The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

GATES

By 1968, the Civil Rights Movement had achieved stunning victories both in the courts... and in the Congress. But would African Americans finally be allowed to achieve genuine racial equality? In the decades that followed, some attained undreamed-of success... while others struggled with ever-greater challenges, opening a deep divide in the black community. As the African American people confronted obstacles old and new, could their efforts be sustained by the dream that they, as a people, could reach the mountaintop?

Siren

KENNEDY

I have some very sad news for all of you and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

Onlookers gasping and shouting

GATES

On April 4, 1968, the tragic assassination of Dr. King, beloved symbol of the civil rights struggle, shattered African Americans' faith that racial equality could ever be won through peaceful protest.

JACKSON

There were those who never believed in nonviolence, because they never understood the depth of that method of solving problems in the world. To some extent, Dr. King has been a buffer the last two years between the black community and the white community. The white people do not know it, but the white people's best friend is dead.

NEAL CLEAVER

Once King was assassinated, the politics of nonviolence lost their relevance for a large number of people. Everyone had some very deeply visceral response of what they wanted to do, and what many people wanted to do was just go burn.

NEWSMEN

6 days of rioting in a negro section of Los Angeles. Race riots rocked New Jersey's largest city. It's as if a flight of bombers has passed over Detroit.

GATES

Across the country, some African Americans who had patiently withstood injustice for decades now set their cities on fire in a spontaneous outpouring of despair and anger. But in Oakland, California, people had somewhere else to turn-- the Black Panther Party, a militant group started in 1966 to defend the city's black community. People jammed the Black Panther offices saying, "We want guns. We want guns. We have to do something about this." By April 1968, the Panthers had gone from promoting self-defense to advocating revolutionary change.

NEAL CLEAVER

If you consider a civil right a right protected by the government in terms of legislation, civil rights were accomplished. Mm-hmm. Obviously, something hadn't happened to make black people equal, available, and have access to the resources. So that's power. That's where the Black Panther Party came in. It's for the people who want to bring about change.

GATES

22-year-old Kathleen Neal was working for racial justice through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, but the rising call for black power awakened her desire for something more radical. After meeting Panther Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen moved west, married Cleaver, and took charge of communications for the Party.

NEAL CLEAVER

The question is not will it be nonviolence versus violence, but whether a human being can practice his God-given right of self-defense.

GATES

The Panthers came up with their own bold new solution to the longstanding problem of police harassment in the ghetto-- armed community patrols.

BROWN

They just assumed their Second-Amendment rights and said, "We have the right to defend ourselves "under this Constitution, and we're going to do it openly and publicly."

NEAL CLEAVER

We would have power to determine the destiny of our own community. We would not be subjected to police brutality. And that was a pretty direct take in the streets with their weapons patrolling the police. It was something that the Oakland police had never encountered.

GATES

Their in-your-face attitude infuriated the authorities, but it thrilled young people impatient with the slow progress toward racial equality. The Panthers summoned the people they called "the brothers on the block" to realize the goal defined by their Black Nationalist forbearers like Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X-- black self-empowerment.

JOSEPH

The Panthers are really saying they want guns and butter-- guns to defend the community. The butter is community programs.

MAN

Way over 6,000 bags of groceries are being given away free.

JOSEPH

Free breakfast programs, free sickle cell anemia programs, health clinics.

NEAL CLEAVER

Raised our own money. We didn't take grants. It was a community-based popular radical black organization completely independent, and we didn't have to answer to anyone. What kind of future for the African American people did the Panthers envision? A brilliant future.

GATES

The Black Panthers were not alone. The black power movement inspired a whole generation who had stopped asking for freedom and were now demanding it.

WOMAN

What is freedom? Freedom is black power. Calling all black people. Calling all black people.

GATES

Black power took many forms, including black feminism, black theology, a black arts movement, and a new ideology called cultural nationalism, which encouraged Black Americans to reconnect with the culture of their ancestors by learning Swahili, taking African names, and wearing African clothes. Maulana Karenga and his organization Us called for black unity through cultural revolution. Cedric, would you tell us what umoja is? Umoja is unity. To that end, in 1966, he invented an African American holiday--Kwanza. I created it as a way to reaffirm our rootedness in our own culture, African culture. Malcolm said it--Until we have a cultural revolution to un-brainwash a whole people, we cannot break the bonds of white supremacy, because it begins first in the mind. You've got to decolonize the mind. 10 years before, you could have had the same idea, and it would have fallen flat. You know that as well as I. But what was it about this moment that let the seeds that you planted blossom? Remember, this is the black power movement, and black was sacred. Ha ha ha ha! It became a movement holiday, and as the movement grew, it grew. Wearing my natural gives me more power within myself. Isn't it beautiful?

