TV REVIEWS : ‘Across the River’ to a Real War on Poverty

Journalist Hedrick Smith has made a career of exploring faraway places and, with as intimate a touch as a reporter can muster, making the inhabitants human. But Smith is now based in Washington, D.C. with his own TV production unit with ties to PBS, and he would seem to be on familiar turf. Where are the new, unknown places for Smith to roam?

Well, he’s found one, divided from Washington by the Potomac. In the hourlong “Across the River,” Smith takes us to Anacondia and Marshall Heights, two of the area’s most depressed, drug-ravaged communities, and brings us up close to people who are trying to save their towns.

In the wake of defunct government efforts to wage any kind of meaningful war on poverty, grass-roots projects and nonprofit institutions have filled the social support vacuum. In the case of the Alliance of Concerned Men, a tiny group of middle-aged black men who have seen and survived lives of drugs and crime, numbers and money matter less than pure commitment and energy as they bring children in contact with their fathers in prison.

These big brothers provide a kind of emotional bonding to lost younger men, but other projects in the Anacondia area are directed at material well-being. Smith is clearly astounded by entrepreneur Lloyd Smith, who put his own assets on the line for investments in local commercial developments aimed at bringing jobs and money--and the middle class--back where they used to be.

Not far from this triumph is another, in which a white-owned bank (Nations Bank) and a white-owned developer (William Smith Development Co.) have sunk millions of dollars into restoring schools and affordable housing in a largely African American area. The bankers tell Smith that it’s good business as well as a way of saving a community. If there’s a war on redlining, this is it.

Our roving reporter also finds that children in poverty need not fail in school, not if they can have programs that combine discipline, job-training and one-on-one teacher involvement. The Public Service Academy, a mini-school within Anacondia High School, graduates almost all of its students, who obviously benefit from internships inside the Beltway.

The problem with such local success stories is, paradoxically, why they’re successes in the first place: They are local and grass-roots. Smith never inquires into the nagging question for Los Angeles viewers: If these projects work 3,000 miles away, why not here? You feel happy for Anacondia and Marshall Heights, but you wonder about the rest of the country.

* “Across the River” airs at 10 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.