Rating: 
February 6, 2008
AND you thought your family had secrets.
Tonight, radio personality Tom Joyner will learn the story of how two of his great uncles and three other men - all African Americans - were executed in South Carolina on the same day in 1915 for the murder of a white Civil War veteran - a murder they almost certainly did not commit.
It's a story some of his older relatives may have known, but none of them ever told him and he is understandably stunned.
This long-buried family story is revealed by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the second edition of his illuminating series, "African American Lives," premiering tonight on PBS.
This is the series in which Gates, the renowned Harvard professor specializing in African American studies, investigates the forgotten stories of the ancestors of some prominent Americans, who tonight include Joyner, Jackie Joyner-Kersee (no relation), Chris Rock, Morgan Freeman, Don Cheadle and Tina Turner.
Rock and Turner are so moved by what they hear that they cry.
For once, Chris Rock is rendered virtually speechless when he learns in tonight's second hour that his great-great grandfather, Julius Caesar Tinghman of South Carolina, enlisted in the Union army in the Civil War and was later elected to the South Carolina legislature during Reconstruction. When Reconstruction ended in 1876, Tinghman was left a pauper, but by the time he died, he amassed a sizable estate.
"I'm gonna cry - I can't believe it," says Rock, who indeed sheds tears. "I'm very proud of my great-great grandfather and I'm really sad that I went through my whole life not knowing that there were people in my family that achieved enormous heights, people in my family who grew up during slavery and Jim Crow and the fall of Reconstruction that still managed to experience some of their dreams coming true - a miracle."
A miracle is how you might describe this beautifully filmed and emotionally stirring TV show. It's about the Black experience in America, but its family stories of success and failure, tragedy and triumph are universal.
Every American family has them, even if most of us will never know them unless we dig them up ourselves, or are lucky enough to have Prof. Gates unearth them for us.
"African American Lives 2"
Tonight at 9 p.m. WNET/13
