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HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR: By the middle of the 1950s,
African Americans had fought and died in war,
achieved success in business, attained fame on the stage,
on screen, and on the playing field.
But in the South, they couldn't sit in the front of a bus
or eat a hamburger at a lunch counter.
GATES, VOICE-OVER: Nearly a century after emancipation,
many found these contradictions intolerable.
Out of this was born a new determination and resolve
to stand up and fight.
At first, these defiant acts were tiny ripples of hope,
as Robert Kennedy once described them.
But soon, they would converge to form a mighty current of change,
in a mass movement that would forever alter America.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: I have a dream this afternoon
that one day...
GATES: The prologue to the great drama
of the civil rights movement began in the 1940s,
in northern cities like Detroit.
Tens of thousands of African Americans migrated here,
lured by the promise of a better life.
Jobs in the auto industry
offered many black Americans
their first chance to earn a living wage.
But economic opportunity did not mean equal treatment.
My dad and 99% of all blacks
worked in the foundry.
The foundry is the dirtiest place
at the Ford Motor Company you could have at that time.
There were no unions. There was no vacation time.
You punched in, you punched out,
and my father would come home with
burns all over his face.
It was just humiliating.
GATES: And the foundry was where they put Negroes.
And the foundry was where they put Negroes.
GATES: As black workers poured into Detroit,
racial tensions mounted,
over jobs, housing, even access to public space.
MAN ON RADIO: We interrupt this program
to bring you a special news bulletin.
The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air...
GATES: Pearl Harbor turned Detroit,
and the rest of America, upside down.
MAN ON FILM: Not just another relatively simple automobile.
GATES: Almost overnight, the automobile industry
stopped manufacturing cars and started making bombers.
MAN ON FILM: ...each had to be perfect.
SECOND MAN ON FILM: And another giant missile shows its power.
GATES: Facing labor shortages and pressure from black leaders,
FDR integrated defense industry assembly lines.
And with that, simmering racial tensions in Detroit exploded.
KEITH: Detroit was basically a segregated city.
Not only was it segregated, it was full of hatred.
You could see the animosity between blacks and whites.
You had this mixture of southern whites and southern blacks
for the first time being integrated
because of the war efforts, and it was explosive.
The atmosphere that engulfed our city.
GATES: During the war, Detroit came to be known
as the arsenal of democracy,
but it also was an arsenal of racial conflict.
A race war erupted here in 1943,
and some of the worst violence occurred on this bridge.
The riots broke out. Everything was in chaos. My God.
The whites came into the neighborhood,
just start fighting and beating us up.
They came into your neighborhood?
Yes. Oh, sure.
The hatred and venom in these people.
I told my mother, I said,
"I'm just prepared to die here
to save you and our family in the city."
GATES: By the time the two-day riot ended,
24 African Americans were dead,
more than half killed by the Detroit police.
But unlike earlier riots, this time,
when the smoke cleared,
African Americans refused to return to the status quo.
They girded themselves for a new kind of battle.
[Explosions and gunfire]
With the advent of World War II,
African Americans saw a further opportunity
to press their cause.
[Man shouting indistinctly]
GATES: Hundreds of thousands went to war,
with the expectation that their service
would earn them equal rights once and for all.
Black men fought in every American war
since the American Revolution,
in return for the promise of equality,
but they never received the right to full citizenship.
Black servicemen and black leaders
decided in World War II that they would finally force America
to make good on that promise.
Seizing on the spirit of the moment,
the black press mounted the "Double V" campaign--
victory on two fronts, against Hitler overseas
and against racism at home.
If we are going to rally to the colors, we must
make larger society aware that it is conditional this time.
[Gunfire]
Victory at home and victory abroad
became the mantra of men and women as they marched off.
MAN: What happened was, they went overseas,
made a lot of difference, because they got a greater
sense of themselves, right,
they got a greater measure of themselves.
[Bell ringing]
[Indistinct shouting]
GATES: Christopher Parker, a Navy veteran,
has written about black servicemen
and their fight for equal rights.
A lot of these men wanted to fight
because they wanted to prove their manhood.
They wanted to prove their patriotism, right?
