CRUEL WORLD OF 'JIM CROW'.

Byline: David Kronke TV Critic

GIVEN THE LEGACY of oppression that has dogged African-Americans ever since they reached this country and how virulently reticent far more powerful whites were to cede them simple equality, one marvels at the courage and tenacity displayed by the heroes depicted in ``The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow.''

Producer/writer/director Richard Wormser has assembled an impressive and sobering four-hour documentary miniseries that at times seems to detail every lynching, every white-fueled race riot, every cruel indignity that has been visited upon blacks in this country over the past two centuries. And yet the film celebrates the poetic resolve and patience that those like 19th-century champions Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells and 20th-century advocates W.E.B. DuBois, Charlotte Hawkins and Charles Hamilton Houston, all of whom understood that education was the path that led to equality. The film posits the 1954 Supreme Court decision banning school desegregation as the movement's greatest victory.

Jim Crow was a ``malicious minstrel caricature'' created in 1836, and the name given to ipso facto rules separating whites and blacks, particularly in the South. President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor, flatly declared, ``This is a country for white men.'' Mississippi governor Benjamin Humphreys, in his accented English, was less eloquent but more blunt: ``The nigra is free, whether we like it or not, (but) they must accept their place in the order of things.''

Nothing blacks could do, it seems, would appease whites. When they went about their lives and became successful, as in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898 or Atlanta in 1906, whites still attacked them and burned down their homes and businesses. Convict lease camps became slavery reimagined in a more virulent state: Southern blacks arrested for misdemeanors were sentenced to years of hard - and more specifically, cheap - labor to create roads and other public services.

Wormser has assembled a broad, enthralling group of historians and witnesses to tell his story with great drama. At one point, narrator Richard Roundtree merely reads a list of some of the more than 3,000 blacks lynched over a 30-year period in the South while a gruesome montage of lynchings plays across the screen.

Most chilling is a white supremacist who discusses the first lynching he witnessed as a youngster, the glee still in his voice, while another witness, 50 years after the fact, still weeps recalling the lynching he saw, adding that if anyone had known he had seen it, he himself would've been murdered. There's also astonishing footage of Strom Thurmond, then governor of South Carolina, apoplectic with hatred, sputtering his prediction of ``a totalitarian state'' if a civil-rights bill is passed. This guy is still in politics?

But the halting victories and moments in which African-Americans risked their own lives for the betterment of their race eventually outnumber the atrocities. ``The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow'' reminds us how abject the depths of prejudices were from which America has risen, and so it's no wonder that there's more work to be done.

THE RISE AND FALL OF JIM CROW - Three and one half stars

What: Four-hour documentary miniseries examining segregation and its eventual dismantling in America.

Where: KCET.

When: 8 tonight and successive Thursdays through Oct. 24.

In a nutshell: Smart, absorbing and disturbing, making the ultimate civil- rights victories that much more resonant.

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The four-part ``Rise and Fall of Jim Crow'' on PBS examines segregation from the end of the Civil War to the dawn of the civil rights movement.