Narrator: My grandparents were Colored.

My parents were Negroes.

And me?

I'm Black.

Kanye West: ♪ For my theme song ♪ ♪ My leather black jeans on... ♪ Narrator: Over my lifetime, I've seen astonishing progress.

I'm Black and beautiful.

African Americans have achieved so much, in so many ways, surpassing our greatest hopes... Game Announcer: Here is Jordan!

Narrator: And our wildest dreams.

[Applause] We're visible in virtually every facet of American life... Defining its face and its voice to the world.

John Legend: ♪ One day when the glory comes... ♪ Narrator: Yet far too many Black lives are still threatened by harsh inequalities.

Woman: Whose streets?

Protestors: Our streets!

Whose streets?

Our streets!

Gates: Why do we still have to march to protect our rights?

Protestors: Black lives matter!

50 years ago, I thought that by now, we would have been long past all this.

How did we get here?

How have we come so far and yet have so far to go?

Choir: ♪ Glory ♪ [Music playing] ♪ I went to a dance last night ♪ ♪ I met a little girl ♪ ♪ Everything was going right ♪ ♪ Man, she was out of this world... ♪ Gates: In 1965, I was preoccupied, watching "American Bandstand," searching among the dancers for the few Black faces trying to learn a new dance called the slide.

I was 14 years old, growing up in the hills of West Virginia.

The civil rights movement seemed a long way away.

All that changed on March 7, 1965, when peaceful marchers calling for voting rights were viciously attacked by the police in Selma, Alabama.

The shocking images were broadcast that night in primetime, and they galvanized the country.

Martin Luther King: However frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth crushed to earth will rise again.

Yes, sir!

How long?

Not long.

Yes, sir.

Because no lie can live forever.

[Applause] Gates: Outraged, President Lyndon Johnson astonished the nation by invoking the phrase that had become the mantra of the Civil Rights Movement.

And we shall overcome.

[Applause] Gates: I watched that speech with my parents.

My mother began to cry.

Less than 6 months later, with Dr.

King beside him, President Johnson would sign the Voting Rights Act, bringing down one of the last legal pillars of Jim Crow segregation.

Woman: ♪ Thank the Lord... ♪ Gates: It was a defining moment for the United States.

For the first time since Reconstruction, African Americans everywhere would be able to vote.

It seemed as if all the sacrifices of the Civil Rights Movement had finally paid off.

The years of marches, jailings, and even murders were giving rise to a new day of racial harmony, integration, and equal opportunity, but the story of race in the second half of the 20th century would turn out to be much more complicated than we thought.

[Siren] 5 days after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Los Angeles, California, exploded.

[Sirens, people shouting] an altercation between an unarmed Black man and the police sparked riots on the streets of Watts, a predominantly Black neighborhood... Policeman: First one that drops your hands is a dead man.

Gates: Revealing that America still faced deep racial issues.

Man: It's so easy to think racism was a Southern problem, as opposed to Midwestern, Northern, Western.

No.

It was a national problem.

You had similar conditions-- Segregated housing, you had segregated schools, you had massive unemployment, massive underemployment, and police brutality, if not downright police terror.

Gates: While the nation had been transfixed by the South, Black people in Los Angeles had been battling racial injustice on many fronts for years.

Man: In Watts and these other places, you always have had African Americans who have been organizing, but they were up against the entirety of not only the political system, but really, the economic system, and so it was an expression of their frustration, and they said, "If you didn't listen to us before, you're sure as heck gonna listen to us now."

I'm just getting tired of being pushed around by you white people, that's all.

You're stopping us on the street, kicking in the doors, taking down to the police station.

You're kicking teeth in.

Reporter: Well, they're stopping people on the street now, but, I mean, they weren't stopping people on the street when this started.

Oh, they've been doing it a long time before now.

I think it started 400 years ago.

Reporter: What would make it better?

What would make all the rioting stop?

I don't think it'll ever stop, really.

Johnson: Pillage, looting, murder, and arson have nothing to do with civil rights.

Gates: President Johnson was shocked by the anger in Watts, but Watts was just one spark of a much larger fire.

In the coming years, urban unrest roiled cities across America.

I remember my father saying it was crazy for people to burn down their own neighborhoods.

But African Americans were fed up with segregation, deprivation, and everyday humiliation.

They wanted genuine equality.

They'd been fighting for it for decades, and not enough had changed.

When Dr.

King visited Watts in the wake of the riots, the frustration was right in front of him.

Nobody here is for riots.

Nobody wants to see anybody killed, but who wants to lay down while somebody kick him to death?

[People cheer] this is what I'm talking about!

King: You all know my philosophy.

You all know that I believe firmly in nonviolence.

Man: Sure, we like to be nonviolent, but we up here in Los Angeles area will not turn that other cheek.

They are selling us again, and we're tired of being sold as slaves!

[Cheering] Gates: Dr.

King was absolutely undone by what he saw in Watts.

It was clear that Black America was undergoing a seismic shift.

♪ Oh, but my country is full of lies ♪ ♪ We all gonna die and die like flies ♪ ♪ 'Cause I don't trust nobody anymore ♪ ♪ They keep on saying "Go slow" ♪ We declare our right on this Earth to be a man by any means necessary!

Audience: Yeah!

Gates: More radical voices-- some old, some new-- Were sparking new ideas and new attitudes.

No man knocks me down and get away with it, so you be ready for, you hear?

Be ready, 'cause I'm coming to get you.

♪ Everybody knows about ♪ ♪ Mississippi Goddam ♪ That's it!

[Applause] Gates: These new ideas were even transforming the struggle in the South.

In the spring of 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, sent teams of activists to rural Lowndes County, Alabama.

Among them was a charismatic 23-year-old named Stokely Carmichael.

A policeman in a Black community is a licensed killer.

He's a licensed killer.

A Black man attacking a policeman is a rioter.

Yeah.

Gates: Born in Trinidad and raised in New York City, Stokely knew that voting alone hadn't been enough to secure full equality for African Americans in the North, but here, Black people made up 80% of the population, so there was a chance to try something new.

We have to use our vote to get out of the cotton fields.

That's right.

We can't get out the cotton field voting for the boss man.

That's right... We got to vote for people who've been in the cotton fields like ourselves, and they're the ones who are gonna bring us out of the cotton fields.

Gates: At first, Carmichael had trouble convincing Black residents to join him because so many were terrified of the white landowners who controlled just about every aspect of their lives.

The rivers and roadsides here were dotted with the bodies of men and women who had dared to stand up for civil rights.

The county was nicknamed Bloody Lowndes.

Anyone who even talked about Black people voting was taking an enormous risk.

Jeffries: African Americans who had lived on white folks' land literally for multiple generations-- If it was found out that they had attempted to register to vote, they were thrown off the land, evicted.

Nightriders ride by and fire into the homes of the local leaders.

No one wore hoods and masks in Lowndes County, Alabama.

Racial terror was unmasked.

Help me to understand how people felt when they were approached by SNCC at the beginning.

They were afraid, and they thought that they would be killed, and they were frightened for their family.

They let him out of jail... Gates, voice-over: John Jackson grew up in Lowndes County.

He was 16 years old when Stokely arrived and was one of the few to welcome him.

Jackson: I was a student at the time, and I saw the civil rights workers.

So, I was excited, and they said, "Well, we looking for a place to stay in the community so we can organize Lowndes County."

I said, "Well, my father got a vacant house down there."

I said, "Y'all come on down and meet him."

You volunteered your parents' house?

Yeah.

I said, "Come talk to Daddy.

He might let y'all stay in the house."

Wow.

Did, uh-- When you went home and told your father, did he say, "Are you crazy, boy?"

No, he didn't.

He said, "Well, let them come on down, fellas, and we'll see what we can do."

Uh-huh.

So they came down to meet him.

They hit it right off, and he told them, he said, "There's no inside bathroom.

"These are substandard housing.

You cats gonna stay in there?"

"Yeah, Mr.

Jackson.

We just need somewhere to stay because these folks shooting at us."

Ha ha ha!

How did your white neighbors react to Stokely and SNCC activists?

After they found out they was really here, they called my daddy and told him, "You don't need them down there," but he said to them, "Well, I just want it better for my children, so they're gonna continue to stay down there."

Gates, voice-over: Carmichael and his fellow activists worked Lowndes County for over a year, braving constant danger.

They could see that if voting was going to make a real difference, people needed someone to vote for, but Alabama was dominated by the Democratic Party, which was committed to white supremacy, so Carmichael and his compatriots proposed a radical plan.

Black people would create their own independent party-- the Lowndes County Freedom Organization.

Carmichael: I say to the Black people that we form our own party and we seek power.

We don't seek integration.

That's irrelevant to what we want.

We want power, and this is the way we get it.

Gates: Alabama state law required every political party to have a symbol that voters could recognize on the ballot if they couldn't read.

The Democratic Party symbol had always been this white rooster.

Jeffries: African Americans, local activists, turned to one sister, and they said, "Hey, could you come up with a ballot symbol?"

So she, you know, thinks about it for a while, then comes back and presents to the people of Lowndes County, Alabama, a white dove-- beautiful, soaring to the heavens, this white dove-- and they look at it, and they're like, "You know, we appreciate the effort, "but this doesn't exactly capture "the fierceness of the situation and the struggle that we find ourselves in."

[Drumbeats] Gates: Then someone suggested an animal more in keeping with the changing mood of the times.

Jeffries: And they look at it, and they say, "This is exactly what we need."