They were participating in something
that they thought would actually not only free them,
but also, they were participating
in something that was bigger than them.
They were making the world safe for democracy.
Exactly. And some white troops
tried to bring Jim Crow over there with them,
and these black men are like, "Not today.
"We're wearing the same uniform.
We're fighting for the same stuff here."
And we could die. Equally.
And so they became accustomed to fighting
Jim Crow overseas.
It was nothing but a thing, you know,
when they came back.
So, it was a new *** who returned from the war.
Yes.
LEWIS: Soldiers who have experienced,
who have liberated concentration camps, even,
there is now a seriousness of purpose.
We believed that the return would bring us to a world
that was mending itself and improving race relations.
Well, wishful thinking.
GATES: Though black soldiers had changed,
much of the rest of the country still had not.
Black veterans were unprepared for the discrimination,
even violence, they faced upon returning home.
It was February 1946.
Army Sergeant Isaac Woodard,
just back from a tour of duty in the Pacific,
boarded a bus in Augusta, Georgia.
At a routine stop, Sergeant Woodard, in full uniform,
asked if he could use the restroom.
The bus driver cursed him and said no.
Woodard cursed him back, demanding respect.
When they arrived at the next stop,
Woodard was called off the bus,
where two police officers were waiting for him.
When he tried to tell his side of the story,
one of the officers beat him in the head with a nightstick,
driving the end of it into his eyes.
At 27, Sergeant Woodard would be blinded
for the rest of his life.
African Americans mourned the Woodard incident
within their own communities,
but now, after the war, many white Americans
shared their shock and horror.
MAN ON RADIO: What does it cost to be a ***?
In Aiken, South Carolina, it cost a man his eyes.
GATES: Film director Orson Welles,
who hosted a weekly political radio broadcast,
devoted an entire show to the Woodard incident,
expressing his disgust for the two policemen.
WELLES: ...Officer X, all America is ashamed of you.
If there's room for pity, you can have it,
for you're far more blind than he.
GATES: But even when they weren't overtly political,
radio broadcasts were beginning to shake up the status quo,
especially in the South, where you could segregate
virtually everything but the airwaves.
MAN ON RADIO: Top of the morning to you, my friends.
WDIA, 50,000 watts of goodwill, invites you to join us...
GATES: In 1949, white-owned Memphis radio station WDIA
became an accidental agent of social change.
Starved for listeners, it was forced to broaden its audience.
They were losing money. No sponsors. They couldn't get anybody.
So, they brought in this programming
that was directed toward the African American--
there's 40% African Americans in Memphis in 1948.
GATES: With little left to lose, WDIA took a gamble.
They switched to all-black programming.
The next year, within a year, they're number two.
[Blues music ending]
All right. 1:34, 26 before 2:00
at AM 1070, your WDIA.
GATES: They also introduced black DJs,
including Ford Nelson, who'd once been a part
of B.B. King's band.
I've been looking forward to this all the week.
GATES: 6 decades later, he's still on the air.
Professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates.
Say something to my audience.
You are a pioneer and that's why I'm here.
62 years on the radio.
And I love the history of WDIA,
"Mother Station of the Negroes" as it was
called back in the day.
That's all right.
To our audience and to our community,
we were a big deal.
It gave the black community a feeling of pride,
a feeling of involvement,
and a feeling of belonging.
So, we were just, like, heroes, so to speak.
And I haven't forgotten our new believers.
About this time on Sundays, I like to remember--
GATES: But WDIA's contribution went beyond community service.
Before long, white kids began tuning in as well,
giving the station an interracial audience
in the Jim Crow South.
So, in spite of the fact that Memphis is strictly segregated,
white people are listening to black music
being played and narrated by black DJs.
Sure. What I think is really fascinating
is how these kids who were coming of age
in the late 1940s and early 1950s,
they're getting exposure to a message
that is very much that we are all the same.
So, subconsciously, this is breaking down a racial barrier.
[Nelson laughs on radio]
NELSON ON RADIO: And now, folks, here we are,
smack dab at the end of another day of broadcasting...
GATES: Across the country, black culture
was becoming popular culture,
loosening assumptions and quietly opening doors.