MAN

What are you? I'm black and beautiful.

ROSE

"Black is beautiful" was an effort to sort of throw off the shackles of the way white supremacy constructed black bodies-- they're not as intelligent, they're not human, they're not as beautiful, they're not valued. So to undo that, one has to directly attack that ideology.

GATES

"Black is Beautiful" came out of the black power movement... Right on, brother. But it quickly permeated the American cultural mainstream. Blackness, or soul, became the epitome of cool... Right on. In popular films, music, and advertising. By 1969, there were black characters on 21 prime-time TV shows. But more than any other program, the syndicated television show "Soul Train," created and hosted by visionary entrepreneur Don Cornelius, helped spread the idea that black was beautiful. "Soul Train" brought black music, dancing, and fashion into homes across America. For African American youth, it was a revelation to see kids like themselves on national television.

THOMPSON

"Soul Train" was pretty much the obsession in every household in my neighborhood. I guess you could say "Soul Train" was kind of the first non-minstrel-based black entertainment that, you know, America really got.

GATES

And it was more than just music and dancing. "Soul Train" and its sponsors advertised products for black consumers in ways that appealed to their new pride and identity.

THOMPSON

Don Cornelius used the commercials to educate and promote afrocentricity, which was something that was absolutely not heard of. There's one with Frederick Douglass. Teaching you how to...yeah. "My brother, you can't go out looking like that." Well, Mr. Douglass, you know, times have changed. We wear the natural now. You call that a natural? That's a mess. Kids used to tease you by saying, "You're African." "No, I'm not. I'm..." You know, that was the reason for a fight. Someone called me African, I'm beating somebody up. Don Cornelius, his master plan was to change the lives of black youth without them knowing it. I don't mean it lightly when I say that self-love was probably the most important lesson that was taught on the show.

Indistinct

GATES

"Soul Train" made black culture truly national and kept it accessible to the African Americans who were moving out of their old segregated neighborhoods and integrating white suburbs for the first time. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down Professional opportunities were opening up, both in civil service and in the private sector, spurring the growth of the black middle class. The American dream was finally coming within reach for some thanks to a new idea called Affirmative Action, which prescribed concrete policies to end historic discrimination. You cannot explain the significant increase of middle-class blacks in professional positions and in colleges and universities without taking account of these civil rights acts and Affirmative Action programs. It definitely improved their life. You and I are prime examples. Precisely, yeah. In September 1969, I drove to New Haven, Connecticut, a world away from my hometown, Piedmont, West Virginia. I was one of the lucky 96 black students starting at Yale that fall, a huge leap from the 6 black men who had graduated in the class of '66, just 3 years earlier. Yale's president, Kingman Brewster, who had made the bold decision to open up admissions policies, greeted us with a speech I'll never forget. He said, "Welcome to Yale. "You're among the intellectual elect. "You are one of the 1,000 male leaders brought into the freshman class." Our goal, our revolutionary action would be to integrate the white power elite. The other black students I met at Yale were brilliant, including future neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson, future United States Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, and Kurt Schmoke, who would go on to become the first black mayor of Baltimore.

SCHMOKE

I thought of our class coming in as part of what Dr. King was talking about, certainly what my grandmother would wish for, you know, that these institutions were opening up to African Americans. Uh, somewhere in here. Where's the mark? There you go. Affirmative Action, for us, was the first chance we had to compete with white boys, our peers, on a level playing field. You know, I never considered myself as being unqualified. Right. This was all about inclusion. This was about me being a part of and not apart from.

