-[chatter] -[helicopter whirs]
-[sirens blare] -[horns beep]
[woman] Most of how we think about ourselves as Americans,
most of what we're proudest of,
and most of the ways in which we believe we are free
are embedded in the 14th Amendment.
[upbeat music]
[man 1] The 14th Amendment was born in battle,
forged in controversy and ratified amid rancor.
That's the heritage.
[man 2] What we didn't account for is how unprepared we were
to actually embrace true equality.
[contemporary orchestral music]
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
And every revolution has an equal and opposite counter-revolution.
Most people have a really hard time with change,
especially when they feel like they're losing something.
After the Civil War, most white Southerners
feel like they've not only lost a war, but they've lost their way of life.
They've been humiliated.
Former slaves have now gained legal equality
under the 14th Amendment.
Equality backed by the government.
And, as it turns out,
Fourteen needs defending
because as soon as it's passed, it meets resistance on all sides.
In the courts, in the streets…
Its significance is even distorted in our memories.
[chatter]
[clamor grows]
[shouting]
How do you put a republic back together
after an all-out four-year civil war?
[artillery fire]
The effort to bring the Southern states back into the Union
on the basis of genuine equality between Black and white
was always a very difficult project.
Slavery was a total institution.
It was a system of labor. It was a system of politics.
It was a system of wealth. It was a system of power.
You needed to revamp all of that.
Most Southern whites did not want the 14th Amendment,
they felt it was a humiliation,
particularly in the day-to-day interactions of people.
Everybody knew how a slave was supposed to act.
They were meant to step off the sidewalk if a white person came by.
They could not address a white person, except as Master this, Master that.
But what is the behavior after slavery?
[man] "You must not think because you are as free as white people
you are their equal, because you are not."
"If you wish to be esteemed as ladies and gentlemen,
you must conduct yourselves accordingly."
"Call your old master 'Master' and your old mistress 'Mistress.'"
[man] One of the things I don't think we've ever talked about in this country
is how remarkable it is, the kind of mindset
that emancipated Black people showed during Reconstruction
is one of the most inspiring things you can find in American history.
Here are people enslaved and brutalized, and traumatized and tortured…
[whip cracks]
Win their freedom and they seek peace, and harmony and community.
[man] "They bear towards their former masters
no revengeful thoughts,
no hatreds,
no animosities."
"They aim not to elevate themselves
by sacrificing one single interest of their white fellow citizens."
"They ask but the rights which are theirs by God's universal law."
Many of us aren't aware of the magnitude
of Black American and African contribution
to America and the world.
Join us in a joyous celebration of Black cultural contribution.
["Freedom" by Pharrell Williams playing]
[Stevenson] With the 14th Amendment, we saw remarkable progress
by emancipated Black people.
With the presence of federal troops, they became successful
at commerce, at business, at agriculture.
They wanted to serve and lead.
♪ Man's red flower ♪
♪ It's in every living thing ♪
♪ Mind, use your power ♪
♪ Spirit, use your wings ♪
[man] "Our eyes behold it,
our ears hear it, our hearts feel it, there's no doubt about it."
"The Black man is free."
"The Black man is a citizen and the Black man is enfranchised."
African Americans are filled with this excitement about freedom,
filled with this excitement about what it means to be full citizens.
And we begin to have this transformation in Black life.
They also wanted to establish institutions, like churches.
The AME Church and Black Baptist Churches proliferate across the South.
So many of the historically Black colleges and universities,
from Fisk to Howard University in Washington DC,
were born in this moment
as a way for Black people to have the institutional basis
for making a new life for themselves in a world that they had never known.
♪ Freedom! ♪
♪ Freedom ♪
Reconstruction brought about hundreds of Black officeholders,
whether they were state legislators in the South,
Lieutenant governors in the South.
A few became US Congressmen and two became US senators
and served nobly.
Hiram Revels became the first African American senator.
