Henry Louis Gates Jr. presents 'The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross'

Writer and scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. is behind the PBS show “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.”

BLACK HISTORY documentaries and dramatizations surface regularly on television, but scholar and author Henry Louis Gates Jr. says his new one for PBS takes a different tack.

“The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” premieres Tuesday at 8 p.m. and runs for six weeks. It’s set up chronologically, with each hour focusing on a defined era.

Tuesday’s opener, titled “The Black Atlantic,” covers 1500 to 1800. The final episode, covering 1968 to the present, is titled, with just a splash of irony, “A More Perfect Union.”

What sets “Many Rivers” apart, says Gates, is that it covers “the full complexity of the black experience. This isn’t just about slavery. It’s also about the lives and contributions of free blacks.

“African Americans have always been two peoples with two stories — one slave, one free. I found it startling, as we’ve put this series together, how little most people know about that other story.”

The first episode, Gates notes, also expands the story of slavery and free blacks outside the borders of what would become the U.S.A.

The overwhelming majority of African slaves, millions in all, were sent elsewhere in the “New World.” At the same time, one of the most successful Spanish “conquistadors” was a black man, African-born Juan Garrido.

“If you want to understand the full scope of the black experience, you have to know stories like this,” says Gates, and “Many Rivers” follows that principle, telling its larger stories through individual biographical narratives.

It follows teenagers and preteenagers from their enslavement to the often unexpected destiny of their own lives and those of their descendants.

This part of “Many Rivers” dovetails neatly with another of Gates’ projects: his PBS genealogy series that tracks the ancestry of blacks and whites with surprising results.

For the black experience specifically, Gates says one dirty little secret is crucial.

“Not one person in any of our genetic tests has ever been 100% African American,” he says. “No matter how dark their complexion, there’s always some white blood.

“That collective and public information is part of the story we’re telling.”

“Many Rivers” does have at least one thing in common with every other black history documentary, Gates allows.

“We don’t have time to tell as much of the story as we’d like to,” he says. “We’re covering 500 years in six hours and there’s always so much you have to leave out.”

But this is the digital age, so the “Many Rivers” project can include additional material on its website, which is also interactive for viewers to add their own stories.

There will also be educational DVDs and a companion book of the same title, written by Gates and Donald Yacavone.