GATES

Integrating the power elite was just the beginning. For us, black power meant shaping Yale to meet our needs, forming a black student alliance, and demanding new classes emphasizing African American history and culture. But off campus, the assertive stance of the black power movement had aroused fears, fears that began to take tangible form. Calling the Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country," the FBI launched a secret campaign of surveillance, infiltration, and disinformation aimed at seeding conflict between the black power groups. Were you aware of this counterintelligence program as it was going on? We thought they wanted to kill us. What we didn't understand is really what they wanted to do was confuse us, to make us think our friends were our enemies, to make us lose confidence in what we were doing. Why would the FBI care about the handful of black people wearing berets and the handful of black people in dashikis? You know, these were not mass movements where 20 million black people, you know, lined up to join them. Nobody really was threatened by the Panthers. Let's be honest. Hoover wasn't afraid of them, and he wasn't afraid of us. He feared us in our unity, the potential of a unified black movement, self-conscious and armed. In March 1972, over 8,000 people, including Cultural Nationalists, Black Panthers, representatives of the black arts movement, mainstream civil rights activists, and elected officials come together in Gary, Indiana, intent on defining a unified agenda through the first national black political convention. What was the idea behind this meeting? There was a recognition that protect politics wasn't enough. You actually have to struggle for power.

MAN

All right, please, please, please. In the interest-- Please. Now let's go.

KELLEY

One of the things that Gary did reveal, though, is that unity is a hard thing.

MAN

The political agenda that comes out of this convention has to be a nearly unanimous document. If it's not, it will simply be ignored by the major political parties. "Why is it that you all don't agree?" Yeah. We have never had that in the black community, and it has never been true in the white community. But only we are asked about it. Ha ha ha. Going and participating did not necessarily mean that you agree with everything, but not to be there to witness this and to be a part of it would have been, for me, irresponsible. All in favor of adopting the National Black Agenda please signify by raising your hands!

GATES

The participants united across ideological lines around the black community's most crucial issue, the longstanding economic inequality that the civil rights movement hadn't been able to eradicate.

JACKSON

Now we find ourselves with the right to move in any neighborhood in America, and we can't pay the note. We have the right to go to any school in America. We can't pay the tuition. We've got the right to buy any car in America. But we can't stop it from being repossessed. We are not arguing about our Constitutionality. We are raising a basic question-- when will we get paid for the work we have already done?

Cheering and applause

BLACKWELL

In the Seventies, we really had a tale of three cities. We have a few African Americans who have achieved real greatness in terms of education, in business, in politics. Then you had a black middle class that had middle-class status, middle-class ideals, did not quite have middle-class stability, but middle class nonetheless. And then you had a huge swath of the black community that was poor, and its poverty was worse than the poverty that preceded it.

GATES

During that time, larger economic forces were reshaping the American landscape. Industries were moving out of the inner cities. White people and African Americans who had made it into the middle class followed the jobs to the suburbs. The black poor were left behind. There's a big difference, Skip, between neighborhoods in which a majority of the adults are working, like was the case, say, back in 1950... Mm-hmm. And neighborhoods in which a significant majority of the adults are not working. Joblessness triggers problems in a neighborhood-- family breakups, drug trafficking, gangs. What you're describing is a perfect storm for disaster for the poorest element of the African American community. Yeah, absolutely. Well, what strikes me as a paradox is that all this occurred precisely as black people were gaining increasing political power and efficacy in the cities. Being mayor of Gary has not made it possible for me to control things like jobs and the economic conditions of black people.

Applause

GATES

The unemployment rate is 4 and 5 times greater than the national unemployment rate during the Depression.

Applause

GATES

Congratulations, Mr. Mayor. When my old friend from Yale, Kurt Schmoke, was elected, he, like the country's other black mayors, inherited a city in decline and abandoned by the Federal government.

SCHMOKE

When I became mayor, it was clear that we had significant problems in the African American community that weren't being faced in the white community. I didn't realize, however, that the other thing that I was gonna face was the negative impacts of the war on drugs.

NEWSMAN

President Reagan signed a stiff new anti-drug law authorizing $1.7 billion to fight drug abuse.

REAGAN

The American people want their government to get tough and go on the offensive, and that's exactly what we intend.

ALEXANDER

From the outset, the war on drugs had relatively little to do with genuine concern about people struggling with drug addiction and drug abuse...

ANNOUNCER

This is your brain on drugs. And much to do with politics... Just say no. Racial politics, using racially coded get-tough political peals on issues of crime and welfare in order to appeal to poor and working-class whites who are anxious about and resentful of many of the gains of African Americans in the civil rights movement.