Black panthers were indigenous to the Southeast, so... These are rural people.

They understood that panthers, as cats, were peaceful animals, but that when backed into a corner, they will come out fighting for life or death.

Gates: Defying white terror tactics, African Americans registered to vote in droves.

Looking back at these images today makes me realize how brave these people were.

Everyone here knew that they were risking their lives.

In the end, the new party lost their first election, but their point had been made.

They would no longer be cowed by intimidation, and in the coming years, African American candidates would begin to win.

Indeed, the call for Black political empowerment was just beginning, and so was Stokely Carmichael.

The time for running has come to an end!

[Crowd cheers] You tell them white folk in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead.

Crowd: Yeah!

Gates: In June of 1966, Stokely traveled to Mississippi to join a massive march on the state capitol.

He walked side by side with his friend Dr.

King, but by now, their views seemed to be far apart.

King: Let me say first that this march is nonviolent.

It is a nonviolent expression of our determination to be free.

Mr.

Carmichael, are you as committed to the nonviolent approach as Dr.

King is?

No, I'm not.

Why aren't you?

I just don't see it as a way of life.

I never have.

I grew up in the slums of New York, and I learned there that the only way that one survived was to use his fists.

No one in this country is asking the white community in the South to be nonviolent, and that, in a sense, is giving them a free license to go ahead and shoot us at will.

Gates: Carmichael was looking for a new way to frame the civil rights struggle.

Marchers: Black power, stop and yell!

As it turns out, the solution was right in front of him.

You ask them, working in them crackers' fields... One of his colleagues, Willie Ricks, was rousing people with the phrase "Black power," and on June 16, 1966, Stokely used these words himself.

The effect was electrifying.

Carmichael: It's time we stand up and take over.

Don't be afraid.

Don't be ashamed.

We want Black power.

We want Black power.

Black power!

Black power!

We want Black power!

Black power!

Black power!

We want Black power.

Black power!

Black power!

Everybody, what do you want?

Black power!

Black power!

That's what we gonna get.

[Crowd cheering] Gates: Almost overnight, Black Power groups were organizing across the country, each with their own idea about what the phrase actually meant.

You had everybody from those that are saying, "Yes, let's go for elected office," to those that say, "Let's overthrow the government."

Gates: But not everyone was onboard with the new slogan.

We don't believe in Black Power.

That's the wrong word.

That's a dirty word.

Man: Amen!

Woman: There are certain segments of African American communities that just really believe that Black Power is disruptive, that it's wrong, that it's violent, and that that is not the way to get ahead in society, and so there are a lot of African Americans who, in fact, denounce Black Power at its peak.

No matter how endlessly they try to explain it, the term "Black Power" means anti-white power.

It shall not now poison our forward march.

[Applause] Jeffries: There was a real fear that the idea of Black Power, the idea of African Americans challenging white liberals in the Democratic Party, would scare white folk.

King: The phrase "Black Power" gives a wrong connotation, and there are those who associate it with Black supremacy, with a call to violence, and with a call to Negro separatism, a feeling that the Negro now feels that he can make it alone.

Man: The day of Martin Luther King's nonviolence has come to an end!

Yeah!

Yeah!

I've got 3 witnesses right here in this audience who were there when he said, "My day's finished."

Man: ♪ Do your thing... ♪ Gates: At first, Dr.

King and many of his allies saw Black Power as a challenge, both to nonviolence and the goal of integration.

They feared that it would speed the unraveling of the always fragile interracial civil rights coalition, and they were right.

Ricks: As far as I'm concerned, this meeting is over!

This meeting is over.

This country has never cared about Black people.

That's right.

They don't give two damns about us, and all of us always turning around worrying about what's good for America, what's good-- Later for America!

What's good for Black people?

That's what we want to know.

♪ Don't call me nigger ♪ ♪ Whitey ♪ We want Black power!

We want Black power!

We want Black power!

Black power.

Black power.

Black power!

Gates: Looking back, Black Power marked a startling shift in Black consciousness.

Crowd: BP!

Hey, hey!

Ungawa.

Black power... Gates: Black--the word we once dreaded being called, the word we even sometimes used to insult one another-- suddenly had become both a battle cry and a weapon.

It was the most exciting thing I'd ever heard.

And we are not white!

We are Black!

[Applause] Gates: But just as Dr.

King had feared, Black Power helped accelerate a white exodus from the Civil Rights Movement.

I think there were a lot of well-meaning white people who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement actively and for all the right reasons that felt alienated from the Black Power movement, kind of upset.

I think that what a lot of them didn't understand is the Civil Rights Movement was part of something much larger than just a struggle for legal rights and legal citizenship in the United States.

It was also the struggle against the indignities that had built up over centuries.

The Black Power movement was about raising consciousness, about changing selves, changing the meaning of Blackness, and I'm not sure that's something that white people were quite as onboard for.

Gates: Many in white America may have seen Black Power as a threat, but for Black activists, it heralded a new direction and the virtual reincarnation of one of their greatest leaders-- Malcolm X. Malcolm X: There's no such thing as freedom in this country for a Black man, there's no such thing as justice in this country for a Black man, and there's no such thing as equality in this country for a Black man.

This is a white man's country.

Man: Malcolm X gave us the notion that it's OK to think outside of the box, especially the box that has imprisoned us.

He said, "That's OK.

Think outside of that box."

Man: When you look at the kinds of things that were going on at the time-- dogs being sicced on people, people disappearing-- Malcolm X realized that while Martin Luther King was preaching nonviolence and peace, you had to send a message.

He was a warrior.

He was a general, and they feared him, and fear sometimes is a very good thing.

The Negroes themselves should take whatever steps necessary to defend themselves.

The Negro will be serving notice that no longer does he believe in turning the other cheek.

Gates: By the time Black Power began to rise, Malcolm had been tragically silenced, but now his words were on the lips of a new generation, telling Black people to take control of their own destiny, not just ask for concessions, and to take fierce pride in their Blackness.

♪ Black is beautiful ♪ Free Huey!

♪ Set our warrior free ♪ Free Huey!

Gates: Most famously, in October 1966, a group of activists in Oakland, California, took up Malcolm's rhetoric, adopted the symbol of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, and called themselves the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.

Their goal was to protect their community from racism and violence, which meant protecting it from the police.

More people were dying at the hands of the police in any given year in the United States in metropolitan areas outside of the South than were dying at the hands of the Klan in the entire South, and so one of the things that the Panthers decide that they're gonna do as a way to introduce themselves to the community, as a way to also stop police brutality, they say, "We're gonna police the police."

We advocate that the entire Black community arm itself for self-defense against the racist gestapo violence of the pigs.

♪ Say it loud ♪ ♪ I'm Black and I'm proud ♪ ♪ No matter how hard you try ♪ ♪ You can't stop me now... ♪ Gates: The Panthers organized community patrols, boldly following the police, armed and unafraid.

Their audacity was breathtaking.

Black men with guns, black leather jackets, black berets?

Who had ever even imagined this kind of thing before?

It was like an alternative universe in which centuries of white-on-Black violence were about to be repaid.

I say violence is necessary.

Violence is a part of America's culture.

It is as American as cherry pie.

Americans taught the Black people to be violent.

We will use that violence to rid ourselves of oppression if necessary.

We will be free, by any means necessary.

♪ So come on, people ♪ Children: ♪ Oh, yeah ♪ ♪ Join in the struggle ♪ ♪ Oh, yeah ♪ ♪ Fight for liberation ♪ ♪ Oh, yeah ♪ ♪ I said, guns, pick up the guns ♪ ♪ Pick up the guns and put the pigs on the run ♪ ♪ Pick up the guns ♪ Gates: The Panthers scared the hell out of just about everybody, especially the police.

I was pretty terrified of them myself, but at the same time, I found them thrilling, and I wasn't the only one.

The Panthers sent shockwaves throughout America, attracting an array of young recruits.

This was the place where he first brought me to the Panther office down in July.

It was here.

Wow, look at this.

This is the first issue of the paper I worked on.

"Racist ethnic groups battle for pig power."

That's the truth.

That's what was happening in America.

Gates: Kathleen Neal was 22 years old when she moved to California and joined the Panthers' inner circle.

She married the party's minister of information, Eldridge Cleaver, and became its communications secretary.

They want the Panthers in Syracuse.

They have the Panthers in New York.

Everywhere they go, they want the Black Panther Party... Cleaver: More and more people joined, and we were building cadres, building up a consciousness, and really bringing about change in the people in Oakland, and they could see themselves in a different way, and they wanted to function in a different way, and--the Panther Party gave that opportunity.

Gates: Kathleen witnessed first-hand the party refining its tactics and expanding its reach.

Chapters opened across the country, spreading the Panthers' radical message.

Cleaver, voice-over: We were not for integration.

We were for self-determination.

We wanted to have the right to determine ourselves what we wanted.

It meant economic opportunity, decent education.

We wanted access to the full complement of privileges and benefits and responsibilities of any American.

[Siren] Gates: The Panthers put their revolutionary rhetoric into action.

They developed community programs, offering care and clothing to the needy and free breakfasts for children.

Reporter: Did you have breakfast here this morning?

Yes.

How long has it been since you've had a hot breakfast?

A long time.

Jeffries: Did the Panthers embrace a willingness to use arms to defend themselves?

Absolutely.

Unfortunately, that's usually the only part of the story that we get.

Even more energy was expended on the part of the Panthers in social programs.

Gates: The trouble was, the Panthers could feed all the children they wanted to, but America wasn't going to tolerate Black people standing up to the police.

