The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

GATES

The dawning of the 20th century brought cruel repression to the African American people, but the strategies they employed to fight back led to profound transformations in American society, as Black people reinvented themselves. The migrants fleeing the South realigned the racial composition of virtually every city and town in the North and the Midwest, and in the process, Black culture experienced a renaissance, an unprecedented economic and political growth. As the 19th century drew to a close, nearly 8 million African Americans still lived in the South.

LANGSTON HUGHES

"I pick up my life and take it on the train to Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Seattle, Oakland, Salt Lake... any place that is North and West and not South."

Boat whistle blows

GATES

Just 30 years after the end of slavery, life for most African Americans had become increasingly harsh.

HUGHES

"I am fed up with Jim Crow laws, people who are "cruel and afraid, who lynch and run, "who are scared of me and me of them. So I pick up my life and take it away on a one-way ticket."

GATES

With "separate but equal" the law of the land, enforcing segregation could be a brutal enterprise. Consequently, many African Americans were beginning to look for a way out of the South. Starting in the 1890s, African Americans began to migrate north and west-- first as a trickle, then as a flood. It would come to be known as the Great Migration, and it would last for generations to come. By the time it ended, it would arguably be the largest exodus of people in American history. But it began with a slow stream of pioneers. What was happening in the South that made the migration occur? The late 19th century, that was a period of time when things were getting pretty tough in the South, and anyone who had a political opinion, expressed it, really had to leave. African Americans carried with them much more than their meager possessions. They carried their hopes, their dreams, and their culture. How in the world did all those people...travel? Any way they could! Ha ha ha! Mobility is such an important part of freedom, you know? That's at the core of it, isn't it? Of course, with the Great Migration, there was also another opportunity for self-realization, to find themselves, to get the boot off their neck. The boot on the neck of African Americans belonged to Jim Crow, the set of legal and extra-legal measures that tried to keep them thoroughly in their place.

WOMAN

From the moment they woke up until the moment they went to sleep, every aspect of their lives was controlled and determined by an artificial hierarchy that replicated aspects of enslavement. There were Black and White bibles to swear to tell the truth on in court. It was actually against the law for Black people and White people to even play checkers together. And that had an overlay over every single thing that they could do and everything that they could imagine themselves being.

GATES

Jim Crow was not just a system of laws excluding Black people from public accommodations; it was a code of conduct that relegated African Americans to second-class citizenship.

MAN

To reach your maturity as a male at this time, you were expected to step off sidewalks. Your eyes were never to gaze directly into those of a White person. Perish the thought that any eye contact with a female occur. This was the policing of a population. Life was one of saturated oppression.

GATES

Lynchings were fast becoming the weapon of choice for enforcing Jim Crow and reinforcing the notion of white supremacy. By the turn of the century, as many as 3 lynchings occurred each week. Some were widely advertised and drew large crowds, picnic basket in tow.

LEWIS

Figure, if you will, some community 50 miles away from an advertised event of retribution, a lynching, would pack bags and get on the buggy and hurry there. Multiply that 10-fold, and then you have hundreds of people there to witness, and indeed, to leave with souvenirs of the flesh and bone of the victim. This was a barbarism that should have placed the South beyond the pale.

GATES

These grisly events spared no one-- man, woman, or child-- and they didn't always involve a rope and a tree. In Memphis, here at a place called the Curve stood the People's Grocery, a food co-op owned by a well-respected African American, Thomas Moss.

Bell ringing

GATES

The success of Moss' store threatened a White competitor. To put him out of business, a mob attacked. Moss and his partners took up arms to defend themselves. When the smoke cleared, several of the attackers lay wounded, while Moss and his defenders were hauled off to jail. Before long, a lynch mob came, pulled them from their cells, and dragged them to the outskirts of town. There, before a group of local reporters, Thomas Moss was asked if he had anything left to say. He answered, "Tell my people to go west. There is no justice for them here." So this is where he's buried. Mm-hmm. Oh, look. They put "At Rest." That's horrible. "At Rest." It really brings back the manner of his death, which was so brutal. They were making a statement. They replicated the injuries of Whites that had been shot in this melee, and the Whites had been shot, one man in the eye and cheek and throat. And that's how they shot him? And that's how they shot the 3 men. Oh, that's horrible! That's terrible. Yeah, yeah. The Moss case attracted the attention of many African Americans in the South, largely due to Moss' friendship with journalist Ida B. Wells. In a series of provocative editorials published in her newspaper, the "Memphis Free Speech," Wells condemned the Moss killings and the practice of lynching.

