Even when Terry Neumann isn’t loading and unloading trailers at the Milwaukee warehouse where he works from 4 p.m. to midnight, his body aches.
“With all my physical activity, the joints, the knees, the shoulders, the broken leg – the weather changes and it hurts,” Neumann, who is in his early 60s, says in the words of above the new film FRONTLINE. America’s two families: 1991-2024. “I mean I’m in pain every day, but I’m moving on.”
Neumann has been “pushing” physically demanding jobs for years, trying to keep himself and his family afloat in America’s changing economy. He is one of two Milwaukee families — one white, one black — whose decades-long struggle to escape poverty has been documented. America’s two families: 1991-2024starts on July 23rd.
When reporter Bill Moyers and filmmakers Tom Casciato and Kathleen Hughes began filming the Neumanns and Stanleys, it was 1991, the families had young children, and the American economy was you are in a seismic shift. The breadwinners in both families had recently lost their well-paying, unionized manufacturing jobs, and the families were struggling to adapt to the new service economy where jobs were geared toward temporary, of low income.
Stanley’s patriarch, Claude, said in 1991: “When I was put to work, they wanted me to continue with health care, but I couldn’t wait in line. “I just said, it’s not me… I got my strength, my health; I’m going to find a job.”
Jackie, Claude’s wife, was similarly determined.
At that time he said: “There is something I always say: ‘As a man thinks, so does he.’ “If I think about poverty all the time, I will act like that. I can’t say bad things and let my children see me like that, I’m down or depressed.”
The Neumanns faced similar problems at the time.
“I don’t like to go and say, ‘I don’t have any food in the house … can you help me?'” Terry Neumann said of going to the grocery store with her ex-husband, Tony, looking for a steady income.I’d rather be on the giving side than the receiving side.
More than thirty years later, America’s two families: 1991-2024 brings the stories of the Neumann and Stanley families, through the generations, to the present. As the two-hour documentary shows, both families have refused to stop fighting for financial stability despite the economic crisis.
“I’m not going to give up,” Jackie Stanley, who works as a real estate agent as she enters her 70s and deals with life’s challenges, says in the clip above.
America’s two families: 1991-2024 is the fifth installment in the critically acclaimed PBS documentary series following the Neumanns and Stanleys that began in the 1992’s. Minimum Wages: The New Economyand continued with three more films – a 1995 collaboration with FRONTLINE called Living on the Edge, a 2000 PBS special called Surviving the Good Times and the 2013 documentary FRONTLINE Two American families. The New Yorker stated that the final film would “take its place among the central documentaries of our time,” and Variety he wrote that “it wants to be seen and discussed.”
It includes six presidential officers, America’s two families: 1991-2024 is a portrait of perseverance that raises unsettling questions about the changing American economy, the impact on the poor, and the shrinking middle class of tax cuts and other government policies that have made the wealthy they are rich.
It’s a rare and poignant long-term look at two families who are still working, in Moyers’ words, “in an economy that stopped working for them a long time ago.”
Terry Neumann, now a grandfather, in the quote above, says: “If our wages go up, everything goes up, gas goes up, groceries go up.”
He adds: “There is no room to do anything.”
For the full story of how the elder Neumanns and Stanleys, along with their children and grandchildren, live today, watch America’s two families: 1991-2024. The special two-hour documentary will be available to watch in its entirety at pbs.org/line and on the PBS App beginning July 23, 2024, at 7/6c. It will premiere on PBS stations (check your local listings) and so on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel at 10/9c and will be available again at PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. America’s two families: 1991-2024 is a production of FRONTLINE and Okapi Productions LLC and Public Affairs Television, Inc. in conjunction with Left/Right Docs. Produced and directed by Tom Casciato and Kathleen Hughes. Co-producer is Andrew Fredericks. Written by Kathleen Hughes. The author is Bill Moyers. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.
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