Americans watched as Jackie Robinson
broke baseball's color line
and became the highest-paid Dodger in history.
♪ When your lovebird decides to fly ♪
♪ There ain't no door that... ♪
GATES: 5 years later, Dorothy Dandridge
became the first African-American
nominated for an Academy Award in a leading role.
♪ ...dream a dream come ♪
GATES: While most black stars supported civil rights,
few used their celebrity for explicitly political ends.
♪ ...first thing you do... ♪
GATES: Actor and singer Paul Robeson did.
♪ ...tell a lie... ♪
Free political expression is the very essence of the defense
of our civil liberties, and by that I shall always stand.
GATES: Robeson spoke to audiences around the world,
condemning the United States government
for promoting democracy abroad while neglecting the rights
of its African American citizens at home.
ROBESON: In attacking me, they suggested
that when I was abroad, I spoke out
against injustices to the *** people in the United States.
I certainly did.
GATES: Paul Robeson sought to plead the cause of the ***
right here, at the United Nations.
In 1951, he presented a petition
entitled "We Charge Genocide:
The Crime of Government Against the *** People."
He chose the U.N. because it would have
provided a worldwide voice.
MAN: Robeson was pointing to the fact that
in this country, blacks were still living
in desperate circumstances,
and that the federal government,
let alone the state governments,
were doing almost nothing about it.
He insisted that economic deprivations
were just as destructive of human life
as were the overt policies of a state regime,
like Hitler and the Jews.
GATES: Robeson thought that only a Communist revolution
could solve the problem of racial discrimination in America.
Most other black leaders disagreed.
DUBERMAN: At that point in time, the black leadership in this country
still felt that they had to present themselves
as good, patriotic Americans,
and there was no room for Robeson in that scenario.
GATES: For more than a decade,
the NAACP had been mounting a painstaking legal effort
to dismantle Jim Crow.
Robeson, to them, was a dangerous gadfly.
How important do you think Robeson was
to the creation of the modern civil rights movement?
Once the modern civil rights movement got going,
he was not regarded as one of the great
precursors, which, in fact, he was.
He was always on the cutting edge
of racial justice.
GATES: Robeson introduced a tactic that,
when the time was right, others would repeat.
His public shaming of the United States before the world
would prove to be a key strategy
used by others in the mass movement to come,
a movement that would ultimately sweep the nation,
but that began in the American South.
The first major battle of the civil rights movement
began on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
GATES, VOICE-OVER: On this bus, on December 1, 1955,
Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man.
The battle over this very seat launched a revolution,
and Rosa Parks became its icon.
Civil rights leaders had long been looking
for the ideal candidate to challenge segregation
on public buses.
Mrs. Parks fit the bill perfectly.
LEWIS: She, of course, doesn't come out of nowhere.
There had been trial runs of 3 women
who were thought to be not quite perfect.
So, the stars were aligned with Rosa Parks,
a wonderfully composed and courageous woman.
GATES: Rosa Parks' dignified manner
masked her long history as a tenacious activist.
LEWIS: She had gone to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee,
the cockpit for much labor organizing
and civil rights planning,
and so she had, in a sense,
already had a dress rehearsal experience.
MAN: I heard somebody said once that
when Rosa Parks sat down, black people stood up.
Ha ha! That's right.
She democratized the movement.
It became a people's movement at all levels.
GATES: Inspired by Parks' example,
Montgomery's black community
opted to walk to their jobs
instead of riding the city's buses.
JORDAN: There are many great lines
in the civil rights movement,
but there is none better
than the black maid who, in the second week, said,
"My feets are tired but my soul is rested."
That was a statement of inspiration,
and it was a statement saying,
"Let's get on with it."
KING: 90% at least of the regular *** bus passengers
are staying off the buses, and we plan to continue
until something is done.
GATES: The boycott effort came to be led
by an unknown young minister from Atlanta.
26-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr.
became a household name when, after a year of protest,
Montgomery finally ended segregation
on its city buses.
Do you believe the majority
of the *** people of Montgomery
will now go back to riding the buses?
Yes, I do. We must go back
with a deep sense of love and dedication
to the principle of nonviolence.