GIDDINGS

When Ida B. Wells hears about the lynching, she doesn't know what she's going to write about it, but then she remembers Thomas Moss' last words, and she decides to say,

there's only one thing we can do

save our nickels and dimes. Leave Memphis, a place that will not protect us and murders us in cold blood.

GATES

With that, Ida B. Wells, born into slavery, became our country's leading anti-lynching crusader. Her words enraged her White neighbors, who destroyed her newspaper offices. She was threatened with lynching if she ever returned to Memphis. In this editorial, she spoke the unspeakable.

GIDDINGS

She spoke the unspeakable. Talk about truth to power. Truth to power. And the interesting thing about her, she knew how explosive it was, but she was just determined to follow what she calls the logic of lynching to its end. She said, "The heavens might fall," but I'm going to tell the truth about lynching.

GATES

The truth about lynching, according to Wells, was that it was an "unjustifiable act" of economic jealousy and sexual anxiety, an instrument of terror and control. In the weeks and months following, thousands of Black people from Memphis joined the early migration out of the South. Their exodus created a problem. The Southern economy was still largely agrarian, dependent upon African Americans to do the jobs no one else wanted at a wage few others would accept.

LEWIS

People are leaving the South, and indeed, curiously enough, there is a pushback on the part of many Whites in the South, who say, "Wait a minute. "We have to calibrate our bestiality. "I mean, if we start losing these people, why, that's not the game plan."

GATES

Who would cook... clean... and care for the children? Till the fields, harvest the crops?

WILKERSON

The interaction between the former slaveholders and those who had been enslaved had not changed fundamentally when it came to interpersonal interactions and the expectations of how one should behave. And economic exploitation. And economic exploitation. It's incredible, isn't it? It was like a bad marriage. Yeah. The Emancipation Proclamation had not lived up to its name. People had not truly been free. The Great Migration is really about freedom. It's about identity. It's about claiming one's citizenship, one's American-ness, and it's ultimately about agency.

GATES

While some Black leaders advocated leaving the South behind, there were other influential voices urging African Americans to resist the siren song of the North and to stay right where they were. Born a slave himself, Booker T. Washington believed that former slaves and their masters shared a common role in the creation of the New South-- to help transform it economically. If the South was ever going to leave that antebellum plantation mentality behind, it would require the mutual cooperation of Black people and White people alike.

WOMAN

Booker T. Washington was a very practical man, because he was a person who could see the world as it is. He's saying to the Black people, you don't need to leave. You don't need to go North. You can stay here.

GATES

As a practical man, Washington argued that political rights for African Americans could only be won from a position of economic strength and self-sufficiency.

WOMAN

He believed that eventually, White people would come to realize the value of Black workers. He saw himself as a mediating figure between the White South and the Black South.

GATES

The product of a vocational education himself, Washington argued that by learning a trade, African Americans would hold the key to their own advancement. He went on to found the Tuskegee Institute, which trained African Americans in vocational and technical skills and advocated self-help. Tuskegee was not alone. The Negro Women's Club movement created far-reaching social networks that promoted racial uplift. Black churches and benevolent societies lent money to entrepreneurs starting out in business. A washerwoman named Sarah Breedlove relied on just such a network. After changing her name to Madam C.J. Walker, she launched a hair product company and was hailed as the first self-made female millionaire, Black or White. Fueled in part by the hardships of Jim Crow, these success stories were a by-product of a system of laws that forced Black people to live in their own world. Necessity became the mother of invention. African Americans made a way out of no way.

HIGGINBOTHAM

Our people didn't give up. You know, they didn't say, we're overwhelmed and overcome, and therefore, we will just turn on ourselves. They looked to their own institutions, their churches. Out of those churches, they will build schools, they will build insurance companies, they will build banks. It's just amazing, all that is happening.

GATES

While Black land ownership was on the rise and a small Black middle class was emerging, another, more sinister phenomenon was taking root to counteract these gains. And in those days, it took little more than a trip to the mailbox to see it.

MAN

This is our row of caricatures-- the picaninny, the Tom, the coon, the tragic mulatto, the Jezebel, the savage. All groups, all racial and ethnic groups, in this country have been caricatured. None of them has been caricatured as often or in as many ways as have Africans and their American descendants.