"Washington, February 25th, 1870."
"Mr. Revels, the Colored senator from Mississippi
was sworn in and admitted to his seat this afternoon."
"There was not an inch of standing or sitting room in the galleries,
and to say that the interest was intense gives but a faint idea of the feeling
which prevailed throughout the entire proceeding."
[as Revels] "We are in the midst of an exciting campus
on the basis of justice and political and legal equality."
[distorted music]
I get it,
but now that we're living so close together,
we can get used to each other's ways and work together peacefully.
[cheering]
The famous illustrator Thomas Nast created a cartoon,
"Uncle Sam's Thanksgiving."
It was sort of an example of the thinking at that time.
["93 'Til Infinity" by Souls Of Mischief playing]
[Foner] Everybody is at this table. White, Black, Native American, Chinese…
At that time, I think that was a visual that people have never seen.
This was what they were trying to imagine themselves into.
[Muhammad] The 14th Amendment brought into life
what could be a new multiracial nation,
a multiracial democracy that finally lived up to its inherent principles
enshrined in the Declaration.
And it didn't last long.
[atmospheric music playing]
[Epps] The one thing that's clear
is that there were forces in the white South…
that were determined
to get things back the way they had been.
[man] "Darkness is the fashionable color in these regions."
"We have Africans in place all about us."
"They are jurors,
post office clerks, custom-house officers."
"The Southern communities will be a desolation
until there is a thorough change of affairs
in all departments of government."
"Even insurrection would be better
than the insensibility that seems to prevail."
[narrator] The 14th says everyone is equal under the law.
Then comes the 15th Amendment,
which gives Black men the right to vote.
For some in the white South, together that's a dangerous cocktail.
Those two amendments change Southern law,
and, for a time, Southern leadership.
But many white Southern minds haven't changed at all,
and they'll do anything to take back their power.
Anything.
-[shouting] -[gunshots]
[man] We want to live in peace with all mankind,
and especially with the whites of the South.
Our interests are identical.
But we do not want the peace of the lamb with the lion.
Give us our rights.
[Ifill] White Southerners marginalized Black people
to a second-class citizenship,
living subservient lives and, in much of the South,
living almost as they did as slaves.
And after the holocaust
there was a freedom.
On paper, at least.
Technically, slavery had ended
but the struggle for equality was just beginning.
[narrator] As citizens,
guaranteed their rights under the 14th Amendment,
Black Americans now turn to the courts for help against this resistance.
Before the Civil War, most of our justices owned enslaved people
or were appointed by presidents who did.
It kind of took all the surprise out of their rulings.
But the Court in the 1870s and 1880s, it's different.
It's like, been-through-a-civil-war kind of different.
Many of these justices were appointed by presidents who fought for the Union.
This court should be full of revolutionaries, right?
Hmm, not so much.
Black Americans don't find an ally in the courts,
but white Southerners do.
I think when many people think about the backlash to Reconstruction,
we think of the violence on the ground, we think about the rise of the Klan.
We think about Black Codes.
But we also have to be clear that the Supreme Court
plays a vitally important and powerful role
in returning African people to a state, essentially, of servitude.
[Epps] The 14th Amendment, Section 1, says,
as a citizen you have the privileges or immunities of citizenship.
No state shall compromise those.
As a human being,
you have the right to equal protection of the laws and due process.
Well, are those gonna be observed?
What the Supreme Court did in a series of cases,
Slaughterhouse and Cruikshank and Civil Rights Cases,
was undermine that commitment.
[Epps] Slaughterhouse is one of the most…
reviled and criticized decisions of the United States Supreme Court.
Basically, it said you still look to the states,
not the national government,
for the basic definition and protection of your rights.
This emasculated the Privileges and Immunities Clause,
and it never has recovered.
Okay, let's break down privileges and immunities.
It basically means our rights.
The privileges are our freedoms.
That's the things we're allowed to do.