GATES: King's philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience
was inspired by the principles and practices
of India's Mahatma Gandhi.
The tactic was intended to agitate segregationists,
provoking a reaction that would elicit
widespread sympathy from the public.
LEWIS: The way you bring to your side
forces governmental, religious, international
is by allowing yourself to be so maltreated visibly
that your assailant loses credibility.
GATES: The clash between peaceful protests and violent resistance
would produce images that caused the country
to sit up and take notice.
In New Orleans, on the morning of November 14, 1960,
federal marshals escorted a 6-year-old girl
named Ruby Bridges to the local, all-white elementary school.
WOMAN: I remember turning onto the street.
I saw barricades and police officers
and just people everywhere.
When I saw all of that,
I immediately thought that it was Mardi Gras.
I had no idea
that they were here to keep me out of the school.
Ruby, were you scared? I would have been terrified.
I wasn't, actually, because, you know,
it was very hard for parents, I think,
to explain to a 6-year-old
what was actually happening.
They didn't say, "It's a white school. You're making history"?
I remember them saying "Ruby, you're gonna go to
a new school today, and you better behave."
GATES: But Ruby was making history.
6 years earlier, after decades of struggle,
the NAACP had won a major legal victory--
Brown v. Board of Education,
in which the Supreme Court declared
that the doctrine of separate but equal schools
was unconstitutional.
But in many places, that triumph did not translate into change.
For years after Brown, much of the South
simply refused to integrate.
Now Ruby would be one of 6 New Orleans children
chosen to desegregate several all-white elementary schools.
BRIDGES: They were screaming and shouting
and chanting "2, 4, 6, 8, we don't want to integrate."
[Crowd chanting] 2, 4, 6, 8, we don't want to integrate.
2, 4, 6, 8...
MAN ON TV: The mothers of downtown New Orleans
screaming at a *** child as she entered
the William Frantz Elementary School,
first in the city to be integrated.
BRIDGES: Once I got into the school,
all of these people here rushed inside of the building.
[Indistinct chanting]
BRIDGES: They were taking out their children.
Over 500 kids walked out of school that day.
MAN: What is your reaction to the court's decision
continuing integration?
We don't want the *** going in that school.
This is a white school.
BRIDGES: They didn't see a child.
They saw change,
and what they thought was being taken from them.
They never saw a child.
WOMEN: ♪ If you believe ♪
♪ The faith you lost so long ago ♪
♪ Will return upon your shore ♪
GATES: The image of a 6-year-old child
heckled by an angry mob
became a powerful icon for the young movement.
Ruby's example soon inspired others.
[Indistinct shouting]
MAN ON TV: There is still opposition to integration here,
but integration is being accomplished.
GATES: Nonviolent direct action was contagious.
African American students began crossing the color line
at historically white colleges and universities
throughout the South.
MAN: We had one thing in mind, and that was challenging
bigotry and Jim Crow.
We had been fit as students, even in elementary grades,
to memorize "We hold these truths to be self-evident,"
"that all men are created equal
and endowed with--" not women, now,
"all men are created equal."
We saw through that.
And now here was our moment
to challenge our nation to recognize
that we are hypocrites,
and this is our opportunity
to try to make this right.
[Crowd chanting] ...want to integrate, 2, 4, 6, 8...
GATES: Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes
desegregated the University of Georgia in 1961.
[Crowd chanting] 2, 4, 6, 8, we don't want to integrate.
We just kept straight ahead,
kept our eyes on the prize, you know,
and walked through the columns.
GATES: Now, I'm trying to think of other movements
in which the students played such a vanguard role
Why students?
Students in one sense have less to lose.
One of the reasons I think so many
older black people opposed the movement
was that they had vested business interests.
They had to take care of their family.
Mortgages to pay.
The parents of many of those students
told them not to do this.
Yeah. But they went ahead.
And they were afraid they were gonna get killed, too.
Well, yeah, that, but part of it
Rock the boat. Yeah.
GATES: Soon, students began confronting
local segregated businesses across the South.
Diane Nash was a student in Nashville
when, together with John Lewis,
she helped lead a campaign
to desegregate the city's lunch counters.