GATES

David Pilgrim is the founder of the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University in Michigan, home to the largest collection of racist memorabilia in the country.

PILGRIM

You could take any piece that you see in here, and they do two things. The first thing is, they reflect existing attitudes toward Black people. But the other thing, and maybe more important, is they shaped future attitudes toward Black people.

LEWIS

The redefinition of the African American takes place in this period of time. The African American in antebellum times was, the stereotype held, reliable, faithful, hardworking, malleable-- indeed, one entrusted one's children, one's property to such people. Now of a sudden, the African American becomes demonized, a threat, a lascivious beast roaming the countryside of the South, people loosed by the end of slavery and now upon us like locusts. Well, this was an absurdity.

GATES

A massive propaganda campaign demeaning African Americans and legitimizing violence against them was fundamental to reinforcing Jim Crow.

PILGRIM

And that is one of the most vulgar depictions of African American children that we have in here.

GATES

Well, they're not human. They're bait. That's right. They look like a litter. This is a postcard? Yeah, that was a postcard. Actually, what that one says is, "Dear Aunt Libby, this is what they do to the bad people in Delaware." And the significance here is that it shows a Black person being beaten matter-of-factly. It's the normalizing of violence against Blacks. And look at this kid's face. Not only does that teach something about violence-- against Blacks, in this case-- but it's also teaching him. Oh, yeah. It's horrible. David, if Black people were so subjugated, why did White America need to create millions and millions of images of our ancestors' subjugation? New generations had to be taught those same lessons about, this is the way we need to treat Black people. Because our people never were fully subjugated. They were never-- that's right.

MAN

Come listen, all you gals and boys, I'm just from Tuckahoe I'm gwine to sing a little song, My name's Jim Crow

GATES

While these images were shaping negative perceptions of Black people at home, an altogether different view of African Americans made its way to Europe. At the 1900 World's Fair, a most unusual display drew crowds of curious onlookers. Called the American Negro Exhibit, it featured a collection of nearly 500 images of dignified, well-dressed African American men, women, and children.

LEWIS

Here, these fine images of African Americans of every color, every shape, every size, every professional pursuit show graphically that this is a small nation of people on the march.

GATES

The exhibit was the brainchild of the leading Black intellectual of the time, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. Du Bois earned his first Bachelor degree from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and soon became a leader among the emerging African American intellectual elite.

LEWIS

There's a wonderful image of Du Bois arriving in Paris in top hat and tails, looking like the Edwardian man quintessential. He sees 1900 as a wonderful opportunity to give a counter narrative to the stereotype view of the African American that has really gone global.

GATES

The Paris exhibition embodied Du Bois' philosophy about African American leadership. Unlike his contemporary Booker T. Washington, Du Bois believed that the masses of former slaves in the South, largely uneducated, had little chance of achieving liberation on their own. They needed to be shown the way.

HIGGINBOTHAM

How do we understand how a group of people who are oppressed rise? There's one idea that says you need talented leaders, you need extraordinary, exceptional, educated-- you know, the highest leaders, your great thinkers. That was the Talented Tenth.

GATES

Du Bois was the first African American to earn a doctoral degree from Harvard. He believed it was the responsibility of his intellectual cohort to lead the fight for full citizenship.

HIGGINBOTHAM

Du Bois told Black people that they could not wait to be citizens, that they were already on the books. We have a Constitution. It was signed and sealed in blood during that Civil War and during Reconstruction, and we were already citizens of the United States. You couldn't postpone fighting for justice. For Du Bois, you comprise something too great to wait and to say "one day."

GATES

Du Bois waged his battle for justice on several fronts. First, he established the Niagara Movement, whose Declaration of Principles would provide the basis of the modern civil rights movement. And then he cofounded the NAACP, the country's oldest and largest civil-rights organization. He also believed that if African Americans were going to achieve equal rights, they had to prove their worth on the cultural front, as well, as creators of a unique artistic tradition.

LEWIS

Du Bois was saying that literature can be an agency for profound change. I call it civil rights by copyright.

