The series begins as host and executive producer Henry Louis Gates Jr. visits Ellis Island, where Caucasian Americans come to trace their European roots. Black people, Gates asserts, deserve the same information; it's just that, up to now, they lacked the means to find it. They also may have lacked any reason to ask. ''If you're on the run, man," says record producer and composer Quincy Jones, ''you do not care about lineage."
''African American Lives" takes on the riveting task of tracing black history through family history, focusing on people we largely know. Along with Gates, Winfrey, and Jones, the series traces the family trees of actress Whoopi Goldberg, neurosurgeon Ben Carson, preacher Bishop T.D. Jakes, astronaut Mae Jemison, Harvard professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, and comedian Chris Tucker. Each episode takes us back further in time, first to the Jim Crow era and the Great Migration, then to the days of slavery and Reconstruction, and, finally, to Africa.
If nothing else, this is a stunning historical undertaking, a massive and detailed project tracing genealogical records and analyzing DNA, swiped from celebrity cheeks. But the program's greater power comes from the past itself. With minimal use of talking-head experts, it tells the small stories that make history feel more true.
We meet, for instance, a white genealogist who could be Gates's distant cousin. We learn that Tucker's great-grandfather saved a black Georgia town from extinction by selling land to families who would have migrated north. We learn that Winfrey's great-great grandfather put a school on his property. We spend time with Winfrey's father, who still runs a no-frills barbershop in Nashville, and is as compelling a figure as anyone.
Winfrey commands more than her share of screen time, in part because she's eloquent. Tucker provides a vehicle for a trip back to Africa, where he comes face to face with his roots. Goldberg wittily cuts through documentary conventions: When Gates asks her how it will feel to uncover her roots, she replies, ''I don't know. I don't want to fabricate a feeling. I want to feel it."