GATES: When I'm teaching my students
about the history of the civil rights movement,
we talk about nonviolence,
they think it's ridiculous. Ha ha!
How long did it take you to wrap your head around
the genius of nonviolent, passive resistance?
I didn't think nonviolence would work.
The idea of guns and power and violence
compared to nonviolence, I thought,
no, you know, violence would work better.
But what questions does this raise to us
as to how we might act nonviolently?
GATES: Nash and Lewis attended workshops
led by the Reverend James Lawson
that trained students in the tactics of nonviolence.
The workshops in Nashville were the only organization
that was trying to do anything to combat segregation.
That's why I kept going.
MAN: Now, tonight, we have to have one major
role-playing experience.
We just didn't wake up one morning
and say we're gonna go and sit in.
We had role-playing. We had social drama.
Let's send them all back to Africa.
Why don't someone get these *** out of here?
[Men talking at once]
[Clapping]
LEVERING LEWIS: The training involved in nonviolent passive resistance
was specific and demanding.
It takes a lot of courage to be weak.
JOHN LEWIS, VOICE-OVER: We had the very first sit-in in Nashville.
I asked a waitress for a hamburger and a Coke.
I said, "I'm sorry, our management does not
allow us to serve *** in here."
JOHN LEWIS, VOICE-OVER: In spite of all of this.
I have to keep loving the people who denied me service.
[Indistinct shouting]
GATES: The tactic worked to perfection.
Passive resistance was met with brutality.
WOMAN: ♪ We who believe in freedom cannot rest... ♪
GATES: Forced to contend with the escalating violence,
Nashville became the first major city in the South
to desegregate its lunch counters.
WOMAN: ♪ ...until it come ♪
♪ We who believe in... ♪
HUNTER: When you get confronted,
particularly in the way that we were confronted,
it caused us to reach down inside of ourselves
and find something that we didn't know was there,
and guess what it was?
It was courage.
WOMEN: ♪ Young people come first ♪
♪ They come first... ♪
GATES: By the end of April, in 1960,
over 50,000 students had staged sit-ins throughout the South.
They were becoming the vanguard of the civil rights struggle.
But they had little support or encouragement
from the movement's leadership,
accustomed to employing less-aggressive tactics.
WOMAN: Activism was not the style of the civil rights movement.
Some of our elders thought it was a bit much
to be putting yourself up for jail and violence.
They certainly refused to see young people
as a part of their struggle.
GATES: A little-known 56-year-old civil rights veteran
named Ella Baker would change that.
Ella Baker, granddaughter of slaves,
had been a grassroots organizer
all over the South for two decades.
A quiet but radical force.
She would say, like the turtle,
you have to put your tail on the line,
and the students could understand that,
and...we did put our tails on the line.
GATES: Now together with students less than half her age,
Baker helped found a new organization--
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
known as SNCC.
NORTON: The level at which SNCC operated
was the most dangerous level.
It was the shock troop level.
They went into towns and the places
where segregation ran amok.
They were in parts of the South
that can only be called terrorist.
Historically, civil rights and many other movements
are top-down.
Mrs. Baker believed that the ultimate
source of power is at
the level where the people are.
Up here does not direct down here.
Down here directs up there.
The day has come when racism must be banished.
GATES: So many people of your generation, you two,
describe her as this visionary force.
Why isn't she a household word of the civil rights movement?
Because the movement was--I hate to say this--
it was dominated by ministers
and religious leaders,
and they didn't see a role
for women in leadership position.
Until the killing of black men,
black mother and son,
becomes as important to the rest of the country
as the killing of a white mother and son...
[Applause]
JOHN LEWIS: That was Ella Baker.
BAKER: We who believe in freedom cannot rest
until this happens.
[Applause]
JOHN LEWIS: She took the long sweep of her life and her experiences
and poured it into young folks.
GATES: Ella Baker and SNCC helped the civil rights movement
broaden and gain momentum.
Up to this point, the movement had been focused on the South.
It had not found its voice in the North.
Here in Detroit, that began to change in 1963.
GATES, VOICE-OVER: By then, black people in Detroit
had lost many of the gains they had made
during and after World War II.