GATES

That war on drugs would be waged in African American neighborhoods like Harlem's Wagner Houses, where Terrence Stevens grew up. Were you aware that the government had declared a war on drugs? I knew that there was a war on drugs in the street with law enforcement because I remember, as a kid, we'd just be hanging out in front of our buildings, and the police would come and just throw everybody up on the wall and started checking everybody. They're running up in these apartment buildings with their guns out. It had a devastating effect on the black community. In the mid-1980's, inner-city neighborhoods like Terrence's, which were already struggling to combat poverty and decay, suffered a staggering blow.

STEVENS

Crack stole the show. Crack just like killed the game. It was undescribable, the level of hardships and whatnot that, you know, people was experiencing. They would be smoking crack cocaine in a park. You know, people literally stealing TV's out of your house, you know. Crack really hit Harlem heavy. The war on drugs is focused on crack. Let's go.

Men shouting

STEVENS

Police!

ALEXANDER

When crack hit the streets, the Reagan administration seized on this development, actually hiring staff whose job it was to publicize inner-city crack babies... Crack kids. Crack dealers... Get down on your hands! In an effort to bolster public support for a drug war they had already declared.

NEWSMAN

The plan, an all too familiar one. It's another night, another crack raid.

ALEXANDER

There was such a frenzy associated with a fear of crack, it served the function of deflecting attention away from problems of poverty, of joblessness in these communities... Open it! To crack.

MAN

Police are now arresting more than 35 people a day on drug charges, but almost all of these arrests are taking place in black neighborhoods.

ALEXANDER

Even at the height of the crack epidemic, the majority of crack users were white. But once it became sensationalized in the media as a black drug, a wave of punitiveness swept over. We saw a whole generation of young black men in particular being swept into prisons and jails. How old are you, son? 15 years old. It's like it was a trap, and it was a trap by design.

GATES

In 1990, Terrence was traveling to Buffalo. Police searched the bus he was riding and found 5 ounces of cocaine.

STEVENS

I was arrested, you know, as a result of drugs that someone else had in their bag, and I was sentenced as a first-time, low-level, nonviolent offender to 15 years to life. I was locked up with some guys that committed murder. They raped kids. And they got under 10 years.

MAN

When your gate opens up, you will strip down for the officer.

ALEXANDER

Before the war on drugs, the most severe sentence for drug possession under Federal law was one year. Congress and State legislators began passing ever harsher mandatory minimum sentences for minor drug offenses. Prisons exploded almost overnight. What's happening, man? You're getting big, kid. You'll be growing up, and you'll wonder why you ain't seen the person, and unfortunately, if you end up in prison, the person will be there. You know, they go, "Mike!" They go, "Bob!" They go, "Uncle..." you know, and it's like the prisons were an extension of the community.

Indistinct conversation

GATES

As their communities came under assault or languished in neglect, young people were looking for a way to express their rage and hopes about what was going on around them.

BROWN

You had a lot of confusion on what was gonna get America out of really kind of like a depression for black folks.

V. BROWN

The gutting of the urban labor force, the rise of the prison economy, the flooding of these neighborhoods with drugs, you have the withering of the state, so schools are being increasingly defunded, art programs go away. Out of the ashes rose the phoenix of hip-hop.

ROSE

Kids just did it themselves. Deejays take the electrical power sources from the city, you know, and attach them to turntables and massive homemade speakers. The idea of a block party was just reinvigorated in hip-hop with nothing.

GATES

Those kids created an entire culture with its own music, dance, visual art, style, and attitude. Don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge Rap songs like "The Message" shed a vivid new light on the experience of people who felt invisible. It makes me wonder how I keep from going under It's like a jungle sometimes. It makes me wonder how I keep from going under. That black male especially, it made us like, yeah, you know. "This person is speaking for me "because I can't say these things. I ain't being heard." And hip-hop just came out and just said, "Yes. Yes. Exactly, you know." And it's riding a beat. Very powerful for a person going from 17 to 26, when I started making my first records. Fight the power Fight the power Fight the power Chuck D had grown up with the black power movement. With his group Public Enemy, he revived the message of black resistance in the language of a new generation.

CHUCK D

"Fight the power" was a call to be looked upon as equal people, yelling for your rights. And if you can speak and yell and then rap for your rights, then, you know, it just follows in the footsteps of the legacy of black musicians that spoke to a forward movement.

GATES

As hip-hop's popularity grew, its lyrics and music videos didn't shy away from portraying issues like poverty, hardship, and police brutality.

