Growing up in this part of the country, Orlando Bagwell knew that he was living in what had been the very center of the American slave trade. But he never fully appreciated what that meant until he was researching his newest PBS documentary, "Africans in America: America's Journey Through Slavery."

"Even when I was growing up, the word in my community was that most of the descendants of African people in some way or another lived in Virginia," says Bagwell, noting that the majority of Africans brought to America to be sold into slavery landed first in Virginia or Maryland. "We used to laugh at it, not really understanding what that meant. In fact, that makes a lot of sense, when you look at the number of Africans who passed through Virginia and were moved from Virginia to other parts of the country."

While researching the story of Anthony Johnson, one of the first Africans to win his freedom and become a landowner in the New World, Bagwell visited Virginia's Accomack County, on the peninsula that state shares with Maryland's Eastern Shore.

"A woman looked at me and said, 'You know, you're from around here,' " says Bagwell, 48, a native Baltimorean who moved from the city at age 15 and now lives in Boston. "I explained to her that I was from Baltimore. She asked me where I thought my family was from, and I said I'd heard they were from Virginia. ... She said, 'You know, your family lives over there, on that plantation not far from here down the road.'

"She took me to the plantation and showed me the place where, in fact, members of my family still live, and the descendants of the family who owned the plantation still live in the house. She took me to the record books and began to show me names in the record books that go back to the 1700s. I was quite taken and determined that I would go back and do a bit more investigation to find out about members of my family on my father's side."

Not every American is going to find so personal a connection to "Africans in America," an exhaustive and enlightening look at the black experience in the British Colonies and, later, the United States. But Bagwell firmly believes his four-part, six-hour documentary is more than a simple history lesson.

The series, which begins tomorrow night on MPT, traces the history of slavery as an institution and as a defining influence on how Americans view one another. Even while white Americans were exploiting a system based on the idea that an entire race of people could be bought and sold, they established a democracy based on the concept of freedom as an inalienable right.

If they failed to see the hypocrisy, black Americans did not - a dichotomy that fostered an us-vs.-them mentality the country still suffers under more than 130 years after the Civil War supposedly settled the issue.

"Once there was a decision to set people aside and to make them the permanent labor force, then of course you're on somewhat of a slippery slope, because the next thing is to convince someone that this kind of thinking is correct, that in fact there is something about these people that makes them the people that should be this permanent work force. ... It begins to move you in a long, continuous series of decisions and laws that not only enforce that idea, but also work toward maintaining that system.

"I hope, by looking at this, we begin to recognize how certain ideas about racial identity have been constructed in this country," says Bagwell, who served as the series' executive producer and directed tomorrow night's opening chapter. "And if we begin to see that ... these ideas were constructed over generations, we can recognize how deeply ingrained some of these ideas are within us."

Such an understanding, he suspects, "can contribute to a really worthwhile discussion about issues today that we're facing, around issues of race and identity in our society."

Bagwell first rose to prominence directing two episodes of "Eyes on the Prize" (1988), a chronicle of the Civil Rights movement that stands alongside Ken Burns' "The Civil War" (1990) as one of the finest historical documentaries of this generation. Since then, his work has included "The Great Depression" (1993), "Frederick Douglass: When the Lion Wrote History" (1994) and "Malcolm X: Make it Plain" (1994).

He's been making films for 18 years, as everything from a staff producer for the PBS series "Frontline" (a product of Boston's WGBH) to executive vice president for Blackside Inc. (producers of "The Great Depression") to founder and president of ROJA Productions, a Boston-based film and television production company.

For Bagwell, the most pleasant surprise he uncovered in researching "Africans in America" - apart from his family tree - was the wealth of source material, including journals from free blacks and other contemporary accounts.

"I was quite surprised by the range of people we were able to find," he says. "I had never known of Anthony Johnson, one of the first Africans to come to the Virginia Colony, and the quite amazing range of his life. The same could be said of Venture Smith, in the second program, who comes over as an enslaved African and buys his freedom and the freedom of his family.

"I was also quite taken by the journal of Fanny Kemble that showed up in the fourth program, when she goes to Butler Island and begins to talk with enslaved women and begins to record their stories in very detailed form. It gives us kind of an interesting look at slavery on a very isolated yet very profitable and big plantation off the coast of Georgia."

If nothing else, Bagwell looks forward to dispelling forever "the sense that the population of slave people, as well as the free black community, was kind of a silent community that endured slavery, that survived it, surely, ... did not like it, but was to a certain degree quiet. Some people even might believe that slaves themselves were somewhat passive, kind of devastated by the institution and life - and therefore, in that passivity, somewhat accepting."

On the contrary, Bagwell says, the historical record is replete with "voices of Africans, slaves and free, who are actively challenging the nation and its notions of liberty and freedom."

Pub date 10/18/98