By 1968, the FBI had launched a massive operation aimed at bringing down the entire Black Power movement.

Cleaver: I remember when I would come to New York, the FBI would be trailing me.

They weren't hiding the fact that they were trailing you.

We thought that they were gonna set us up and kill us or make somebody else kill us.

What we had no idea is they basically wanted to confuse us and make us think that people who were our enemies were our friends, and people who were our friends were our enemies, and mislead us.

Man: ♪ Get on the floor ♪ ♪ Do your thing, whatever it is... ♪ Gates: But while the government could arrest, confound, and even kill the Black Power leadership, it couldn't stop the spread of their ideas.

Man: ♪ It's all right, it's out of sight... ♪ Gates: Black Power took root and sprouted many branches, encouraging Black people to perceive themselves differently, to see their African origins as a point of pride and Blackness as a sign of beauty.

The whole culture changed.

There became a very strong move toward Black identity.

People started wearing natural hair, African garb.

It was to the point where when I got to secondary school or junior high school, everybody was in dashikis and 'fros.

You couldn't talk to a girl if you didn't have a big 'fro and a dashiki, and it was just where everybody was.

Woman: ♪ Black is beautiful ♪ ♪ Don't you see ♪ ♪ Black ♪ Woman: "Essence."

Looking at the first cover of "Essence" magazine was like looking at yourself.

Yeah.

Lean in there... Get involved in that a little.

Ok.

Fine.

That's good, love... Oprah: I grew up thinking that only if you were white or light-skinned were you actually beautiful.

It changed the way I saw myself in the world.

Brown: You have to think about how long Blackness had been associated with negative stereotypes and ugliness and stupidity and low social status.

Just to be able to claim, "No, this thing that we are, the way we look, this is positive and powerful and beautiful," that was huge.

Gates: Even Soul Brother Number One, the immensely popular James Brown, abandoned his signature patent-leather processed hairstyle for a natural kinky-headed Afro.

Hello.

This is Don Warden.

You're on "Black Dignity."

Male Caller: Yeah.

What's happening, James?

Well, I just wanted to ask you one question.

I'd like to know why you got your process cut.

Well, this is a Black move, and regardless of what you're thinking, we've all got to think one way, and if we look alike, we can think alike.

Caller: You know, the way I see it, it's really what's in your mind that counts.

Well, the mind counts, but, see, we all don't have a good image, and the image is like Black.

We've never thought together.

You know, in Africa, a man can do what he want to do because he know who he is.

Over here, you don't know, so first we got to get an image, an identity.

[Applause] Gates: And Brown didn't just change his look.

He also recorded a song that would become a Black Power anthem.

Brown: ♪ Uh!

♪ ♪ Your bad self ♪ ♪ Say it loud ♪ Crowd: I'm Black and I'm proud!

♪ Say it loud ♪ I'm Black and I'm proud!

♪ Lookie here ♪ Woman: When we think about "Say it loud, I'm Black and I'm proud," we've got to remember what a thinker Brown was about how to deal in segregated, racist, apartheid America.

James Brown understood, from the experience he had as a child, dark-skinned Black people are especially hated in this culture.

They are seen as the true Black people worth hating.

Brown: ♪ Oh, yeah... ♪ Woman: I mean, you wanted to be not just part of--the movement but the song, the melody because it harmonized your life, to feel that you were proud to be Black.

Gates: James Brown's transformation was part of something larger-- An unprecedented Black cultural awakening that swept through America in the 1960s.

Woman: I am the daughter of 400 years of Black tears.

Be careful.

Gates: It took many forms from new Black magazines to new commercial products, like Afro Sheen, to a creative explosion known as the Black Arts Movement that was like the Harlem Renaissance on steroids.

♪ Black lovers must live ♪ ♪ Push against the devils of this world ♪ ♪ Against the creeping whiteness ♪ ♪ Of they own minds... ♪ Woman: Black Arts said to people, you know, "America really does think you're still a slave "and it can continue to enslave you.

"And we're here to say it can't.

Right.

"America wants you, really, to hate yourselves.

"We're here to say stop hating yourselves; love yourselves.

Look in the mirror, Black woman, Black man."

You know, "You are important to this world."

What has America done for me?

All: Nothing but made me a zombie!

Hooks: You know, it was just at that wonderful moment.

Whatever you did as a painter, whatever you did as a writer, the Black Arts Movement was a bunch of Black artists getting together, finally saying, "We want to be heard."

Man: Niggers watch dying on TV.

They love it.

Niggers watch other niggers die.

They love it!

Die, nigger!

Niggers watched Medgar Evers die.

Niggers watched Emmett Till die.

Niggers, die!

Niggers... die!

Niggers... die!

Niggers... die!

Niggers... die!

Die, die, die!

Die, niggers!

So Black folks can take over.

[Applause] [Music playing] Gates: The Black Arts Movement would go on to influence everything from the rise of Black feminism to the roots of hip-hop to the way Black history and Black culture were taught in schools.

What is freedom?

Black Power.

Black Power?

What is your nationality?

Children: Afro-American!

Aren't you Colored children?

No!

No!

Aren't you Negro boys and girls?

No!

No!

Gates: But even as Black America redefined itself, the civil rights struggle was far from over, and while its most prominent leader was still fighting fiercely, his style seemed out of step with the times.

King: I would like for all of us to believe in nonviolence, but I'm here to say tonight that if every Negro in the United States turns against nonviolence, I'm gonna stand up as a lone voice and say, "This is the wrong way."

[Applause] Sharpton: Dr.

King, in his last couple years, would come to New York and be heckled by Blacks.

They threw eggs at him in Harlem.

I remember that last visit he made to New York, on the same day Adam Clayton Powell returned to Harlem, and Adam said, "In that church is the biggest Uncle Tom in America."

But that was the kind of friction that was going on in the movement.

Adam Clayton Powell, who was huge, used to call him Martin Loser King.

It was not popular to grow up in New York and be a follower of Martin Luther King.

Gates: It's hard to believe today, but as the 1960s wore on, Dr.

King, still only in his 30s, started to seem like an old man.

Many young Black activists saw him, through the dark glasses of Black Power, as someone who didn't pass the litmus test of Blackness and asked if maybe it was even time for him to step out of the way, but Dr.

King himself had a very different idea.

I do plan to stir up trouble in some of the big cities in our country this summer, but my stirring up trouble will be righteous trouble to bring about nonviolent solutions.

Gates: In 1966, King traveled to Chicago to focus attention on racism in the urban North.

King: After touring this city, I must report that Chicago is far from being the promised land.

[Applause] Gates: Chicago was home to a larger African-American population than the entire state of Mississippi, yet most of that population was crowded into virtually all-Black neighborhoods, with more than 1/3 living in poverty.

The root of the problem, as Dr.

King saw it, was segregated housing.

Black people were caught in a vicious cycle where opportunities for jobs and education were determined by where they lived, and where they lived was no accident.

Jeffries: Policymakers were deciding which neighborhoods would be Black.

School districts were deciding which neighborhood schools would be white.

I mean, so you have, at the highest levels of municipal and state government, people who were making very clear policy decisions that would impact African Americans that were based on race.

You didn't have to segregate schools because you sent people to their neighborhood schools, and if you lived in a segregated neighborhood, your schools were all white or all Black.

You didn't have to segregate your movie theaters or your swimming pools.

Housing accomplished in the North everything that Jim Crow accomplished in the South.

Gates: King announced that he was launching a campaign to make it possible for Black people to live anywhere they could afford to live, but Chicago's Mayor Daley and many of the city's white residents were not interested.

They had no desire to see the Civil Rights Movement in their own backyard.

Jeffries: White people aren't happy to see King.

That's the last thing they want to see is Dr.

King showing up on their steps, and especially when he starts talking about open housing.

"What are you talking about?

"You know, that's a Southern issue.

"That's a Southern problem.

"As long as Black folk stay in their neighborhoods in Chicago "and we stay in our neighborhoods "outside of Chicago, what's the problem?"

Woman: I have known so many Colored people that are so nice, but like I say, I think they have to learn to live the way we do and take care of things.

'Cause I moved out of a neighborhood that was Colored.

I had to move.

Everybody that lives with the Colored has to move.

Reporter: Why?

Because you're not safe walking the streets at night.

You cannot leave the house.

The Negro that would move into your community, the first one would possibly be good.

The second one in would be less.

The problem is not the Negro but how some of the Negro community lives-- The VD rate, the crime rate, the corruption, the dope.

[Cheering] Gates: Undeterred, King moved his family into a run-down apartment building on Chicago's West side and started to strategize.

He decided to march into segregated white neighborhoods that effectively barred African Americans.

This park was a division between a changing north side of the park and a solidly white south side of the park, and if you go further south, another 10, 12 blocks south here-- oh, that's just hard-core white.

Gates: Prexy Nesbitt was 22 years old when Dr.

King arrived in Chicago.

He'd played football in high school and volunteered to be King's bodyguard on the day of the march, but he was unprepared for what came next.

Crowd: Go home, nigger!

Go home, nigger!

Go home, nigger!

[Laughter] Nesbitt: I was scared to death.

By the time we reached this park, the whites in this neighborhood and whites from other neighborhoods had become so agitated.

[People shouting] They would spit and throw stuff, full of just utter hate for us as a group.

Nigger!

Crowd: Go home, nigger!

Go home, nigger!

Nesbitt: I'd never seen so much hate, and you just resist that because the absolute dictate was you could not fight back.

I wanted to so bad, but you could not do that.