GATES

Du Bois and his colleagues aspired to set in motion a Black literary movement that would compete on the highest levels of New York society. "We just left slavery 40, 50 years ago, and you're "talking about publishing house contracts with Alfred Knopf and Horace Liveright, when lynching still goes on?" "Yes," they said. "Absolutely. We're going to write ourselves just straight across this problem." In 1910, Harlem was an upper-middle-class White community, but by 1925, it was known as the Mecca of the New Negro. African Americans came to New York, just as they did to many of the great cities of the North, seeking opportunity. During the first World War, their numbers swelled when labor shortages made better-paying jobs available for migrants.

Bell rings

GATES

Those who came to Harlem found a place where they were free, for the first time, to express themselves in ways that seemed inconceivable before.

WILKERSON

Many of these people had not been able to pursue their art, had not been able to pursue the opportunity to become a novelist, to become a jazz musician. It simply was not available and possible for them in the restricted caste system that they were consigned to in the South. Suddenly, here, in New York, finally, finally, finally, we can be the people that we imagine ourselves to be.

Jazz playing

GATES

It would explode into one of the most artistically fertile periods in African American history.

MAN

The Harlem Renaissance represents, above all, Black people, really for the first time, making a claim on being modern as a people... to say that we are here, and this is our contribution.

GATES

Here, on 136th Street, in the heart of Harlem, some of the most talented newcomers found a temporary home in a rooming house which its residents humorously nicknamed Nigeratti Manor.

EDWARDS

Some of the people that lived there included Eric Walrond, the Caribbean novelist and short-story writer, Zora Neale Hurston passed through there, Langston Hughes spent time there. They all ended up putting together a kind of salon. It was right here. Who invented this crazy term, "niggerati"? Zora Neale Hurston, playing with the term "literati" and saying, "If they're the literati downtown, we must be the niggerati uptown."

GATES

Out of Niggerati Manor came one of the most provocative publications of the renaissance-- a literary journal called "Fire!!"

EDWARDS

In that single issue of "Fire!!" the first story in there is Wallace Thurman's "Cordelia the Crude."

Both chuckle

EDWARDS

It's about a prostitute. Richard Bruce Nugent's sexually exploratory vignettes "Smoke, Lilies and Jade"-- in terms of exploring a kind of queer eroticism, it's one of the stories in the renaissance, one of the few, that does that, that goes there.

Jazz music playing

EDWARDS

Harlem came to represent a kind of oasis of permissibility. There were things that could go on in Harlem that could not go on elsewhere.

GATES

Harlem's reputation spread throughout the country. Outsiders were drawn to its clubs and cabarets. Races could mingle here in ways that were illegal in much of the rest of the country.

EDWARDS

Let's say you get out of the show at Connie's Inn or at the Cotton Club. Something else happens when you can go to the speakeasy after hours and be sitting next to an Ethel Waters or a Duke Ellington. Were they segregated, these speakeasies? They were not segregated. You had to know where it was and know how to get in.

Buzzer sounds

EDWARDS

For all of them, you had to know the code. So there's one you would knock 3 times and cough. Ha ha ha! And if you didn't cough right, you weren't gonna get in. And if you're thinking about the attraction to a White audience, it's not just the attraction of seeing what was then American popular music, the coolest stuff around, but you also get a kind of proximity and everything that goes along with that-- communication, seduction, various kinds of interaction that's not always predictable. You're on top of each other. Literally and figuratively. Literally and figuratively. You're going to be jammed up with people sweating and drinking and having a good time all night till the next morning. It adds something to the evening. Ha ha ha!

GATES

The Harlem Renaissance spotlighted African American artists, both as purveyors of cool and as major contributors to American culture. Ironically, the most sublime of these contributions wasn't widely embraced at the time by the Black elite.

Jazz playing

GATES

To them, jazz, which had made its way north with many of the southern migrants, was unsophisticated, even vulgar, but in time, jazz would be recognized as the most quintessentially American art form.

Applause

EDWARDS

Jazz is significant because it represents some of the best potentials that are inherent in the American conception of democracy... making sure that everyone has a place to have their own say... and creating, out of a fabric of individual contributions, a greater whole, a more beautiful whole.