CHUCK D

Rap was black America's CNN because it was able to give direct commentary on what was going on. 13 years into the recorded hip-hop idiom comes what it's been saying all along.

GATES

In 1991, a home video captured the vicious beating of Rodney King, an unarmed black man by Los Angeles police officers. Those images shocked a nation largely unaware of police practices in America's inner cities. When the officers in the King video went on trial, black Los Angeles waited for the verdict. On April 29, 1992, the 4 officers were cleared of all charges. They don't represent the people no more! It's terrible.

ALEXANDER

After being denied for so long, any validation, acknowledgement of the pain and the suffering and the anger, it exploded. A black man didn't put these scars on my head! A black man didn't do this! The police did this! I got scars on my head for the rest of my life!

Chanting "Africans unite!"

MAN

Today Mayor Tom Bradley urged everyone in Los Angeles to remain home, to stay off the streets. He also suggested they might want to watch "The Cosby Show" because he believes and we believe we need this time, a bit of a cooling-off period, giving us some breathing space, maybe a time to remember what Thursday nights were like before all this madness began in Los Angeles. Theo!

GATES

While Los Angeles burned, millions of people of all races tuned in to "The Cosby Show's" final episode to say goodbye to the black characters they had loved and laughed with with 8 years. America's most popular sitcom had offered viewers a celebration of black achievement, an affluent, wholesome family who unapologetically embraced black traditions and culture from historically black colleges... I haven't seen this since I was 8 years old. To black art and music.

V. BROWN

Through the Eighties and Nineties, that black middle class finds its voice, too, people beginning to express what's happening for black middle-class people who can go to college, uh, and who are entering professional life, um, and who begin to take their place in the nation's elite.

GATES

I watched "The Cosby Show" with my two daughters. The world it depicted reflected the lives of our own family and our friends, a black reality that looked nothing like what was going on in America's ghettoes. My daughters were accustomed to seeing African Americans as icons of mainstream American culture. But it still amazed me that black celebrities were becoming so popular with audiences of all colors.

COBB

We started to see acceptance for exceptional black people, but in some ways, people were measuring the rest of black America by the success of a handful of exceptional individuals, and it made it possible to ignore the ongoing structural dynamics that made it very difficult for other people to attain a reasonable living.

JOSEPH

These people who find themselves very, very successful, they've managed to escape. That's what they've managed to do. You may think to yourself like, "Wow! Things are great. You know, I've made it." But if you go back to where you're from, you're gonna see that all these people that were left behind are still there, and you might have thought to yourself that "since I made it, somehow they all got free..." In America, that's not the case.

MAN

We've got major flooding here.

GATES

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the city of New Orleans. In the floods that followed, about 1,500 people lost their lives. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes. These members of the Black Men of Labor, a cultural organization, stayed in New Orleans throughout the disaster. Things were so hectic that, you know, guys just couldn't arbitrarily go out on their own for fear of being arrested or maybe being fired upon. So we banded together. When aid didn't come fast enough, they went out with a boat to rescue people stranded by the floods. Do you have nightmares about what you saw? Where these three-- they were sisters and brothers. They were all dressed in white. I'll never forget that. And they were pouring water down his mouth and telling him, "We're gonna make it. We're almost there. We're almost there." They were bringing him to the bus. And I couldn't take that either. I couldn't take it. Excuse me. Shouldn't the government have been doing what you guys were forced to do? You can wait for government if you want, but, I mean, lives were at stake. So you did what you knew you could do.

MAN

So many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor, and they are so black, and this is gonna raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story unfold.

GATES

For many African Americans, no matter how rich or poor, the painfully inadequate relief effort reopened a deep racial wound. The landscape of the city has changed dramatically, tragically, and perhaps irreversibly. George Bush doesn't care about black people.

COBB

There are hundreds of deceased people literally floating down the street, overwhelmingly African American, and the official response is that the President is on Air Force One, and they fly lower so that they can survey the damage. People kept saying, "This is not about race." But for African Americans, it was hard to conceive that there could be 800 white people dead and hundreds, thousands more who are desperately in need of assistance, and what they get is a flyover.

BLACKWELL

The government's failure to respond I don't think was just because people were black or just because people were poor. People were left in that crisis because they were black and poor. It was strictly because they did not matter.