Crowd: We want King!

We want King!

We want King!

We want King!

[Gunshot] We want King!

Man: Wait, wait.

Hold up.

I was supposed to make sure King didn't get hurt because I was an ex-football player.

What we did-- this is all nonviolent.

Anything thrown, you were supposed to catch.

Well, I missed this one brick, and it hit King in his head, and King went down.

I'll never forget.

I'm just feeling horrible.

King looked up at me.

He said, "Prexy, I thought you were a good football player, man."

So...he always joked about that later, but it was really-- it was scary.

Was Dr.

King expecting this kind of reaction?

I think King and his leadership knew there was going to be a reaction.

I don't think they knew the scale of that reaction.

I think it's one of the most tragic pictures of man's inhumanity to man that I've ever seen.

I've been in Mississippi and Alabama, but I can assure you that the hatred and the hostility here are really deeper than what I've seen in Alabama and Mississippi.

Gates: I remember this incident.

Nesbitt: Yeah.

I was 15 years old... yeah.

And it was astonishing because this was the North.

That's right.

That's right... This was the North, and at that time, we had a binary opposition between the North and the South, between good and evil.

Yeah.

And evil was Southern, white, descendants of the Confederates.

It was Mississippi.

But to be in Chicago, which was a Democratic city, thought to be liberal... Right.

Why do you think the white people were so angry?

Black people were moving beyond their boundaries.

Every minute almost, somebody's nose was getting broken, just everywhere you turned, and we went through this narrow street with all these trees, and the policemen, they were hollering up, "Come out of the trees," because they were in these trees to shoot at anything.

I would say I was so afraid as... that I had yielded to the real possibility of the inevitability of death.

Gates: A weaker man might have given up but not Martin Luther King.

He pushed on harder than ever.

The violence and poverty he had seen in Chicago reinforced his belief that integration alone wasn't enough.

King: Now we are in a new phase, and that is a phase where we are seeking genuine equality, where we are dealing with hard economic and social issues, and it means that the job is much more difficult.

It's much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee an annual income.

Gates: Dr.

King had come to believe that racism was deeply entangled with class discrimination.

The biggest barrier to equality, he now felt, was economic injustice.

King: We're getting ready to demand full-time jobs... Gates: This idea was enormously unpopular.

It was one thing to integrate a social system; it was something else to talk about reordering the economics of that system, but that became the focus of Dr.

King's life, and that's why he was in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, supporting sanitation workers calling for higher wages.

Jesse Jackson: We were supposed to go around 5:00.

I remember coming across the courtyard, and Dr.

King said, "Jesse, we're going out to dinner.

You don't even have on a tie."

He said, "You're crazy."

We laugh, and about that time... [Clap] a bullet hit him.

It was so fast.

And there's a picture of us pointing, and the reason we were pointing is the police were coming towards us with drawn guns.

We said, "The bullets came from that way.

It couldn't have come-- it came from that way."

He was 39.

A lot of people rejoiced.

Gates: I know.

He was about 55% in the negative among Blacks at that time, 72% in the negative among whites at that time.

He died a very hated man.

He was very hated that day.

He had gone away from civil rights, talking about the war in Vietnam and all that, they say.

Mm-hmm.

White-man business.

Yeah, but the next morning afterwards, he was everybody's hero.

From that day on, he's been etched in the stone of time.

Sharpton: When King got killed, I'll never forget.

I was home with my mother, and my mother started crying hysterically, like it was an immediate member of our family, and I said, "Ma, you all right?

Ma, you all right?"

She said, "You were born and raised here, in Brooklyn and in Queens."

She said, "I was born in Alabama.

"You never sat in the back of a bus.

"You never had to go to a water fountain thirsty "and they say you have to use the Colored one.

"You never wanted to stay in a motel and they denied you.

"You would have had to live through that "to understand who Dr.

King was.

"To you, he was a famous guy that came to the church, but to me, he changed my life."

Gates: Surely to goodness, you must have, at some point, thought, "Where are the Panthers?

"Give me a gun.

I want to go out and shoot somebody."

I didn't.

Never once?

No, because as a practical matter, how are you gonna take on the most powerful military nation in the world with a shotgun?

That's impractical.

That is a factor.

Ha ha!

It's impractical, and violence has no redemption in it, and we'd been taught to appreciate... the power of redemption, that honor and suffering is redemptive.

[Sirens] Gates: In the wake of Dr.

King's murder, rioting erupted in more than a hundred cities across the United States.

It looked like Watts all over again, but the anger felt deeper.

I was 17 years old.

As my friends and I watched the funeral procession, I remember thinking that all Dr.

King had done, all he had sacrificed, had made no difference.

Procession: ♪ We shall overcome someday ♪ Gates: But I was wrong.

Progress was taking place, in ways that I could glimpse but not yet fully understand.

Woman: To the extent we've had successes, to the extent we've achieved a level of pluralism, to the extent that you have probably in your life been exposed to, you know, Black doctors and lawyers and engineers and television personalities-- That happened because of the work of the Civil Rights Movement.

Donna Brazile: Because of that movement, so much has happened.

Because of that movement, people have a seat at the table.

Because of that movement and the heroes and the she-roes of that movement, America has changed for the better.

Gates: In essence, the victories of the Civil Rights Movement meant that African Americans were equal before the law and, finally given the chance, we were making significant gains.

Some were economic.

By the late 1960s, the percentage of Black families living in poverty was dropping, unemployment was decreasing, and Black incomes were rising at the fastest rate in history.

♪ R-E-S-P-E-C-T ♪ ♪ Find out what it means to me ♪ ♪ R-E-S-P-E-C-T ♪ ♪ Take care, T-C-B, oh!

♪ Gates: But many of the most visible gains were cultural.

Black culture was permeating mainstream American culture like never before.

♪ For once in my life ♪ ♪ I have someone who needs me ♪ Gates: You could hear it in music, see it in advertising... Oh, I don't use just mouthwash.

I use Listerine.

Gates: And even watch it on television.

When I was a kid, it was extremely rare to see any Black people on TV.

I remember how excited my whole neighborhood got any time an African American appeared, even in a minor part.

When Bill Cosby got a starring role on "I Spy" back in 1965, we were ecstatic, and by the late 1960s, we started to see more shows with Black stars and Black co-Stars.

Then in 1971, there was a show made just for us.

Announcer: "Soul Train"!

60 nonstop minutes across the tracks of your mind into the exciting world of soul.

Hey, now.

Welcome aboard to another super-hip ride on the "Soul Train."

Gates: Created and hosted by visionary entrepreneur Don Cornelius, "Soul Train" brought Black music, dancing, and fashion into homes all across America.

Brazile: Back then when I finally got my Afro at 16... ♪ Soul Train ♪ I know all of the dances.

Mm-hmm.

Don Cornelius, he had the presence to show us how to live our best lives.

We wish you love, peace, and soul.

Gates: Black culture allowed us to define ourselves to the world and to change America in ways both subtle and profound.

["Higher and Higher" playing] Man: ♪ Your love, liftin' me higher than I've ever... ♪ Gates: Meanwhile, other avenues of change were opening to us, as well.

In September of 1969, I came here, to Yale University.

I was part of the largest group of Black students Yale had ever admitted, and we arrived alongside Yale's very first undergraduate women-- like my lifelong friend Sheila Jackson, whom I met at a Black party our first weekend on campus.

I'd go up to you all and say, "Could I have a date?"

And you'd be like, "Check back in two years," right?

Ha ha ha!

Sheila and I go way back, and we share a unique experience.

We were among the first beneficiaries of affirmative action and count ourselves as its proudest recipients.

What was it like?

What did you feel?

I think the fright did not come until the thrill wore off.

Ha ha!

We both came from working-Class families.

Growing up, an Ivy League education was a distant dream.

Today, I'm a professor at Harvard.

Sheila is an 11-term congresswoman from Texas, and we are still grateful for the chance we were given almost 5 decades ago.

I knew that I had a privilege to get here.

I knew that Yale was obviously making a point twice.

One, they purposely were looking for women-- I fit that-- and then African American.

I was truly an early affirmative action baby.

Affirmative action brought us to the party.

It brought us to the party.

It did not graduate me.

That's true.

But I would've never had the opportunity, nor you, nor others, if there had not been that concerted effort to say, "Is there somebody out there "that's different from us, that would make Yale better?"

And America better.

That's the way I like to look at-- And America better.

Gates, voice-over: Sheila and I came to Yale at the height of the Black Power movement, and we saw ourselves as part of it.

We joined the Black Student Alliance and demanded that Yale offer more classes in Afro-American studies.

Gates: Our generation manifested Black Power by integrating the American upper-middle class and the historically white institutions of power.

Sheila: Absolutely.

And Black professors told us that's what we were here to do, and my white professors said the same thing.

Yes.

You know, defeating stereotypes, trying to show that you weren't the image that people visited upon you when you walked through the door.

Yes.

You know, when I used to tell my kids I was in the revolution, they would look askance.

They'd say, "American Revolution, Grandma?"

Ha ha ha!

My whole DNA changed.

I became a soul of the movement, the song "We Shall Overcome."

I sort of lived the aftermath of Dr.

King's life.

I just felt that this... this is the change.

♪ Just move on up ♪ ♪ Toward your destination ♪ Hello.

♪ Though you may find ♪ ♪ From time to time complication ♪ Gates: By the early 1970s, the Civil Rights Movement had unleashed a wave of change that was transforming the country.

The number of African Americans graduating from college had nearly doubled, opening the door to a wealth of new opportunities.