Applause

GATES

Meanwhile, a new medium was emerging that would revolutionize popular culture and offer another opportunity for African Americans to redefine their image. Before Hollywood was even Hollywood, Oscar Micheaux, once a Pullman porter, became the first Black independent filmmaker. Micheaux films-- were they shown in Black theaters or in White? Black theaters. I mean, sometimes White-owned theaters, but as with some of the others of that period, Micheaux didn't really see boundaries for himself. Oscar Micheaux managed to make more than 40 films in a career that spanned 4 decades. What is different about them than other films coming out? Well, the fact that you are seeing a whole range of Black characters on the screen, assertive, articulate, often sophisticated African American men who are strong characters who are trying to do something for themselves and the community. The idea was, there's a Black audience out there that wasn't yet begin serviced and wanted to be entertained and wanted to learn something as much as any other audience. Black audiences would see new images of themselves on film, many of them for the first time. Micheaux's films walked a fine line between entertainment and social commentary. Tackling taboo subjects like miscegenation and the brutality of rape, Micheaux chose to articulate harsh, largely unspoken truths about black life through his art.

BOGLE

In this film, "Within Our Gates," there was this sequence when the leading lady of the film, she is in a sort of cabin, and there's an older white man who's about to rape her. And he goes after her, and there is a struggle, and somehow her blouse is ripped open, and she's got a birthmark, and he realizes that actually he had impregnated a black woman years before, and this is his daughter. Oh, my God. You know, you think of the women in the slave cabins at night, when the White masters came out and got them. I mean, all of that is sort of part of a kind of subtext in the movie. Now, this is heavy stuff.

GATES

In its portrayal of the hidden causes of racial violence, Micheaux's film was a bold rebuttal to one of the most celebrated and racist American films ever made, "The Birth of a Nation."

FILM ANNOUNCER

D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation."

GATES

Released in 1915 to widespread critical acclaim, "The Birth of a Nation" was picketed by the NAACP for its vicious portrayals of African Americans.

BOGLE

In "The Birth of a Nation," major Black characters were played by Whites in blackface-- Of course. which made them all the more grotesque, and these Black men lusting after White women.

GATES

With its searing depiction of black men as sexual predators, "The Birth of a Nation" helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, which had been largely dormant since Reconstruction. Organized to defend White supremacy, the Klan's membership fluctuated over the decades and tended to peak when competition for jobs triggered violence. On occasion, Klan activities were fueled by resentment of a thriving Black middle class, like in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

WOMAN

My grandfather, he has seen a lot in this life, and he shared some of those things with me.

GATES

Wes Young was only 4 years old when a single accusation ignited the city of Tulsa. He told me, when he was a little boy, that something really bad happened, told me how he was woken up by his mom in the middle of the night-- "We have to go." Young's family lived in the Black section of town known as Greenwood, where black-owned businesses thrived, creating an oasis at the height of Jim Crow.

MAN

In the early parts of the 20th century in Tulsa, African Americans, they said, "OK, we have to be separate, "and we're going to show that separate but equal is not "gonna stop us from being successful. "We can build our own businesses. We can support our own industry." And in fact, the black dollar circulated 26 times before it left that community, which meant it went from the barbershop to the butcher to the supermarket.

GATES

This area was once known as the Negro Wall Street-- prosperous, self-sufficient, all-Black world, a model of progress and achievement. But prosperity for some was a provocation to others. On May 31, 1921, Dick Rowland was accused of assaulting Sarah Page in an elevator. He was Black. She was White. Both were teenagers. Mm-hmm. In the elevator? In the elevator. As allegations spread that a Black boy had molested a White girl, a White mob headed to the jailhouse where Dick Rowland was being held. Black men from Greenwood got their guns and protected Dick Rowland from being lynched, but what happened afterward went beyond their control.

MAN

A large white mob came over the railroad tracks into the Greenwood community, shooting and burning and looting. There were over 1,250 structures in Greenwood that were destroyed. These were homes and businesses. Because of the fires, the whole area was wiped out-- 36 square blocks. Wiped out in 24 hours? Really wiped out in less than 24 hours. My God. Just think of what this would have been today.

OGLETREE

This was an effort to stop the success of the community and Greenwood, and there was a message from Tulsa. The message was, if you try to be successful, we're going to bring you down.

GATES

The exact number of African Americans killed during the massacre may never be known. I mean, until you see it, the enormity of the thing-- it's never hit me until right now. Oh, yeah. Property damage to Greenwood's homes and businesses was estimated at $2 million. That would be the equivalent of almost $26 million today. But they didn't burn the spirit. The Tulsa riots were not an isolated incident. Throughout the country, racial conflicts had been flaring. World War I had just ended. Black and White soldiers were returning home from the front, competing with immigrants for scarce jobs. The mere sight of a Black man in uniform could be enough to provoke bloodshed from those who saw his proud assertion of citizenship as a threat. In 1919, an outbreak of violence in Charleston, South Carolina, spread like a virus to some two dozen cities. It was known as Red Summer.

