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[music] African American migration was one of the most significant demographic changes to America in the last 125 years.

Hello everyone, I'm Steve Beverly.

On this edition of Tennessee is Talking, we'll be visiting with the directors of Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s brand new docuseries called Great Migrations of People on the Move.

It's something you won't want to miss and you're not going to want to miss this conversation.

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West Tennessee PBS presents, Tennessee is Talking.

Let the conversation begin.

Thanks for joining the discussion on Tennessee is talking.

I'm Steve Beverly.

Today we're finding out more about the new docuseries by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Great Migration of People on the Move, which tells the story of African American movement over the 20th and 21st centuries and how it has shaped our nation.

Joining us now are two of the show's directors, Julia Marchesi and Nailah Ife Sims.

Julia and Nailah, it is a joy to have you with us.

It is just really a thrill because we don't often get to talk to people who are directly involved in the production of some of our great PBS documentaries and so it is great to have you here.

Oh, thanks for having us.

Thank you for having us.

Let's get right into this about of course Henry Louis Gates is without question one of the most noted in America in all of the research, the storytelling, everything that he does.

Let's get off the start with this, what did you do as far as getting this idea together?

How does it germinate when suddenly you're talking about Great Migrations which I envision this great big blank canvas.

How do you actually start at point A?

Every project's a little different.

[laughs] This one was the brainchild of Dr. Gates.

He has touched on the Great Migration in a lot of his other series in smaller ways.

I think he has always wanted to do a Great Migration-related series.

It was important to him to make this plural, Great Migrations, because migration itself has been a defining factor of the Black American story and continues to be a defining factor of the American story.

There are more stories to be told.

It's not just the Great Migration, it's also the reverse migration to the South.

It's also African and Caribbeans who've come.

We've started with that framework.

Julie and I and a larger team of producers weighed in, had scholars weigh in, and dived into the research to figure out how we're going to organize all of this history and how we're going to keep it tied to migration.

The work is really in figuring out what stories represent the transformations from all of these migrations, how do we tell a linear story, how do we show that there's maturation over time, how do we tell a complicated story.

Skip gave us this framework and we ran with it.

Julia, give me an idea of timeline on all of this.

How long before you actually - let's say from when you started this process that Nailah just told us about to when you actually got into the editing room and you're trying to get all of this together, what kind of a lead time did you have?

That's a great question.

Oh, never enough.

[laughs].

[laughs] I think we start researching.

The research phase is really important.

As Nailah said, we consult a lot of scholars to make sure we're not missing anything, we read a lot of books, we read a lot of articles, we try to get our heads around the story.

Then we start interviewing these scholars and we start to put the pieces together.

For a timeline, I would say from beginning to edit, it's about six months.

Is that right?

Yes.

-Something like that.. Of course, the research continued as we were doing these interviews.

Sometimes we learned something from a scholar interview that helped shape the story.

We also had a really robust archival team.

In the format of documentary storytelling, sometimes the visuals also impact what stories we can tell.

Let's look at this from a standpoint.

I'm fascinated with this because, you've done your research and here you are, you know a basic storyline, but this story of Great Migrations, this covers 125 years that we're talking about at least on the surface.

Where do you find the people that you interview for this documentary because that just seems to me such a broad base and I know a lot of it has to deal with people who are-- it's multi-generational obviously, but where do you find the people?

I'm just fascinated with this.

The biggest challenge of making this series is how broad these topics are.

The Great Migration itself, it's a 70 year period, it's 6 million people with 6 million different stories.

They went to many different cities in the North and the West and there's no one person who embodies the Great Migration.

There's no leader of the Great Migration.

There's no one telling that story.

It is really difficult to figure out how to personalize it because it was very important to us that it didn't become this big survey history but that you understand real people's stories.

What we try to do is, we tell the history chronologically and then we try to find a personal story, usually a family story that connects to some point in that history.

We have a family whose ancestors or great-grandparents arrived in Chicago in 1920s, and we tell a story about a very famous photograph that their family appeared in.

In Nailah's episode, we have a family who moved to Los Angeles because it was important to tell a Los Angeles story and the housing struggles there, so what family can we find that exemplifies that story?

It's looking for a story that matches the history you're trying to tell.

Certainly, we wish that we could have included many more personal stories because as I said, the Great Migration, is just 6 million stories.

That's what it is.

Everybody has a differen.. and we wish we could have included all of them [laughs] It was a great storytelling challenge for sure.

Yes.

It was something that we made sure that we would include because migration essentially is social movement.

It's very personal, it's everyday people.

We would be remiss to tell this history without including everyday people who embody the story of migration.

How emotional did it get for some people to tell stories that-- let's face it, some of this is painful as well as celebratory of what migration has meant, but this has to be emotional for some people, whether it's thinking back through their ancestors or whether it is som.. they may have experienced themselves.

How emotional was this for the people to go back and bring these stories out?