And immunities are our protections,
the things that we'll be protected from as citizens.
And in America, our most basic freedoms and protections
are contained in the Bill of Rights.
Freedom of speech, religion, assembly, right to bear arms,
all of that good stuff.
Now, Fourteen makes it so that you get those rights
no matter which state you live in
or which state you travel to,
and that's really important to Black Americans,
who too often have been deprived of their rights
depending on the state they're in.
By restricting the enforcement of the 14th Amendment so narrowly,
it essentially gutted the amendment.
[Epps] Local white supremacist governments would then use the Slaughterhouse case
to say the 14th Amendment can't interfere
with our local government by guaranteeing civil rights.
[Muhammad] In the United States versus Cruikshank, the courts ruled
that the 14th Amendment
did not protect individual citizens
from violence committed by private citizens.
[man] "The 14th Amendment prohibits a state
from depriving any person life, liberty or property without due process of law,
but this adds nothing to the rights of one citizen against another."
That fundamentally ripped the guts
out of the 14th Amendment's most basic guarantee
that the only way Black people
could have citizenship rights in the United States of America
was if they could be protected from violence.
So, let me get this straight. Uh…
Basically, what the Supreme Court is saying is,
"Sorry, Black Americans."
"If private citizens commit violence against you,
even murder,
the federal government can't really do anything about it,
even though the 14th Amendment was written to protect you."
[Ifill] The Civil Rights Cases essentially remove the power
from the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
The Court essentially say that Black people can't be free
from discrimination in public accommodations.
They can't be free from discrimination in theaters and hotels and so forth.
It applied to private action, not state action.
When an opera house says, "We don't let Black people in here,"
that's not the state government or a public official doing it.
That's a private business.
The Civil Rights Cases legalize segregation
in private accommodations,
saying it's not a violation of equal protection under Fourteen.
It's just a violation of human decency.
The Court says something in the Civil Rights Cases that's devastating,
that is actually quite familiar to Black people.
"When a man has emerged from slavery
there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation
when he ceases to be the special favorite of the laws."
The Court says, "How long must we continue to,
essentially, coddle Black people?"
There must come a time when, freed from the shackles of slavery,
Black people will stand up on their own two feet.
[Epps] The Court became impatient.
"We fought a war and you guys are now free.
What more do you want from us?"
"We've got other things to do."
You know, "Please, just fall in line."
[Ifill] This is 20 years after Black people have been held in servitude
for centuries in this country.
The Supreme Court is already washing its hands
of the project of equality.
Much quicker than anyone would have thought,
the Northern public lost interest in the project of reform of the South,
and this appetite occurred, which was,
"Let's put this behind us."
"Let's not be divided as a country between North and South the rest of history."
And there was this appetite for what was called reconciliation.
[Muhammad] That was the end of federal presence in the South.
It was the end of the commitment to the 14th Amendment,
and it would create a long, dark and torturous road
to what would become Jim Crow segregation.
[shouting]
[clamor grows]
[gavel bangs]
[screaming]
[Ifill] And then, of course, in 1896,
the Supreme Court decides Plessy versus Ferguson…
…in which the Court upholds state laws that provide for segregation
so long as they are separate but equal.
In Plessy versus Ferguson,
the Supreme Court upholds the Louisiana law
stating all railway companies carrying passengers
in their coaches in this state
shall provide equal but separate accommodations
for the white and Colored races.
See, that's where we get "separate but equal."
No, it doesn't mean you can blame segregation on trains,
as much as I'd like to.
The Supreme Court has essentially replaced 14 with white supremacy
as the law of the land.
Let's examine this new law.
What does "separate" really do?
Well, "separate" means to force apart, to divide.
It's an inherently destructive verb.
I dislike the phrase "separate the wheat from the chaff."
Why are you so mad at the chaff? What'd it do to you?
Look at separate's history.