There were more Black businesspeople, more tradespeople, and more professionals... NBC just declared Hatcher as the winner.

[Cheering] Gates: And the political rights we had secured were finally starting to pay off, allowing us to exercise power in places where we never had it before.

Man: Vote Tuesday.

Vote Tuesday, March number one.

Wave him in.

Gates: No one typified the moment better than Maynard Jackson Jr.

Gates: In 1973, Jackson was elected mayor of Atlanta, Georgia-- the hometown of Martin Luther King, a place where less than two decades earlier, Black people had been forced to ride in segregated streetcars.

Never... Crowd: Never.

Never... Never.

Never shall I let you down.

[Cheering] Gates: Jackson was the scion of one of Atlanta's most prominent Black families, and he had deep roots in the Civil Rights Movement.

For movement veterans like Vernon Jordan, who grew up in Atlanta, it was a transcendent moment.

What did it mean to you personally and historically?

Maynard and I went to high school together.

I went to Atlanta from New York to see Maynard sworn in because sometimes you really have to see it to believe it... Ha ha ha!

And as he took the oath, I cried... Hmm.

Because it was so beyond our wildest dreams that that would happen.

Congratulations, Mr.

Mayor.

[Cheering and applause] and when they introduced Maynard as the mayor of--of Atlanta, good God almighty, who would have thought it?

[Laughter] Gates: Jackson pushed affirmative action programs, tried to reform Atlanta's police department, and established a minority business enterprise program, greatly strengthening the city's Black middle class.

Jordan: The most important thing that he did was to say, "If you get this city contract "that you've been getting for all of these years, you have to have a Black subcontractor in this deal."

Hmm, it's amazing.

And he held out for that, and he said to law firms, "You can't represent this city if you don't have any Black lawyers."

Now, keep in mind that neither Maynard nor I in our time could go to University of Georgia to law school.

[Parliament's "Chocolate City" playing] Gates: Jackson embodied a major shift in American politics, and he was part of a much larger trend.

By the mid 1970s, African American mayors were getting elected all over the country-- in Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Detroit, and beyond.

Jelani Cobb: You're looking at these major American cities, and all of a sudden, there's Black leadership at the helm of them, and it's an intoxicating moment.

People were seeing a literally different complexion in American politics.

George Clinton: Right on, Chocolate City.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: It's a remarkable rise.

I mean, you hadn't seen this since Reconstruction in 100 years.

Lester Spence: There was a sense that, "Oh, my God, we've got the city."

You're talking about being able to see people like you.

It was like, "Wow."

Gates: As African Americans moved into positions of real power within the establishment, impassioned calls to destroy the system gave way to demands to transform the system.

The very meaning of "Black Power" seemed to be shifting.

Richard Nixon: Some aspects of Black Power are very disturbing to us because it means revolution, it means violence, but other aspects of Black Power are very constructive because it means that Black people, they want to stand on their own feet.

They want to have Black banks and not just go to white banks.

They want to have Black businesses and not just go to the white businesses, and they should have, and they will have.

[Cheering] Gates: Even President Richard Nixon tried to seize the mood of the times, espousing a vision of Black economic empowerment in an effort to attract Black voters.

After winning the support of Sammy Davis Jr., Nixon got the endorsement of the Godfather of Soul himself-- James Brown, a self-made man who firmly believed that Black people could liberate themselves the American way-- through the accumulation of wealth.

Brown: I believe the future of the country lies with uh, uh, Mr.

Nixon, and I feel that, uh, some of the things he's done has been very close to my heart as a minority, as a Black man.

♪ I don't want nobody to give me nothing ♪ ♪ Open up the door ♪ ♪ I'll get it myself ♪ Al Sharpton: James Brown believed in Black capitalism.

Nixon preached Black capitalism.

James Brown said, "Y'all out there marching.

"Y'all begging the man.

We need to own our own, operate our own."

I said, "Mr.

Brown, do you know how long it would take to own our own to give 30 million people a job?"

And we argued the same arguments I'd had with my kids.

He really believed he was right.

To the day James Brown died, he believed he was right to go with Nixon because of Black capitalism.

Gates: Nixon won 18% of the Black vote in 1972, more than any other Republican presidential candidate since, and his concept of Black capitalism targeted the aspirations of a growing number of African Americans, reflecting the increasing diversity of Black life.

Ja'Net Dubois: ♪ Well, we're movin' on up ♪ Chorus: ♪ Movin' on up ♪ ♪ to the East Side... ♪ Gates: This diversity was visible everywhere, especially on television.

Leading the way was George Jefferson, one of my all-time favorite characters, a dynamo Black businessman transported into the bastions of white privilege.

Let me tell you something about people.

There you are.

Thank you.

That bartender is willing to work for me because if you got enough green in your pocket, then Black becomes his favorite color.

Gates: Jefferson was something we hadn't seen before-- a delightfully irascible and bigoted Black man, a refreshing departure from traditional Black stereotypes.

I'm sorry I called you honky, whitey.

Gates: And part of a new, much wider range of Black characters on TV whose stories reflected our rapidly changing reality.

"The Jeffersons" showed but one aspect of that reality.

Chorus: ♪ Keeping your head above water... ♪ Gates: "Good Times," a sitcom set in a Chicago housing project, showed another.

This is an eviction notice.

Both: It ain't nothing to worry about, Mama.

What are you talking about?

They say they're going to throw us out today.

He's got this friend named Monty who works in the projects, and he told Daddy everything was gonna be OK.

That's the same Monty that said Nixon was gonna be poor folks' best friend.

Cobb: Especially for Black people who were moving out to bona fide middle-class communities, you still had cousins who were living in the housing projects.

Like, you could look at "Good Times" and say, "Yeah.

I recognize that as part of Black life," and you could look at "The Jeffersons" and say, "Yeah.

I recognize that, too."

Like, both of those things were possible at the same moment.

♪ We want the funk ♪ ♪ Let me hear you ♪ ♪ Give us the funk ♪ Gates: Looking back, the 1970s seemed to be shaped by this sense of possibility.

The spectrum of the Black experience was expanding, showing that there were as many different ways to be Black as there were Black people.

Now let me ask a question.

I don't mean to put you on the spot.

Now, you use the term "nigger," right?

Yes.

Now, does the Black community get on you for using that on a show?

Yes.

Sure.

Now, how do you answer that?

What do you say?

I don't say nothing.

I say, "Nigger, get out of my face."

[Laughter and applause] Gates: You had headlining Black comedians, Black musicians climbing the pop charts, and Black athletes seeming to dominate just about every sport.

Even the Great White Way got a little less white when Ntozake Shange rocked Broadway with a hit play dramatizing the lives and challenges faced by young, Black women.

Woman: My old man came in last week saying... "Shut up, woman."

"You know I was high."

"You might as well gone on and forgive me, pretty mama, because I'm sorry."

Gates: Meanwhile, wherever you looked, Black feminists were challenging every aspect of the status quo... Shirley Chisholm: The Black woman continues to be labeled a matriarch, and this is indeed preyed upon by the white psychological and sociological interpretations of the Black woman's roles.

Gates: And American literature was being redefined by a group of extraordinarily talented, new writers.

Bell Hooks: The burgeoning, Black, women writers-- like Alice Walker, like Toni Morrison-- they were the female counterpart to the-- the revolutionary Black man.

That's why those writers were so important to all of us, because they said, "We have a whole world as Black women that we haven't given voice to."

Oprah Winfrey: I remember the very first time I opened the pages of "I know Why the Caged Bird Sings."

I think I was about 14 years old.

I started to cry then, and makes me cry even now because I had never before 14 years old read a story about a Black girl who was just like me.

Gates: This immense feeling of progress was paralleled by significant changes in the lives of everyday African Americans.

Beginning in the early 1970s and continuing for the next 25 years, 7 million Black Americans would leave inner cities to pursue their dreams in the suburbs.

Cobb: It's this quintessential American ideal which is to be able to do better for, you know, the next generation, to be able to own a home, to be able to have equity, to be able to, uh, go to a place where there were good schools.

It's a novel kind of development in Black America.

Well, it looks as if a certain, uh, gate has opened, and there's a wider number of us who are now operating in arenas where we had not previously been admitted.

Thomas Oliver: In the seventies, this was the place to move to, if you want move up, uh, you lived in Brooklyn, if you lived in the Bronx, you wanted to live in Queens.

Gates: Thomas Oliver was born in Virginia in 1940.

By the early 1970s, he was working as a supervisor in a New York City bank, renting an apartment in Brooklyn.

He and his wife wanted a larger home for their growing family, so they came here to Laurelton, Queens.

What they found illuminates both the great progress made and profound challenges still faced by Black America.

Thomas, what was it that attracted you to this neighborhood?

Well, one is the beauty of the neighborhood.

When I lived in Brooklyn, it was not a tree-lined block.

It was a block where they only had concrete.

I wanted to see some grass and some trees.

Were you worried about what the white people would think when you moved in?

I--I was in a way, but, being from the South, I knew what it was like to be discriminated against or being hated, actually, but I believe that if you're good to your neighbor, in turn, they will be good to you.

Gates: Laurelton offered everything Thomas was looking for-- good schools, low crime, and the perfect house, where he still lives today, but many of his white neighbors had never lived next door to a Black person.

Gates: Were the neighbors welcoming?

Uh, I would say, uh, sort of, uh, my neighbor next door to me when we moved in October, just before Halloween, and-- and a lot of children were on the block-- they come back; they wanted chocolate, wanted their candy; they ring the doorbell-- she went each time, "Don't.