LEWIS

And by the time it's over, it has swept north and south and west. Hundreds of people are dead. Cities are smoldering. Young Colonel MacArthur brings the troops in to quell the disturbance. This Red Summer presented a dilemma. We're not making progress. We've left the cotton fields, but it looks like a dead end may confront us.

GATES

This racial violence dampened the wartime optimism of many African Americans, causing them to reexamine their relationship to this country, as they had so many times before. For those wondering "Where now," a man emerged with an answer. Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant with a keen sense of pageantry and a mesmerizing oratorical voice, appealed to those who saw no future for themselves in mainstream American life. A Pan-Africanist, Garvey believed in the fundamental unity of Black people throughout the world.

WOMAN

Garvey emerges at a time when African Americans are coming back from war determined to fight and get their rights. He appeals to this sense of Black pride in a moment in our history where White supremacy is riding unbound, and the response is phenomenal.

GATES

At its height, Garvey's organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, was the largest black mass movement in American history.

MAN

Garvey becomes one of the era's biggest black- nationalist organizers. He is a fan and admirer of Booker T. Washington and thinks that this idea of bootstrapping, pulling yourself up, is the way to go.

GATES

The UNIA started its own businesses, including a printing press that published the widely circulated "Negro World" newspaper.

MAN

Garvey has a messianic vision of himself. He's going to say that Black people are worthwhile people. They've been kings and queens in Africa. He wants to repatriate to Africa and establish a colony that's under African American leadership in Liberia.

GATES

Garvey created a shipping company called the Black Star Line to transport those of his followers who wanted to move to Africa. But Garvey's dream was as leaky as his boats.

LEWIS

Turned out to be a rather unfortunate acquisition. Those huge tubs leaked, and their boilers had to be repaired and all that, but for one gorgeous day, marching down to the Brooklyn pier to see the "Frederick Douglass" sail to Africa-- boy, what a charge, that.

GATES

When Garvey mailed ads for the sale of shares in a ship he did not own, the FBI used this as an excuse to arrest him on charges of fraud. Ultimately, he was tried and convicted of the charges, serving nearly 3 years of a 5-year sentence before making one last bargain.

Ship horn blows

GATES

In one of the cruelest ironies of African American history, President Calvin Coolidge commuted Garvey's sentence, under one condition-- that he would be deported from right here, at the port of New Orleans not back to Africa, but to his home in Jamaica. On a December day in 1927, Garvey's most devoted followers came to bid him farewell.

JOSEPH

His lasting legacy is that all blacks who are descended from Africa, whether they're in Brazil or Brooklyn, Harlem or Haiti, are one people.

GATES

As Garvey's ship sailed away at the height of the Roaring Twenties, no one could imagine the devastating economic downturn that was to come. During the Great Depression, African Americans reached new depths of despair. Pushed out of the unskilled, largely menial jobs that they had once held, Black people saw unemployment rise above 50% in some parts of the country, twice that of White Americans. In the South, searing poverty made the lie of "separate but equal" all the more glaring, especially in education. At the height of the depression, a lawyer named Charles Hamilton Houston set out to expose the inequities of Jim Crow.

SULLIVAN

Charles Hamilton Houston took a camera and went into South Carolina and did a visual documentation of separate and unequal.

GATES

With this visual evidence, Houston began building a legal case against Jim Crow, showing just how unequal education was between Black and White students in America.

SULLIVAN

They would film a Black school. Often, they'd be in just shacks. I mean, you know, places that had cracks in the walls, and children crowded onto benches, no desks. Then he would go to the White school, neighboring White school-- 2-story,brick, basketball courts. So here is this astounding visual essay, and he used it to inform people around the country and to help mobilize Black people to fight for their children's futures.

GATES

After serving as a commissioned officer in World War I, Houston entered law school. He emerged a soldier of another kind.

SULLIVAN

While he was in law school, he developed this notion about the kind of role a Black lawyer should play in the fight for civil rights. He says the Black lawyer is a soldier, taking the battle into the courtroom, serving as an advisor to the people. The courtroom became the place where you asserted your citizenship.

