Historically black colleges come into focus on PBS’ ‘Independent Lens’
They’ve been around since the days of slavery and have educated leaders, intellectuals, artists and revolutionaries. But the story of historically black colleges or universities – or HBCUs, as they’re commonly referred to – is relatively unknown. And that’s something the makers of PBS’ “Independent Lens” intend to change.
The 90-minute documentary “Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities,” premiering Monday, Feb. 19 (check local listings), offers up a rich history of HBCUs, which include Atlanta’s Spelman College, Howard University in Washington, D.C., Hampton University in Virginia, Tennessee’s Fisk University and Tuskegee University in Alabama. Together, the 100-plus schools of higher learning have turned out the likes of civil rights leaders Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. and W.E.B. Du Bois; novelists Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Ralph Ellison; TV personality Oprah Winfrey, filmmaker Spike Lee and recording artist/actor Common.
“The film is really largely an historical film,” Stanley Nelson, the documentary’s director, told a recent gathering of journalists in Pasadena, Calif., “and one of the big through lines in the film is how black colleges and black college students have changed America. So it’s almost like you are looking at American history through the lens of black colleges and through the social movements that have been launched (in) black colleges.”
Created at a time when it was illegal in many states to teach African-Americans to read, HBCUs first came to be following the end of the Civil War, mostly in the rural South. On these campuses, intellectual battles were fought that would help determine the future of African-American society, starting with the ideological difference between Washington’s emphasis on technical trades and Du Bois’ more progressive view that HBCUs not be institutes for training labor for white businesses, but places of intellectual rigor and societal transformation.