Black family there, Black folks," and I heard her saying.

I was shocked.

She was warning them not to come?

Not to come to take the candy from us, but--you met my wife-- she came there with a big bushel of candy, and they took it.

Gates: "Don't look Black to me.

Look like Snickers."

Exactly.

Gates: Thomas and his family weren't easily discouraged.

They made friends with their neighbors and became a vibrant part of their community.

Matty Oliver: This was back from 1972.

These are the children having their little block party, block association.

Very integrated.

Yep, very much so.

Back in 1972, it was.

This is Vincent, and this is Gisella.

See how she's holding him?

Aw, yeah.

That is so sweet.

And that's Gisella here.

I don't know where Vincent is, but she kept up with her little brother.

Vincent: It was fun, you know, with the girls.

We were kids.

We-- Gisella: We did kid things.

We had lemonade stands during the-- You did?

Yeah.

Gisella: I was part of the Girl Scouts, and the Girls Scouts were integrated at the time.

Gates: Thomas and his family felt so at home in Laurelton that it took a while to notice that their community was changing, part of a much larger trend that was transforming the entire country, what we now call "white flight."

My first couple of years here, like we said, it was mixed.

Within a matter of, like, 2, 3 years, like early, mid to late seventies, it changed.

It was just, um, more African American people here.

We didn't even notice it until the neighbors started moving out.

Did you come home and say, "Mama, Daddy, why are they moving?"

They said they were moving out to Long Island.

Hmm, did they say it because there were too many Black people?

Yes.

Well, they didn't actually say it to me.

[Laughter] Gates: What did they say?

"The block is-- you know, is changing.

"Um, I guess they want to live where predominantly white families are moving to."

Gates: Soon, Thomas realized that real estate brokers were playing a large role in the departure of his white neighbors.

You wake up one day, and there's a flyer under your door or in your mailbox.

Exactly.

The real estate brokers prosper when houses turn over, so they were putting flyers-- "Sell your house while it still have value.

"If you can get X dollars today, "you won't get it tomorrow because the tides are turning."

Mary Pattillo: The rumors and the fear that their property values will go down means that you get one family who's scared enough to leave.

That then sends the signal to other people.

"Ah, people are leaving.

"Maybe my home values are going to go down.

I better sell before they go down."

Gates: Laurelton remained a safe, middle-class neighborhood, but its racial balance flipped.

When the Olivers arrived, it was almost all white.

A decade later, it was 90% Black, a pattern that was repeated in communities across the country, revealing that anxieties about race and class still had the power to divide us and suggesting that, for all the signs of progress, America was not yet ready for real integration.

Leah Wright Rigueur: One of the reasons we see white flight is just the idea of not wanting to interact with Black families, so something that goes beyond just, say, "oh, they're--they're going to make my property values drop" or something like that, but actual belief that "I don't want to associate with Black people."

Gates: Looking back, white flight was the sign of a much larger problem.

Some white Americans weren't just moving away from their new Black neighbors.

They were becoming uneasy about the very notion of Black success.

Man On P.A.

: Hank Aaron.

Gates: One instance stood out especially for me.

[Cheering] in September of 1973, I was following Hank Aaron's pursuit of baseball's all-time home run record, a record held by the legendary Babe Ruth.

Aaron was 39 years old.

He'd played in the Negro leagues in the early 1950s, and now here he was, about to break one of the most cherished records in sports.

When the season ended, he was just two home runs away, but the excitement was undercut by a sense of alarm as Aaron's quest unleashed a torrent of vicious racism.

Aaron: I would like to read to you this morning a letter that I received yesterday.

"Hank, there's 3 things you can't give a nigger-- a black eye, a puffed lip, or a job."

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: I remember reading some of the letters.

It was a horrible thing for him to endure, but, because of what I had seen my whole life, uh, it didn't surprise me.

Michael Eric Dyson: Baseball is the quintessential American sport.

Now an African American, a dark-skinned Black man challenging the power, the supremacy of--of baseball and of white men?

That's why the nasty notes.

That's why the hate mail.

That's why the death threats.

That's why the bomb threats.

White people are upset because this was, uh, driving a stake at the heart of American culture.

Man: Has all this made you more aware that you're a Black baseball player?

I've never forgotten it.

Gates: Aaron confessed he was afraid he wouldn't live to break the record, and as the 1974 baseball season began, many of us were nervous that something terrible might happen.

Milo Hamilton: Here's the pitch by Downing.

Swinging.

There's the drive into left center field.

That ball has gonna be... outta here!

It's gone!

It's 715!

There's a new home run champion of all time!

Rufus Thomas: ♪ Breakdown, children, break on down ♪ Gates: Aaron's triumph was electrifying, but it laid bare a troubling truth.

Many white Americans could accept racial equality in theory far more easily than in practice.

There was a sense of white moral panic.

There was a sense that "All the stuff that we had accumulated is no longer safe."

There was a sense that "Black people are coming for our goods.

"They're coming for our cities, and they're coming for our records."

Gates: As the 1970s progressed, friction was clearly building between the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement and the reality of race relations in America.

This was especially obvious when it came to education.

The Supreme Court had outlawed school segregation back in 1954, but two decades later, many children, Black and white, still attended segregated schools because they still lived in segregated neighborhoods, and the reality was that most white neighborhoods were wealthier, which meant better-funded classrooms.

Jeffries: The main thrust behind African-American interest desegregating white schools was a desire for access to quality education, but it wasn't just a desire to have you know, a Black body sitting next to a white body.

They understood that dollars and cents followed white children into white schools.

Gates: Boston was one of many cities where white schools and Black schools were not only separate, they were deeply unequal.

Rigueur: We have these predominantly Black schools that are just not on par with white schools, they don't have the resources, financial or otherwise.

Schools are crowded.

Teachers are leaving.

Um, there are lots of children in--in a room, so it's just not the same experience that white students across the city of Boston are having.

Gates: For years, activists had been pushing to make education more equal for all of Boston's children.

The quality of education, the excellence in courses, the excellence in teachers, the excellence in what the kid has gained at the end of 12 years is missing.

A quality education means integration education.

Gates: Finally in 1974, a federal judge ordered a compulsory busing program to send Black students to predominantly white schools and vice versa.

It set off a firestorm in the working-class neighborhood of South Boston.

Man: What do you think this means?

Oh, the Blacks will come in and ruin everything.

I think that these children should be left in their own towns as they have for generations.

It will be more trouble than everyone realizes because these kids are not going to stand for it.

Neither are the parents.

Yeah.

Give it to the niggers.

That's what they want.

[Laughter and cheering] Jeffries: For working-class whites who don't have that much, one of the things that they have been able to benefit from uh, in this world that is very much racialized uh, is the kinds of being able to send their children to all-white schools and the resources and the privilege that comes along with that, and now they're being asked to give that up.

They believe that all of us are bigots.

We--We really aren't.

It's just that a lot of people in South Boston are--are fearful of the Black people.

Gates: White parents even called for a boycott to protest the judge's decision.

Man: Do you believe in the boycott, or do you think it should go on?

No.

We should go right in the school and beat the ... niggers.

Hey!

All right!

[Cheering] Phyllis Ellison: I would like to go to another school because Roxbury High is, like, just down my district, right down the street.

Gates: On the morning of September 12, 1974, Phyllis Ellison rode the bus from Roxbury to South Boston High for her first day of tenth grade.

Ever since kindergarten, she had attended nearly all-Black schools, and she had no idea what to expect.

Take me back to that day in September 1974.

You're on the bus, and you're driving up the street.

You didn't see the street.

All you saw was a sea of people on both sides of the street.

All white people.

All white people.

[People shouting and chanting] Ellison: They were chanting.

They had signs, and I saw bananas being waved, people saying, you know, "[The N-word], go home," so each bus stopped here, and students were told by the aide that was on the bus, "Don't stop.

Don't look at the crowd.

Hurry into the building."

[People shouting] Gates: You had to be terrified.

It was scary.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was scary to be going in because there was a possibility that if the mob broke out that we would really be injured.

Gates: Once inside the school, the students went to their classes, but the mob refused to disperse, and the chaos outside continued all day long.

What were you thinking?

I mean, you go home.

You're talking to your family.

You're talking to your friends.

My mother was really kind of leery.

She's like, "I don't think I want you to go back there," and so I said, "I have a right to be there."

Mm-hmm.

"How dare you tell me that I cannot attend this high school just because I'm Black?"

Gates: Phyllis went back to South Boston High the next day and the next and the next, walking hallways lined with police officers and constantly confronting the fact that her new classmates did not want her there.

White students sat on one side of the classroom.

Black students sat on the other.

Really?

Really.

They said that it was being integrated, but, as far as inside of the classroom, it was not, and once you got outside the classrooms because there just was a lot of pe-- a lot of students in the hallways, that's where a lot of the fights would start.

Gates: So the Black kids were not embracing the theory of Dr.

King-- nonviolence and turn the other cheek?

No.

We didn't turn the other cheek.

We--We were not that-- those type of students.

There would be fights in the ladies' room and--and boys' room.

There'd be fights in the hallway.

You'd bump a Black student, a white student would bump you, and there would be a altercation.

Gates: Did you ever, ever want to give up and say, "This is too hard"?

No, because, again, I felt that this was my right.

I just said, "How am I going to deal "with them today?

If I have to physically fight them, I will."

You're crazy.

You know that?

Ha ha ha!

Ha ha ha!