GATES

As his legal career ascended, Houston began a slow assault on Jim Crow's "separate but equal" doctrine.

SULLIVAN

As Dean at Howard Law School, he is determined that he will train the best constitutional lawyers, and he imbues in them the power that they have, and he transforms the law school. It becomes the West Point of the civil rights movement.

GATES

Houston and his law students at Howard University would forge an army of their own, bringing a series of cases testing the legality of "separate but equal" throughout the South.

OGLETREE

American wasn't ready for the end of segregation when he started pushing these cases in the 1930s. As he argued cases before the Supreme Court, he also noticed that one justice actually turned his back on him, wouldn't even listen to him, because he was a black man articulating what it was all about. At the Supreme Court? At the Supreme Court. The justice just turned his back, didn't want to hear a black man arguing, but Charles Houston won case by case, statute by statute, section by section, and his whole effort was to make sure that the races were treated equal.

GATES

Though he wouldn't live to argue the case himself, Houston's efforts eventually led to the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling "Brown vs. Board of Education." The court reached the decision to overturn segregation in public schools just 4 years after Houston's death. In the 1930s, however, the end of segregation was still decades away. African Americans would have to find ways to cope with the many challenges posed by Jim Crow, like where to eat or drink, sleep, stand, or where to stop and rest after a long drive. The sheer inconvenience and indignity of it all was enough to overwhelm, so in 1936, a Harlem postal employee offered a solution. "The Negro Motorist Green-Book." What in the world was that?

WILKERSON

It was created by Victor Hugo Green. Ha ha! My man, Victor Hugo Green. So, it was green. The book was green. He was Green. His name was Green. And he set out to create a listing of where one might go if you were African American, and you could be assured of being able to get service. So in other words, how not to get arrested or rebuffed while you're driving that new car that Mr. Ford made. Yes. But it also represented so much more than just listings. It was insurance against indignity.

GATES

With the Great Depression in their rearview mirror, Black people were once again on the move, and the automobile was now one of the most viable means of transportation. But being on the road was not such an easy thing back then. Isabel, it's so enormously complicated and fraught. What went into a Black family planning a trip north in a car? They would need to know, where is it safe to stop, where would there be proprietors that would permit us to have a room for the night, where we could get gas. So we couldn't get gas at any gas station? You couldn't assume that you could get anything from anyplace. All these things added to the uncertainties of being on the road. By turning the uncertainties of the road into something more reliable, the "Green-Book" would direct Black travelers to accommodations like this.

WILKERSON

People had to drive far longer than they otherwise might have because they had to get to the one place that might have accepted them. And they found creative ways to tell the children, "We don't want to stop there, anyway," or, "We're gonna go and wait till we get to auntie's house." They cushioned the blow of reality of the segregated America. Yes, yes. Was this migration one of the first massive exercises of free will of the African American people? Absolutely. In fact, I call it the overground railroad. That's a good way to put it. That this migration was a first step that the nation's servant class ever took without asking. This is the first time that they made a decision for themselves as to who they would be and where they would be it.

GATES

Among other things, it was indignity that African Americans were escaping in the Great Migration-- and indeed, throughout much of their history. Perhaps the "Green-Book" helped in some small way to reaffirm their humanity. Another book certainly did, and it, too, went with them on their journey. That book was the Good Book, the Holy Bible.

WILKERSON

It was the reminder of what was at stake when they were going into these lonely stretches where there was no guarantee of what might happen, and so this is what carried them through. "I raise my eyes toward the mountains. "From where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth..."

GATES

"God will not allow your foot to slip; your guardian does not sleep. "By day, the sun cannot harm you, "nor the moon by night. "The Lord will guard you from all evil, will always guard your life. The Lord will guard your coming and going, both now and forevermore." Next time on "The African Americans," a change is going to come.

MAN

We had one thing in mind, and that was challenging bigotry and Jim Crow. We saw through that. I said, "My God. If we work together as a community, we can break these barriers down."

ANNOUNCER

"The

African Americans

Many Rivers to Cross." The African American story continues online at pbs.org/manyrivers, with streaming video and more. "The Many Rivers to Cross" is available on DVD for 34.99. The companion book is also available, for 34.95 plus shipping. To order, call 1-800-336-1917.