GATES

A few days after the floods, an official delegation visited Katrina evacuees sheltered in the Houston Astrodome. Among them was the sole African American in the United States Senate, Barack Obama, the junior Senator from Illinois.

OBAMA

The people of New Orleans weren't just abandoned during the hurricane. They were abandoned long ago to murder and mayhem in their streets, to substandard schools, to dilapidated housing, to inadequate health care, to a pervasive sense of hopelessness. Now, that's the deeper shame of this past week. Thank you, everybody. God bless you.

GATES

Just a year and a half later, Obama announced that he would seek the Democratic nomination for the United States Presidency. It was an audacious decision for any first-term Senator, but especially for an African American. One day there may be a black President, but there will never be a black President named Barack Obama. Ladies and gentlemen, that's too black. When I did the joke, I really didn't believe he could be President. It was about me sort of just saying the country wasn't ready. Many African Americans simply didn't believe that Obama could persuade white voters to elect a black man to the nation's highest office.

Cheering

GATES

Oh, I think that's a good one! That's a good one! But as the months went by, his unprecedented confidence began to pay off. This fall, we owe the American people a real choice.

Cheering and applause

GATES

The campaign's freshest face has now emerged as its frontrunner. What do we really know about Barack Obama?

MAN

The reason that he's considered such a big deal is simply because he's black. Do we really want somebody like that in the White House? Here's a candidate who claims to be a unifier, and yet he belongs to a church where they specialize in denouncing whites.

GATES

In March 2008, the media discovered the fiery sermons of Obama's pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a 3-strike law, and then wants us to sing "God Bless America"? No, no, no! Not "God Bless America." "...Damn America!" I wouldn't sit in a church where a pastor said that. Would you? Why does Senator Obama? Commitment to the black community. Commitment to the black family. Adherence to the black work ethic. If every time we said "black," if it was a church, and those words were "white," wouldn't we call that church racist? Although Obama had avoided emphasizing the issue of race during the campaign, the media frenzy that ensued forced him to confront the topic head-on. The path to a more perfect Union means acknowledging that what ails the African American community does not just exist in the minds of black people. Working together, we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds and that, in fact, we have no choice. We have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect Union. By reassuring many Americans that he understood both sides of the country's longstanding and painful racial divide, Obama inspired voters to do something that many considered impossible.

NEWSMEN

Pennsylvania has gone to Obama. Senator Obama will carry the State of Massachusetts. Ohio is gone for Obama. We can report history. You are looking at the 44th President of the United States. The celebrations begin.

Cheering "Yes, we can!"

POWELL

We did it. They said we couldn't, and we did it. Yeah. I cried. I still do.

Cheering

JORDAN

My eyes filled with tears, but they were not my tears. They were the tears of my parents and my grandparents. They were the tears of all of those black people who toted that cotton and lifted that bale. Did you think America was ready to elect a black President? It doesn't matter. It happened.

Cheering

JORDAN

Change has come to America.

Cheering

GATES

As people all over the world rejoiced, we, too, could once again believe in the promise of America.

COBB

So there's always been this double vision of America-- America, the land of opportunity, and also America, the land that has a rigid racial hierarchy. What Obama's election did was offer the country at least a moment in which it could renew that creed, the land where everything is possible. Congratulations, Mr. President. Thank you, sir.

Cheering and applause

GATES

Against the greatest odds, America sent a black man to the White House. In the euphoria that followed, some even dared to wonder was this the end of racism? Could 500 years of race relations be transformed by the election of one man? The idea that one black President ended racism-- like...Aah! Like, it was just like, that's all it takes? I think people wanted to buy it. And there was so much good feeling around Barack at that point that we wanted to believe that he was--you know, it's the extension of the magical negro in the movies. And that good feeling led to claims that somehow we had turned a corner, that we were so-called post-racial. America was founded on racism. The only way we get to be post-racial is the way that we got to be post-dinosaur. You know what I mean? Like, a meteor has to hit and just sort of wipe everything out, and then something else has to replace America.

BLACKWELL

Attitudes are improving about race. All the polls show it. The American people actually feel better about people who are different. They feel better about black people. They have less racism. But those personal attitudes don't translate into change, because the racism now is institutionalized. It's structural.

COBB

This African America who is in the White House occurs at a point where there's nearly a million black men who are incarcerated, at a point where black unemployment is routinely double that of white unemployment, at a point where there are all these enduring indicators of social, economic inequality.