Gates: Phyllis graduated in 1977 after 3 long years at South Boston High, but the abuse drove some of her classmates to drop out, and as violent protests continued throughout the years, many who had fought for integration turned against busing, as well.

Man: If they build new schools here, there wouldn't have to be no busing, though.

We don't want to go out there to go to school, you know?

We want to go to school right here, but these schools are inadequate, so therefore, we have to do this here, you know?

There's the buses now.

We got to do that.

Girl: You know, like, I don't think really that those kids are very prejudiced.

Their mothers are telling them things about Black people to make them that way.

If they would just shut up, mind their business, and send their kids to school, you know, they would be OK, but now that they got that idea in their head, I don't--I don't know how it's going to get better.

Rigueur: I think what it teaches us is that the Civil Rights Movement leaves a lot of things untouched.

You can legislate what's in a man's behavior, but you can't legislate what's in his heart.

You can say, "You can't behave this way," but kind of pushing people to believe that and to--to actually act on it is incredibly hard to do, much harder than we ever could have imagined.

Gates: All over the country, even as school desegregation efforts were proceeding, many white parents simply opted out, enrolling their children in private schools or moving to all-white communities and accelerating white flight.

Nobody will force you to do something that you don't have to do in this country.

[Cheering] Gates: Clearly, some white Americans felt that Black progress was coming at their own expense, and they focused their attention on the affirmative action programs put in place just a few years earlier.

Kimberle Crenshaw: There was never a honeymoon period for affirmative action.

A lot of times, people think, "Well, we had it for a couple of decades, and then there was enough."

There's never been a period where any effort to integrate African Americans into American society was not immediately denounced as preferential treatment.

I'm sorry that people had to go to the back of the bus, yet I was not here when it happened.

I don't feel that I owe a Black a thing for what happened in the past, I'm not going to accept being eliminated from the job market or--or pushed back to pay somebody back.

They're taking all our jobs and everything.

We got nothing.

Since they came in, we got nothing.

The whites got nothing.

They took over the whole place.

Why should I--I be, uh, discriminated against because I'm white?

Gates: These resentments came to a head when a white student named Allan Bakke, who had twice been denied admission to a University of California medical school, claimed he was being victimized by affirmative action.

Bakke's case made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

Crenshaw: What Allan Bakke complained about was the fact that there was a set-aside for 16 students of color, um, to, uh, gain admission.

He's arguing about the diminishment of the expectation that white people would get all of the seats.

Gates: Less than a decade after affirmative action enabled my enrollment at Yale, the Supreme Court ruled that it had violated Allan Bakke's civil rights.

The ruling struck down the use of racial quotas to compensate for past injustice, challenging one of the major victories of the Civil Rights Movement.

Though many cried out in protest, a backlash against affirmative action was now in full swing, driven by a growing sense that our nation had done enough to redress centuries of racism.

Cobb: In the 1970s, we start hearing about the rhetoric of reverse racism, that somehow or another, Black people are being "given things" that other people haven't been given, and so, as opposed to talking about racism, you'll now hear things like "the residue of racism," um, as if--as if it's ended, but there's just still a whiff of it floating around in the atmosphere, but it has no real form and substance in a way that, like, could impact people's actual lives.

Gates: The reality, of course, is that racism was still a factor in American life and that, despite all the progress, many African Americans were still struggling, trapped in cities where poverty was growing more entrenched and more concentrated.

The reasons were complex, but the consequences were clear.

Sheryll Cashin: When you have a housing project where 100% of the people have to be poor in order to live there, suddenly you're concentrating poverty, right, and then when you assign that housing on a racially discriminatory basis, "Black people in public housing will live here.

Whites elsewhere," you know, you create high-poverty Black neighborhoods, and then the disinvestment begins to spiral.

All of these things become self-reinforcing, and that's how a ghetto gets created.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Those communities get ignored.

They have, really, no political clout whatsoever, and you find that everyone from banks to supermarkets, um, begin to have predatory practices because these are vulnerable people who don't have a lot of choice.

Gates: The situation was compounded by larger economic forces.

John Chancellor: The country got a double-barrel dose of bad economic news today.

Living costs have spurted ahead by the greatest rate in a year.

Unemployment already has cut across almost the full spectrum of American labor.

Gates: By the mid 1970s, America was in the midst of a deep recession, and the labor market was changing radically.

Factory jobs, once a sure route to the middle class, were drying up as automation and globalization transformed industry.

Tom Brokaw: Labor Day weekend begins with some bad news for workers, especially Black workers.

Gates: All of this had a devastating impact on the African Americans who remained in the cities, many of whom had low skills and little education.

In some communities, unemployment reached levels not seen since the Great Depression.

Vivian Henderson: What I see setting into motion is the possibility of a permanent underclass in America, mostly Black.

Gates: Hidden beneath the data was a frightening fact.

As the Black middle class followed white Americans in moving out of inner cities, the poorest African Americans were becoming increasingly isolated socially, geographically, and economically.

In essence, class differences were fracturing Black America.

Jeffries: For the first time, really, in American history, you will begin to see classes of African Americans living in different places, uh, because prior to that, the options were so few and limited, no matter how much you made, for the most part, you were going to be buying, shopping, going to school, and working and living, uh, within the confines of a Black community.

Robert Johnson: Integration had its downside.

It removed the role models.

It removed some of the stabilizing personalities and characters and--and involved businesspeople and--and doctors and lawyers.

It moved them out of the community.

In the 1950s, Black communities were the most civilized communities in America.

There was ties of empathy and bonds of sympathy, unbelievable embrace of others who came in.

Out of the seventies, we don't have neighborhoods as much as we got 'hoods.

Gates: As Black America transformed, a sociologist named William Julius Wilson began mapping its growing class divide, looking at how the poorest among us were being left behind.

At the time, his work was controversial.

Overwhelming emphasis on... Gates: Today it seems clear that he was right.

Second- and third-generation... Gates: Wilson is my friend and colleague, and he remains a crucial witness to our shared history.

When we were coming along in the sixties watching Dr.

King and the Civil Rights Movement, there was an expectation that once we dismantled de jure segregation, we would all-- Move ahead.

Like, econom--that somehow magically, this would have a positive economic impact.

It did for a certain segment of the Black population.

It did for middle-class Blacks, very definitely.

That said, the civil rights victories really did not have much of an impact, a positive impact, on the Black poor, so whereas one segment of the Black population is indeed, uh, enjoying some success, mm-hmm.

Another segment, uh, is in danger of becoming permanent economic proletarians.

Best of times, worst of times.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

In a way that we have not seen historically in the history of the African American people.

Precisely.

I remember one scholar saying that it's as if racism, having put Blacks in their economic place, stepped aside to watch changes in the economy and the technological revolution uh, destroy that place.

Gates: As the country's economic woes deepened, the poorest African Americans became ever more vulnerable, and with the entire nation struggling, they soon found themselves scapegoats in a changing political landscape.

In Chicago, they're sending checks to a woman who's been on welfare under 80 names, 30 addresses, and 15 telephone numbers.

Gates: In 1976, when Ronald Reagan pursued the Republican presidential nomination, he repeatedly told the story of an African American woman named Linda Taylor, claiming she was earning more than $150,000 a year by cheating social services, holding her up as an example of liberal policies gone wrong.

Well, compared to some of you white people, I think I done pretty damn good to be Black.

Gates: The story grabbed attention but had little basis in reality.

Taylor was a con artist and not at all representative of the typical welfare recipient.

Brittney Cooper: The welfare queen image is a manufacture of Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party using one--one, only one--story from Chicago in the 1970s of one woman who scammed something from the system, and it's not entirely clear all that she scammed.

Donna Brazile: There's this notion that 99% of the welfare money in this society's going to Black and Hispanics.

It's wrong.

It's bogus because the majority of people on welfare are white.

The majority of people on food stamps are white.

Bobby "Blue" Bland: ♪ Ain't no love in the heart of the city ♪ ♪ Ain't no love... ♪ [Siren, glass shatters] ♪ In the heart of town ♪ Gates: Reagan's attack on welfare marked a significant change.

Since the Great Depression, the federal government had offered aid to poor people, the majority of whom were white.

Now in financially insecure times, Reagan hinted that those programs, paid for by tax dollars, were only aiding Black people, and he promised that cutting them would help fix the economy.

Cobb: This is a turning point not only in the history of Black people.

It's a turning point in the ways in which people can talk about poverty because we've moved from this idea of the deserving poor to the undeserving poor, and there's very much a kind of, uh, emphasis upon, uh, morality and moralism and all these kinds of things that, uh, are much more invested in the idea of individual failure than asking, "How did we wind up with this population of impoverished people in the first place?"

Gates: In 1980, Reagan returned for a new presidential campaign.

He was still calling for welfare reform, but now he was doing so as part of a much broader message.

He talked of states' rights and of returning America to a better, bygone era.

While his message had a powerful appeal, to many African Americans, it seemed like a thinly veiled attack on the progress made since the Civil Rights Movement.

Spence: He runs on this campaign that's like, "Listen.

We're going to actually make America great again," and then implicitly in that is the idea that making America great means we basically have to kind of put Black people in their place.

West: "We are taking our country back.

We're making it great again."

Reagan was setting that tone, and Black folk were saying, "Any time whitey leaves talking about taking their country back, "you know what they mean.

They're coming at us with intensity."

[Cheering] Gates: Reagan made good on his campaign promises by rolling back social programs and making significant spending cuts.

