At a recent press conference at the Television Critics Association in Beverly Hills, California, Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., announced his next big project intended to teach the younger generation the 500-year history of African Americans in the United States.
“The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross,” is a six-part television series that will air in October on PBS and highlight the earliest reports of Africans in America, such as Juan Guarrido, a free man who accompanied Ponce de Leon in the early 1500s.
According to reports, Gates has said this about the historical context of the series: “All of us who had any African-American history always started with 1620 in Jamestown, and that’s 107 years too late. And we’re correcting that in this series.”
Other stories Gates has written and hosted for PBS include, “African American Lives,” “Black in Latin America” and “Looking for Lincoln.”
Read more at the Los Angeles Times.