Most were underemployed and undereducated.
But Detroit was also the home of what would become
the most successful black-owned business in the country.
On this street, a man named Berry Gordy
founded a small record label
and transformed it into a factory
of black creative genius.
WOMAN: ♪ ...knockin' on my... ♪
GATES, VOICE-OVER: He called it Motown.
WOMAN: ♪ ...and you need a friend ♪
GATES: Like many black businessmen in the early 1960s,
Berry Gordy was a bit concerned
about how the militancy of the civil rights movement
might affect his bottom line.
But all that changed the day that
the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to town.
Dr. King came to Detroit in June 1963,
hoping to spread his gospel of nonviolence
to a northern audience.
KING: Segregation is a cancer in the body politic
which must be removed before our
democratic health can be realized.
[Cheering and applause]
GATES: Always one to spot a trend,
Berry Gordy stepped in to sell the speech.
You know what that speech was?
It was the prototype of "I Have a Dream."
KING: I have a dream this afternoon
[Applause]
One day little white children and little *** children
will be able to join hands as brothers and sisters.
I have a dream this afternoon.
GATES: In Detroit's cavernous Cobo Hall,
Dr. King spoke before 25,000 eager listeners.
KING: ...simply because people want to be free.
GATES: The recording of the speech
made it onto the "Billboard" charts.
KING: We've come to see the power
of nonviolence.
We've come to see that this method is not a weak method.
GATES: But that same year, a different voice
came to Detroit as well.
MAN: Revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile.
Revolution knows no compromise.
GATES: And a different kind of speech was recorded.
MALCOLM X: Revolution overturns and destroys
everything that gets in its way.
GATES: Malcolm X spent much of his youth in northern cities
and became radicalized by his experiences in prison.
While there, he converted to the Nation of Islam
and embraced the concept of armed self-defense.
X: There's no such thing as a nonviolent revolution.
Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms,
sing "We Shall Overcome"?
GATES: Malcolm X appealed to those
impatient with the pace of the movement
unfolding in the South.
To them, nonviolence looked like capitulation.
Facing police brutality, failing schools,
and widespread unemployment,
northern African Americans were less interested in desegregation
than in economic and racial justice.
MAN: Malcolm's appeal on one level is with
working-class people, with the working poor,
people who might be what we call underclass
in contemporary America.
Now, he also has an appeal beyond that as well, because
Malcolm is able to articulate repressed emotions
that even the black middle class and upper middle class feel.
Malcolm really is black America's prosecuting attorney,
prosecuting white Americans for what he's gonna argue
are crimes against the black community and black humanity.
Whereas King serves as a defense attorney
for both African Americans and whites towards each other.
He's a mediator.
GATES: For a brief moment here in Detroit, in June of 1963,
followers of Dr. King and Malcolm X came together,
marching side by side in the great walk for freedom,
the largest march for racial equality up to that point.
KEITH: It was a tremendous, tremendous gathering of blacks,
and seeing my people together like this,
marching for freedom, meant everything to me,
and it inspired me, because I said, "My God,
"if we work together
"and realize what we can do as a community,
we can break these barriers down."
WOMAN: The freedom march helped to change
our convictions in the North.
We began to see that we could play a role in the struggle.
GATES: Veteran activist Grace Lee Boggs
and her husband James were organizers of the march.
BOGGS: People were not quite sure how to choose
between Malcolm and Martin
and to see how both of them mattered.
GATES: So on June 23, 1963, would you say
this was a Malcolm city, not a Martin city?
There was a lot of sentiment in the city
that King was a little naive and all that sort of stuff.
I mean, we were so sophisticated.
Why was he naive? Because he was southern
or because of all this nonviolence?
I don't think we really recognized
the philosophic meaning of nonviolence.
It took us a while to do that.
So King was ahead of you.
Ah.
But I think by '63 in Detroit,
we were much more...
infatuated with Malcolm,
and we were thinking
we had to redefine ourselves,
that we had to become more self-reliant,
more self-determining,
that we had to create a new dream.
[Sirens]
[Screaming and shouting]
GATES: For the next few years, however,
Dr. King's nonviolent civil disobedience
continued to dominate civil rights strategy
as the movement spread across the country.