His policies had immense consequences for America's already-struggling inner cities, as the lack of federal Support made the job of Black civic leaders all but impossible.

Hosea Williams: Many of the cities where Blacks have become mayors and so forth are nothing but garbage cans.

Hell, who wants to be the mayor, anyway, of a garbage can?

John E. Jacobs: A great deal of the misery that Black America is confronted with today has been exacerbated during the past couple of years with the cuts in basic survival programs that poor people and disadvantaged people have come to depend upon.

Give us a look, Governor.

Dyson: Ronald Reagan was bad news for Black America.

Go back to Hollywood!

We don't want you!

Dyson: Ronald Reagan was a symbol of the repudiation of all of the progress that we had made and not only the economic and political progress, but the kind of spiritual and symbolic progress made.

Kool and the Gang: ♪ Jungle boogie ♪ [Siren] ♪ Jungle boogie ♪ ♪ Get it on ♪ ♪ Jungle boogie ♪ ♪ Ah, yeah ♪ ♪ Jungle boogie ♪ Man: The South Bronx in New York City-- Ugly, neglected, drug-ridden, and corrupt.

Gates: Among the many neighborhoods hit hard by Reaganomics was New York City's crumbling South Bronx.

By the time Reagan took office, property values here had dropped so low that some desperate landlords torched their own empty buildings for the insurance money.

♪Jjungle boogie ♪ ♪ Boogie, baby ♪ [Siren] ♪ Jungle boogie ♪ Joan Morgan: It literally was burning.

Things were on fire all the time.

There were a lot of tenement buildings that would be there one day and then kind of be burnt out the next, mattresses thrown into lots that had a lot of rubble, and we played in those.

Growing up at that time required a great deal of street smarts, like, being a 10-, 11-year-old girl having to get up to the 17th floor in a project building where the lights are all out in the stairways.

You know what I mean?

Gates: Yet beneath the decay were the stirrings of something radically new.

Chic: ♪ Good times ♪ ♪ These are the good times ♪ For years, young people here had been experimenting with art, dance, fashion, and music.

They called it hip-hop.

♪ I'm Chantelle, and my rhymes are def ♪ ♪ Just rap so fresh till I get out of breath ♪ Gates: It would come to energize Black America in ways that people of my generation never saw coming, never even imagined possible.

Morgan: In the schoolyard during recess, someone would have a boom box.

Then someone would start rhyming.

Nas: Everyone was doing it.

♪ Give me 5 so I know it ain't no jive ♪ ♪ Hit me on it, slap me on the Black-hand side ♪ You know, it was always a rhyming rhythm, rhythm thing with Black people, anyway, just in the conversation.

It was just a instant thing that hit you.

Gates: Hip-hop was an entire culture seemingly created out of fragments-- electricity stolen from street lights, sound systems made out of spare parts, parties staged in abandoned lots, and a distribution system that was 100% improvisation.

Man: ♪ One, two, party people ♪ ♪ Clap your hands, everybody ♪ ♪ Hey, everybody, clap your hands ♪ Cobb: You couldn't purchase, you know, albums or records, and you couldn't hear hip-hop on the radio, and the only way that you could participate in the culture musically, uh, was through these cassette tapes which would circulate all throughout the city.

People were just dubbing, uh, and redubbing and redubbing until the audio quality was so terrible, you could barely make it out, but this was how the music circulated, in these kind of underground networks.

Wonder Mike: ♪ Now what you hear is not a test ♪ ♪ I'm rapping to the beat ♪ ♪ And me, the groove, and my friends ♪ ♪ Are gonna try to move your feet ♪ Gates: As its influence spread, the music moved out of the underground, and away from homemade cassettes.

In 1979, a group from suburban New Jersey released one of the very first hip-hop records-- "Rapper's Delight."

Wonder Mike: ♪ Bang bang, the boogie to the boogie ♪ ♪ Say up jump the boogie to the bang bang boogie ♪ ♪ Let's rock ♪ Morgan: That was the first time that I heard hip-hop on the radio, and I remember the next day, we were all talking about it, "Yo, did you hear--" But there was a sort of pride of like, "Wow, other people are listening to something that comes from the 'hood," which, ironically, you know, those guys are from Jersey.

Like, you know what I mean?

It's not like they were, like, 'hood deep or anything like that, but it felt like that.

Gates: "Rapper's Delight" was a sensation.

It broke into the top 40 and became the biggest-selling 12-inch single ever.

Spence: Radio's about ad revenue, so you want really short tracks, so they got this 12-minute-long record, right, but people are wanting it, and they're playing it over and over and over again.

Gates: "Rapper's Delight" was only the beginning.

Soon, hip-hop was no longer just party music.

It was connecting young, Black people in different parts of the country.

Nas: Our generation of young people, we had to find new ways to communicate, you know?

By just getting on them records and speaking about the truth, we were saying, "Here we are.

I'm over here.

"I'm in Long Beach.

This is what's going on over here.

Where y'all at?"

"Yeah?

Well, I'm over in Queensbridge, and this is what it is over here," so we're all hearing about these different places.

Gates: As hip-hop evolved, it became a national phenomenon, a passion shared by millions of young African Americans who used it to articulate their identity, celebrate their lives, and offer up a powerful critique of mainstream America.

[Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" playing] Ava Duvernay: Think it was Chuck D. who said, you know, it's the CNN of the Black community.

It's actually reporting on all of these things that we've experienced in poetry form, in musical form, and the music was just so good.

♪ Got to give us what we want ♪ ♪ Uh ♪ ♪ Got to give us what we need ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Our freedom of speech is freedom or death ♪ ♪ We got to fight the powers that be ♪ ♪ Fight the power ♪ Gates: Hip-hop offered one form of opposition to Reagan's America.

Run, Jesse, run!

Run, Jesse, run!

Gates: At the same time, a civil rights veteran was offering another.

We need more than a new president.

We need a new direction.

We need a new direction.

Gates: In 1984, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, former protege of Martin Luther King, made the audacious decision to run for president, challenging the Democratic Party to cast aside their presumptive candidate Walter Mondale and let a Black man square off against Reagan.

Jackson: We can do without Democratic or the Republican Party.

They cannot do without us.

We are necessary.

We must assert ourselves.

Our time has come.

I was caught up in the electricity of both of your campaigns, and I was rooting for you, brother.

How did your campaign change things?

I think we raised the ambition level.

As we went along, people who were asleep came awake, and so the churches began to fill up, uh, and the auditoriums began to fill up, and we brought in a whole generation of young people... Chain reaction.

And--And then we raised people's dream level.

Mm-hmm.

We, the people, can win.

This is our land.

We, the people, can win.

It is our democracy.

We, the people, can win.

Brazile: It was one of those rare moments where every day of your life, there was a purpose, and the purpose was to register as many voters and to get them out the old-style way where you knocked on doors and you drag people out and said, "This is the day to vote for Reverend Jackson."

Gates: Young people across the country leapt at the chance to work on Jackson's campaign, reaching out to voters beyond the Black community.

Brazile: This was going to be a game changer.

I mean, Reverend Jackson brought the white farmers.

He brought in all of the peaceniks, the white feminists, pro-E.R.A.

he said, "Come and take a seat at this table.

I have enough room for everybody."

Women, Hispanics, workers, Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, we must come together and form the Rainbow Coalition.

We need each other.

Gates: Jackson sought to ally African Americans with others of every color who shared their sense of dispossession, yet not all Black leaders were eager to join.

Charlie Rangel: Certainly, I would think that I would have a moral obligation as well as making some political sense to stick with Walter Mondale.

I don't believe that this country is going to elect a Black man as president.

I don't see how a Jesse Jackson candidacy can defeat Ronald Reagan.

Sharpton: Most of the Black leadership was against him running.

They had their own arrangements with the Democratic Party and establishment.

They didn't think it could work, but he ran, and he did very well, better than they all thought.

Gates: In his first campaign, Jackson captured 3.5 million votes, and he nearly doubled that number when he ran again 4 years later.

He never secured the Democratic nomination, but Jackson won victories that, in my view, were just as important.

He succeeded in reviving the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, in reawakening our hopes, and, for the first time, many Americans clearly saw that a Black man could actually be president.

It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes.

Don't you surrender.

Suffering breeds character.

Character breeds faith.

In the end, faith will not disappoint.

You must not surrender.

You may or may not get there, but just know that you are qualified and you hold on and hold out.

We must never surrender.

America will get better and better.

Keep hope alive.

Keep hope alive.

Keep hope alive.

Gates: From Selma, Alabama, to Jesse's presidential campaigns, African Americans had made huge strides in virtually every arena, and yet, the dream had not been fulfilled.

The doors of opportunity had cracked open, but we wanted them opened wide.

Dr.

King once said, "What good does it do "to be able to eat at a lunch counter if you can't buy a hamburger?"

25 years after Selma, far too many of us were still asking that question.

The journey forward was going to take much longer than any of us had ever imagined.

West: The markets were bursting out.

Announcer: The eighties bring big changes.

Brazile: More Blacks in corporate America, more Black television personalities.

Announcer: But there's also a new scourge.

Crack.

Peterson: There's an entire economy around criminalizing Black men.

Announcer: And video cameras put our racial divide in focus.

Jeffries: How did you not see what I saw?

Cooper: The real difference in the way that we perceive race in the country.

Announcer: Next time on "Black in America Since MLK."

Announcer: "Black America Since MLK" is available on Blu-ray and DVD.

The companion book is also available.

To order, visit shoppbs.org or call 1-800-Play-PBS.

Also available for download from iTunes.