There's one particular story that I think is just the most heartbreaking and emotional, and it's the story that Julie mentioned earlier.

We were lucky enough to find the family who were descendants of the people in a very commonly used Great Migration picture.

There's this photograph of a multi-generational family at a train station holding luggage, they have coats, their faces are striking.

It's a very familiar photograph.

It's probably the most used for demonstrating what the Great Migration looked like.

It's in history books, it was in Ebony Magazine at one point I believe.

These descendants knew their story, it's not like Finding Your Roots where Skip came to them and was telling them about their story.

It was in reverse.

They were telling Skip, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, we call him Skip, [laughs] their story.

They still felt the emotional pull and generational trauma from that story, because they shared that this was a story of people fleeing terror, real terror.

This family was like many other families.

They were people who lived in rural areas, and in a rural area, they were sharecroppers.

I don't want to give too much away, but they were escaping imminent danger.

I think it's eye-opening, and it sheds a light on the realities that many people faced during that time.

I'm always curious when I see documentaries of any kind.

I'm always curious about the person who puts these together, and of course, both of you being multi-award-winning directors in what you do and producers, but what, if anything, surprised you about any of the stories that you had?

Both of you, what really might have been surprising that you didn't expect when you started this project?

You stumped us because there is so many rich histories.

Maybe I'll go first because I am the descendant of migrants.

I am the product of Black Southerners who moved from Mississippi and Arkansas to Chicago, as well as Haitian migrants, who came to the United States and also settled in Chicago.

Going into this, I had a sense of understanding the personal side of migration.

Having the chance to see those kinds of stories contextualized in American history, it was just profound to me, to see how expansive and impactful this history was.

Expansive in terms of geography.

I didn't know much about the West Coast story.

I didn't know that this Great Migration history touched so much American culture.

It's the story behind why Black people became urban, which is something that we take for granted nowadays.

It's the story behind why the Black vote is a thing.

The Black vote was solidified in the North, and it was something that gained more power with something like the reverse migration.

It was just profound to me, and maybe not surprising, but just really interesting to me to see just how profound this history was.

There are little factoids that were interesting, and things I didn't know, like the train lines were really important in terms of not only how people got to these cities, but it also helped determine where people were from in a lot of these cities.

In Chicago, you have a lot of folks from Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

In New York, you have folks from South Carolina, Florida.

It has to do with the mode of transportation.

I think people like me who have a sense of this history still have something to learn and still have something that might help them appreciate this history more.

I would just add, in thinking about the reverse migration, one of the surprising things was actually an archival clip that I stumbled across.

You ask about research.

A lot of our research is just finding differen.. of video or images or whatever that inform you, and change maybe what you're doing, because you realize, "Oh, I have to use this."

One of those was an archival clip that we found of the playwright, August Wilson, and he's giving an interview.

I think it's the early '80s.

He's talking about the Great Migration, and he says, "I think it was a mistake.

I think the Great Migration was a mistake, that Black people in this country, we should have stayed in the South.

We should have built our communities.

We came to the North, and the North betrayed us, and these cities turned dangerous and dirty and violent, and they did not serve us.

We should have stayed in the South."

I'd never thought about that before.

It was a really interesting.

He was proposing that a long time ago.

I think it was a controversial statement in some ways, but it does speak to this idea that as he was speaking, a reverse migration was underway.

People were saying, "Yes, it wasn't really the promised land we thought it was going to be up here in New York, Detroit, Chicago.

Let's go back to where our families are from."

That was one of the episodes that I directed, and it was incredibly interesting to delve into that more modern phenomenon of reverse migration.

You have really set the table for us in so many ways.

Of course, the docuseries is part of our PBS lineup right here on WLJT Channel 11.

Right now, let's take a moment and look at a brief clip from Great Migrations, and I think you'll get an idea just exactly how this all begins to unfold.

Let's watch.

In the American dream narrative, we want to tell migrations, immagrations, as stories of coming to America as a land of opportunity.

In my story and many African-Americans or Black people's stories, we were already here.

It wasn't about moving to America, the land of opportunity, but it's about going to many places within America, finally trying to find freedom.

Movement is a really concrete way of measuring your freedom, especially after centuries of criminalizing movement, realizing that I can make a choice to pick up and start up all over again elsewhere.

If that's not the most transformative decision that you can make, I don't know what is.

That gives you a real thumbnail, and I mean a thumbnail because that can only give you a taste of what our guests have been able to accomplish with this documentary that I think will go down as another one of the great award winners that we have had on PBS.

Let me get you to tell me something about this.

Once you finish all of the shooting, everything that goes in, you've done the research, you've done the shooting, tell me then when you get into the editing room, you're starting to try to put all these things together, how much do you-- I'm always interested about how much do you throw out that you would have loved to have included in the show, but you just didn't have enough time for it.

Oh, I think that's the nature of documentary filmmaking.

You have to kill your babies.

I think all interviews you conduct are multi-hour interviews, and you have to whittle it down to maybe just a segment of these television hours.