PRESIDENT JOHNSON: I am about to sign into law
the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
GATES: The more civil rights protesters suffered violence
and even death,
the clearer the justice of their cause became
and the harder it became to ignore.
The civil rights movement reached a climax
on March 7, 1965,
when a peaceful march for voting rights
from Selma to Montgomery turned into
what would become known as Bloody Sunday.
We're marching today to dramatize to the nation
and dramatize to the world
that hundreds and thousands of *** citizens
are denied the right to vote.
I remember so well on that particular day.
We came to the highest point on the bridge.
Down below we saw a sea of blue--
Alabama State Troopers--
and a man identified himself and said,
"I'm Major John Cloud of the Alabama State Troopers.
"This is an unlawful march.
You will not be allowed to continue."
CLOUD: This is Major Cloud talking.
Marching this way.
JOHN LEWIS: You saw these guys putting on their gas masks.
[Crowd shouting]
They came toward us...
beating us with nightsticks.
I was hit in the head by a State Trooper with a nightstick.
I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death.
GATES: The brutality at Selma
was broadcast on national television.
TV ANNOUNCER: Programs normally seen at this time
will not be broadcast.
[Crowd shouting]
GATES: 48 million people across the country watched
as peaceful protesters were attacked by police
with nightsticks and tear gas.
John Lewis once said that
without television news coverage,
the civil rights movement would have been
like a bird without wings
or a choir without a song.
Do you think that's fair?
I think this fight for righteousness,
for justice, really for the honor of the country--
it would have been a long time
for the movement to succeed.
Television was the instrument
that, to use John Lewis' metaphor,
had people hear the choir.
This is Highway Number 80,
Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
Once our people were totally and terribly brutalized here...
GATES: By transforming the movement
into a kind of televised morality play,
Dr. King was able to appeal to people of faith
across the country,
many of whom began to join his cause.
[Crowd singing "We Shall Overcome"]
JOSEPH: What's extraordinary about nonviolence
is that nonviolence helps you get the clergy leaders,
whether Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim--
the kind of alliances that were needed.
GATES: After Bloody Sunday, hundreds of clergy,
including rabbis Marc Tanenbaum and Abraham Joshua Heschel,
came to Selma in a show of unity.
The people, most of whose names were barely known at the time
and long since forgotten, who took part
in the nonviolent protests--
they made the civil rights movement.
GATES: The outrage following the brutality in Selma
incited demonstrations in over 80 cities across America.
Once again, the treatment of its black citizens
was becoming a liability to a nation trying to be
the face of democracy around the world.
The South was a national embarrassment.
Congress and the White House were compelled to act.
JOHNSON: It's not just Negroes but really
it's all of us who must overcome
the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
GATES: March 15, 1965.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson astonished the nation
by invoking the phrase that had become the mantra
of the movement.
And we shall overcome.
[Applause]
GATES: I watched that speech in our living room
on our little black-and-white TV with my parents.
JOHNSON: And the long denial...
GATES: Even then, at that age, tears came to my eyes.
A few months later, President Johnson would sign
our nation's first Voting Rights Act.
Just 10 years following the Montgomery bus boycott,
a revolution had occurred.
[Applause]
GATES: The passage of the Voting Rights Act
was the high water mark of a decade of struggle
for civil rights.
But despite the legislative victory,
southern states still made it difficult if not impossible
for black citizens
to register and vote.
In June 1966, James Meredith, a law student,
staged a solo march across the South
to draw attention to the issue of voter registration.
It would be called The March Against Fear.
Barely two days into his march,
Meredith crossed the Mississippi state line...
[Gunshot]
and was shot and wounded by a sniper.
In the days following the shooting,
the movement's elders, led by Dr. King,
came to finish what James Meredith had started.
But this time, they were joined by SNCC
and its youthful leader Stokely Carmichael.
JOSEPH: You have two generations:
the generation that Martin Luther King Jr. represents
and the generation that Stokely Carmichael represents,
and Dr. King's message was really wearing thin
in this latter half of the 1960s,
particularly because there's so much violence.