First, Africans were separated from their continent by the slave trade,
then African Americans were separated from their families through slavery.
Jim Crow separates African Americans from education,
wealth, opportunity and justice.
Black Americans were separated so much
that we still have to have a separate Black History Month
just so Americans can know our contributions.
It's so wrong.
Now we're about to see what happens when you separate "equal"
from "protection."
[woman] "During the slave regime, the Southern white man
owned the Negro body and soul."
"It was to his interest to dwarf the soul and preserve the body."
"The white owner rarely permitted his anger
to go so far as to take a life,
which would entail upon him a loss of several hundred dollars."
"But emancipation came,
and the vested interests of the white man in the Negro's body were lost."
"A new system of intimidation came into vogue."
"The Negro was not only whipped and scourged,
he was killed."
["This Land" by Gary Clark Jr. playing]
The South became a field of really remarkable violence.
[music continues]
Once Black men get the right to vote,
once they begin serving in office,
you get overtly political, organized groups.
[Blight] This is the one period in American history
when overt uses of terrorist violence
became all but a normal part of political life.
The Klan and its many imitators
became the violent arm of a political counter-revolution against Reconstruction.
[Stevenson] Black people start finding themselves
threatened and menaced by mobs.
They were pulled out of jails,
they would be targeted if they asked for fair treatment,
if they tried to vote, if they tried to organize,
if they tried to create political power.
They were burned, they were beaten, they were tortured, they were drowned.
They were hanged.
Let's call it what it was. It was homegrown American terrorism.
[shouting]
[Muhammad] The worst political massacre to occur in the United States
was in Colfax, Louisiana
as a result of a gubernatorial election.
African Americans who had been recognized as having militia rights
gathered to protect the newly seated government
and were massacred in cold blood.
[shouting and screaming]
Estimated numbers run as high as 200 people.
[man] "They were shot down without mercy."
"Many were shot in the back of the head and neck."
"The face of one was completely flattened by blows from a gun."
"Another had been cut across the stomach with a knife after being shot."
[Muhammad] It wasn't just the Colfax Massacre.
Time after time after time,
white Southerners would reverse those gains
made by the formerly enslaved.
We see the high-water mark
of Black electoral participation begin to subside.
By 1901, there was not a single Black person
serving in national office representing the South.
[poignant music throughout]
Lynching became the tool of enforcement
for making sure that the 14th Amendment would never be realized.
Between the 1890s and the 1950s,
more than 4,000 documented lynchings occurred all over the country
from Illinois to Mississippi and in between.
And those lynchings were fundamentally based on the notion
that Black people weren't just inferior, that they were born criminals.
Sometimes in the fight for change we need witnesses.
Ida B. Wells is one of the most forceful witnesses after Reconstruction
to write about what was really happening on the ground in the South.
As a Black woman, no one gives her this authority,
but she takes it upon herself to be her generation's truth-teller.
[Ifill] This is one of those extraordinary stories of
what people could make of themselves.
She was an investigative journalist, a civil rights advocate and activist
and early founder of the NAACP.
She was a fierce woman,
and she had an unrelenting sense of justice.
[Muhammad] What really brought her to national infamy
was the loss of three friends in Memphis.
These three men owned a local grocery store.
They were so successful that they were a threat to white business owners
and they were killed by a white mob.
[as Wells] "It is said that Tom Moss begged for his life
for the sake of his wife and child
and unborn baby."
"When asked if he had anything to say, told them to, 'Tell my people to go West,
there is no justice for them here.'"
"Everybody in town knew and loved Tommy."
"He owned his little home, saved his money,
and went into the grocery with the same ambition
that a young white man would've had."
"He believed, with me, that we should defend the cause of right
and fight wrong wherever we saw it."
"Somebody must show that the Afro-American race
is more sinned against than sinning,
and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so."
She was the first person to begin to really count and document
and enumerate the number of lynchings.