GATES

After almost a decade, in a maximum-security prison, an eternity for Terrence Stevens, who suffers from muscular dystrophy, the governor of New York granted him clemency, allowing him to come home at last. Today is Terrence day, baby. Yippy-yi-yay! 8 1/2 long years. I guess it's like 58 it seemed like to him in his condition. Getting ready to lift now. Let's go. I'm thinking about writing a book when I get out, too. Well, you're out now. Yeah, I'm out now. Yeah, right. "When I get out." He's saying... I'm so used to being in.

Laughter

GATES

Yeah, it's a beautiful morning, though. Ha ha ha! It's funny, man. I was locked up so long that when I finally got released... I...I had a little phobia about going outside, because outside seemed so huge, you know. It seemed so huge. Although he was no longer incarcerated, Terrence discovered that as a convicted felon, he was not yet free. There was a lot of things that I couldn't do. You know, I couldn't vote. Having to report to parole once a week. Parole officers coming to your house. You have a curfew. A lot of people, when they go and apply for jobs, they want to know do you have a conviction, and you write down, yes, you have a conviction, and now the employer don't want to employ you. Even after prison, you're kind of still under prison guidelines, you know.

WOMAN

Put your right foot back up, please. Put that against your stomach.

ALEXANDER

I refer to the system of mass incarceration as a new Jim Crow, because it is a comprehensive system that serves to lock a group of people, defined largely by race and class, into a permanent second-class status. Our racial stereotypes... fears, and anxieties have driven the birth of this system and sustained the idea that some people are a problem to be dealt with harshly.

WOMAN

Sean Bell died the same day he was supposed to get married.

Gunshot

MAN

Grant was fatally wounded.

GATES

As a President of a nation eager to disavow its racial past, Obama had steered clear of discussing race while in the White House. But during his second term, an all too familiar story moved him to break his silence about the persistent demonization of young black men.

WOMAN

We, the jury, find George Zimmerman not guilty. Oh, no! [Chanting "Whose streets? Our streets!"

OBAMA

When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Uh... Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me, uh... 35 years ago.

V. BROWN

My first thought was it could have been me, too. This is something that all black men know in this country. Anybody out of place, anybody in the wrong location-- Can I just say it? Anybody off their plantation... Right? Is already suspected to be a criminal of some sort, and the society around is empowered to do something about that. How you doing, bro? The big question is can the nation be something else? And that's a question we all have to ask together.

STEVENS

I knew that when I returned home, I had to do something significant, I had to do something that was major, and I had to contribute to my society in a huge way. I came up with this idea of starting a foundation where we would actually reach out to children who lost their mothers and fathers to incarceration. We provide tutoring, mentoring. I'm gonna ask that each one of you guys get up and scream out, "I am somebody!" We connect them with a positive role model. And we transport them up to these correctional facilities so that they can reestablish the bond with their parents. How long your dad been in prison? Like, 6 years. 6 years? When was the last time you seen your dad? Like...2 years ago. It's a crying shame that, you know, mass incarceration had taken over the community the way it did, you know. And I remain hopeful that they will soften up some of these policies. Hopefully some of these parents can return home and, you know, become, you know, parents again.

GATES

Terrence's efforts to help these children break the cycle of incarceration connects him to the most important unifying thread that runs through black history-- the enduring will both to survive and to carve out a better future for those who follow.

KARENGA

Everybody benefited from our movement. Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, Women, Gays, Seniors built on our conversation. That's true. In Africa... In China... In the Palestinian struggle, they sang our songs, used our phrases-- "Million Man March, We shall overcome," all of that and posed our struggle as a model to emulate.

GATES

That struggle is far from over. I have a dream today. The African American people have played a central role in building this country since before its inception... Never losing sight of the dream that one day the United States would finally achieve that more perfect Union. Looking back on the last 500 years reminds us that when the weakest members of society take history into their own hands, they can change the world. The journey from the slave ship to the White House, from bondage to full equality has been long and arduous, replete with despair but full of joy as well. It's a journey still in progress, one that we are continuing together. Many rivers to cross But I can't seem to find My way over Wandering, I am lost As I travel along The white cliffs of Dover

ANNOUNCER

The African American story continues online at pbs.org/manyrivers with streaming video and more. "The

African Americans

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. Because of my pride