FORBES: As the violence grew,
the willingness to be passive declined.
MIKE WALLACE: Do you think you'll be able to keep it nonviolent, Dr. King?
Yes, I think so.
I don't have any doubt in my mind about that.
WALLACE: Mr. Carmichael, are you as committed
to the nonviolent approach as Dr. King is?
No, I'm not.
Why aren't you?
Well, I just don't see it as a way of life.
I never have.
JOSEPH: The Meredith march is where Stokely Carmichael
becomes an icon.
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.
MAN: ♪ Freedom got a shotgun ♪
[Crowd chants]
GATES: Carmichael and the militant activists--
they're thinking that civil rights has not gone far enough.
They want liberation and freedom now.
MAN: ♪ Freedom's gonna shoot it ♪
DIFFERENT MAN: I'm gonna start out by asking you a question.
What do you want?
CROWD: Freedom!
MAN: What do you want?
CROWD: Freedom!
MAN: When do you want it?
CROWD: Now!
MAN: How much of it do you want?
CROWD: All of it!
MAN: That tells me that you're gonna march with us,
and we're gonna...
MAN: We're here in the heart of the black community
in Greenwood in the deep part of Mississippi.
The tensions within the march
are starting to manifest themselves.
Twilight was coming.
This park is filled with the Meredith marchers.
Stokely Carmichael gets up to give a speech.
CARMICHAEL: We've begged the federal government.
That's all we've been doing: begging, begging.
It's time we stand up and take over.
[Crowd cheers]
CARMICHAEL: Take over.
He talks about black aspirations.
He talks about how black is beautiful.
And he talks about how black people
need to control their own communities.
Every courthouse in Mississippi
ought to be burned down tomorrow...
GOUDSOUZIAN: So that when he drops the slogan, if you will,
when he starts to say...
CARMICHAEL: What do you want?
GOUDSOUZIAN: What do we want? Black power.
CROWD: Black power!
CARMICHAEL: We want black power.
We want black power.
GOUDSOUZIAN: And starts urging on the crowd,
and the next thing you know,
he's got this massive response.
CROWD: Black power! CARMICHAEL: What do you want?
GOUDSOUZIAN: That's a turning point in African American history,
and certainly a turning point in the civil rights movement.
GATES: I saw it that night on TV...
Really?
with my mother and my father. Yeah.
What did it feel like?
Oh, it was electric, man.
It was--I got gooseflesh.
You knew that-- it was like the top of your head
was about to come off.
Activists had expressed a lot of these ideas already,
but black power--
Not in my living room.
[Both laugh]
I never heard it before.
I went, like, "Whoa, man!"
I'm like a nuclear bomb gone up.
Black power [indistinct]
Yeah!
JOSEPH: By the next morning, the whole nation
is talking about black power.
MAN: It was like the great last march
of these great civil rights leaders.
And because of that dynamic going on
between the different parts of the movement,
there emerged, like it was a process, emerged a new movement.
The new movement was a black consciousness,
black power movement
which was not just political, but it was a psychological
break from the past and saying,
"We are moving to a new day, a new change,
and we're gonna do it on our terms."
KING: Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.
Longevity has its place.
But I'm not concerned about that now.
GATES: Nonviolent protest seemed to have run its course.
The final tragic blow came on April 4, 1968.
And I've seen...
the promised land.
[Crowd murmuring]
I may not get there with you...
Less than two years after the March Against Fear,
the apostle of nonviolence would be felled
by the very violence that he had spent his life opposing.
So I'm happy tonight.
I'm not worried about anything.
I'm not fearing any man.
Mine eyes have seen the glory
of the coming of the Lord!
[Crowd cheering]
[Gun cocking]
[Siren]
GATES: With Dr. King's voice stilled,
black resistance would take a new form.
Next time on "The African Americans"...
a new generation speaks up.
QUESTLOVE: Don Cornelius-- his master plan
was to change the lives of black youth.
ANNOUNCER: And the dream comes true.
We did it.
They said we couldn't, and we did.
Yeah.
ANNOUNCER: "The African Americans:
Many Rivers to Cross."
The African American story continues online at
pbs.org/manyrivers
with streaming video and more.