That's always a challenge.

With this project, we spoke with, I don't know, 30 something scholars.

We filmed full conversations between Dr. Gates and everyday people.

There was a lot on the cutting room floor, but we had to narrow it down to what was essential, what tells a clear story, follows the trajectory of these migrations.

It was absolutely a challenge, and we don't have a number to quantify exactly how many minutes or hours that we cut out.

Same thing to you, as far as that goes, Julia.

This has to be a challenge where you've been in the field and you've heard the interviews, et cetera, and then to know, "I just can't use all of it.

I don't have enough time."

Definitely.

These hour-long shows or a little less, and often rough cuts are two hours because you have all this great stuff and you show-- but it's two hours.

You have to cut an entire ho..

It can be painful, and there are certain things I wish we could have gone into greater detail on.

Certainly, I feel like music and arts and culture is such a rich aspect of the Great Migration that unfortunately we didn't get a lot of time to really delve into, but as we've said before, this is a massive topic, so you really have to pick and choose and keep it moving.

I can tell you that it has to be exciting at the same time because you've got all this rich material that is involved with it.

To talk about just more where this is concerned, when you have interviewed people and for this specific documentary, for Great Migrations, who have had-- Let's just say it goes back to their ancestors and it continues to connect over the years.

As we mentioned, this covers about a 125 year period in which we're talking about Great Migrations of African Americans in our country.

When you see that these stories continue from generation to generation, what I'm-- I guess I could say I'm both concerned as well as interested.

It's hard today to get young people to buy into history.

I know that from being a college professor.

Younger people, they're more interested in today than they were what happened 100 years ago.

How do you think this documentary might be able to get through to younger audiences and get this compelling for them at a point in time when it's hard to sell history?

It's always been hard to sell history to young people.

I don't know that that's unique to young people today.

[laughter] I think maybe that we're lucky in this aspect that the idea of migration has been such a theme in US news and global news in the 21st century.

kids are hearing about people migrating because of war.

They're hearing about economic crises that continue to happen and move and displace people.

Those migrations are not that different than these migrations that we cover in this series.

I think this can resonate with people young and old, because in order to understand what's happening now, sometimes you do have to look back and see how America has handled migrations in the past.

See how migration has shaped us, the benefits that we've received from migrations and demographic shifts that really fundamentally changed our cities, fundamentally integrated a lot of our industries.

I think for the kids who are interested in learning more about the word migrant and the things that they keep hearing about in the news and immigration, which is a huge part of this administration, this series touches on how America has been handling Black migration in the last, as you said, over 100 years.

Hopefully, that speaks to them.

Let me throw one at you that is a little bit different, not directly involved with the documentary, but when you're five or six years old, typically the idea that "I'm going to be a documentary producer and director," is not on your radar scope at that age.

What was it for both of you that motivated you that "This is what I want to do is to be a storyteller in this fashion?"

I think I might have mentioned, I came into this as a historian.

I was a history major in college and I loved doing research.

History is storytelling in a way.

I thought I could be an academic, I could be a historian, or I could find ways to-- To your point about kids, how do you get people engaged with history?

How do you get people to pay attention?

You make stories about it.

You tell stories about it.

I think while I loved history, I didn't want to be cloistered away as an academic as much as I respect college professors.

I wanted to do something that was at the nexus between entertainment and education, which is what documentaries are.

They're attempting to entertain people while educating them.

I was lucky enough to meet Dr. Gates when I was very early on in my car.. and so I've been working with him for a long time.

Luckily he chooses these incredible topics that allow me to scratch that history itch while being able to make these incredible programs.

I lucked into it just because I was interested in history.

I feel very fortunate that I chose this path.

We have approximately one minute left.

I would like for each of you briefly to tell us what you hope the folks at home will take away from Great Migrations.

Mass movements of people always feel destabilizing, whether it's within the country or from without.

It always feels destabilizing.

When we can look back on it, which we do in this series, you realize that for the most part, waves of immigration or migration tend to make the country better and stronger and richer, even if in the moment it feels painful and scary.

That's a big lesson I hope people take away.

I think that's really well said, and that's the big-picture message.

I will also say that I hope that people realize that courageous Black Americans have had a role through their migrations in shaping the America we know today.

We have inherited the America that Black migration has shaped through culture, through politics, through millions of migrants who chose to move against really hard odds and forced America to accept them, and forced America to improve for the better.

I want to thank you both ever so much for your time and also for your insights about a documentary that I know is going to be memorable for our viewers on West Tennessee PBS.

Thank you so very much, Julia Marchesi and Nailah Ife Sims.

Thank you ever so much.

Thank you.

appreciate it.

Thank you.

Just remember, if you want.. if you want to share it with someone you know, then go to the PBS app or you can go to westtnpbs.org.

I'm Steve Beverly, and it's great to have you in the conversation.

Keep talking, Tennessee.

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