby in I Spy, an Emmy winner, the character of George Jefferson, and Flip Wilson, the first black TV superstar,” to exploring the ongoing “cycle of violence … black-on-black violence and violence visited upon people by the police.”

That is indeed a lot of territory to traverse. And this panel, held during the Television Critics Association in Los Angeles on Friday — whose participants also included journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Cornel West, and community organizer and Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson — also took on the vexed subject of Black Lives Matter and how it is perceived in the media. The very first question asked of the panel by a TV critic was whether, given its controversy in some quarters, the phrase “black lives matter” was the “most helpful” one to have built a movement around.

“It’s a catchy phrase,” said West with a hint of humor, before growing serious. “And it carries an implicit word: too, [because] historically, black lives haven’t mattered as much as white lives.” Mckesson added that, to those who say we should say “all lives matter,” that’s missing the point. He used this metaphor: “You never go to a breast cancer rally and shout, ‘Colon cancer matters!’”

The wide-ranging discussion stretched from the desegregation ruling of 1954 (“What is paining me is this notion that 50 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, our schools are re-segregating,” said Hunter-Gault) to the current political scene, with West referring to what he called Donald Trump’s “neo-fascism, or to use a more deodorized category, right-wing populism,” and Gates making the assertion that “Donald Trump’s ascent is directly related to a black family in the White House.”

Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise will air Nov. 15 and 22 on PBS.