The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

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. And the foundry was where they put Negroes. And the foundry was where they put Negroes. As black workers poured into Detroit, racial tensions mounted, over jobs, housing, even access to public space.

And then... 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." 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

GATES

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

GATES

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 Negro 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 Negro? 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. 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. 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. That's all right. 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-- 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. I think it is.

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... 5 years later, Dorothy Dandridge became the first African-American nominated for an Academy Award in a leading role. ...dream a dream come While most black stars supported civil rights, few used their celebrity for explicitly political ends. ...first thing you do... 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. 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 Negro people in the United States. I certainly did.

GATES

Paul Robeson sought to plead the cause of the Negro right here, at the United Nations. In 1951, he presented a petition entitled "We

Charge Genocide

The Crime of Government Against the Negro 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. 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 Negro 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 Negro 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. 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. Ha ha! 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

BRIDGES

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 Negro 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 niggers going in that school. Well... 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

MAN

...want to integrate, 2, 4, 6, 8...

GATES

Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes desegregated the University of Georgia in 1961.

Crowd chanting

GATES

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. 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. They had mortgages to pay. Mortgages to pay. The parents of many of those students told them not to do this. Oh, of course. Yeah. But they went ahead. And they were afraid they were gonna get killed, too. Well, yeah, that, but part of it was don't rock the boat, you know. Rock the boat. Yeah. 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. 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? 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 niggers 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 niggers in here." JOHN LEWIS, 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.

WOMAN

To me

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. 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 that one day...

Applause

KING

One day little white children and little Negro 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"? 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. Yeah, in essence. 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 Negro 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

JOHN LEWIS

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... 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. 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

GATES

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.

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... 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

GATES

I never heard it before. I went, like, "Whoa, man!" I'm like a nuclear bomb gone up. Black power

indistinct

GATES

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

GATES

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. "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.