[Stevenson] Ida B. Wells was encouraging Black people
to recognize that they're going to have to fight,
that they'll have to push back against this tyranny.
They're going to have to speak more critically
of our government's failure to protect us.
[as Wells] "Only under the Stars and Stripes
is the human holocaust possible."
"Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual,
so gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense."
[Muhammad] Lynchings became massive spectacles
where children were let out of school,
photographs were often taken and published as postcards.
One postcard famously said, "I attended this Negro barbecue."
[Stevenson] It wasn't just the Ku Klux Klan,
these were not people wearing robes.
These were bankers, and teachers, and doctors, and law enforcement officers
that were perpetrating these acts of violence with complete impunity.
[Ifill] This racial terrorism, this violence, it's a way of saying,
"Pay no attention to what the 14th Amendment says."
"I know it says you're entitled to equal protection of laws."
"I know the 14th Amendment says that you're full citizens,
but here's who controls the law in this county,
in this town, in this state."
[Muhammad] Ida B. Wells was set upon herself
by a mob that literally burned down her printing press.
She was threatened and eventually fled Memphis
because she could not stay there for fear of her life.
This violence had huge implications for American society.
First of all, the demographic geography of this nation
was shaped by this racial terrorism.
The Black people in Cleveland, and Chicago and Los Angeles and Oakland.
Six million Black people went to those communities
as refugees and exiles from terror.
[Muhammad] Ida B. Wells landed in Chicago in the early 20th Century
to help Black Southerners who were arriving in the city
to adjust to their new conditions.
If we look at the stories of those who left the terrors of the South
for the opportunities of the promised land of the North,
what they often found were a lot of empty promises.
"The black shadow of lawlessness in the form of lynching
is spreading its wings over the whole country."
Now, let me be clear about what those empty promises were.
In 1919, in Ida's new hometown of Chicago,
days of violence against Black Chicagoans leaves nearly 40 people dead,
hundreds injured, and over a thousand homeless.
The Resistance is no longer a Southern problem.
It's now an American problem.
[gunshots]
Hostility develops. Blacks learn a bitter lesson:
that Northern violence isn't any different from Southern violence.
You gold-teeth-gold-chain-wearin',
fried-chicken-and-biscuit-eatin', monkey, ape, baboon,
big thigh, fast-runnin', high-jumpin', spear-chuckin',
360-degree-basketball-dunkin' titsun, spade, moulinyan.
Take your fuckin' pizza-pizza and go the fuck back to Africa.
[shouting]
[crowd chants] You will not replace us!
[horn blares]
[Muhammad] Ida B. Wells would go on to take her anti-lynching campaign
to the international court of opinion,
traveling to various places in Europe,
describing racism and lynching as an abomination
for a so-called civilized nation.
It's astonishing to me that there has not been a movie about this woman's life.
Truly one of the extraordinary women in our country's history.
There's a reason Ida B. Wells hasn't gotten her Oscar-winning biopic yet,
and why she didn't win the Pulitzer Prize until 2020,
eighty-nine years after she died.
It's the same reason you might not be so familiar with the 14th Amendment.
Because the former Confederacy
got the final cut on the movie of the Civil War.
In this new story, the South was a perfect society,
victimized by the North, and unjustly destroyed.
This myth, called the Lost Cause, says that slavery wasn't that bad.
Therefore, we never needed the 14th.
Sometimes making up a new story
is easier than confronting the harsh realities of the past.
Reconstruction less failed than it was actually defeated.
It starts what we call the Lost Cause mythology
that becomes very important after the Civil War.
The idea that the South had fought this noble battle,
you know, that permeated white society.
[Blight] What the Lost Cause ideology became
was more of a victory narrative.
What they came to celebrate in the South was the victory over Reconstruction.
[Stevenson] And we saw that as the iconography of the Confederacy
was restored in the American South with monuments and memorials.
The raising of these huge, pharaonic monuments…
…is really a kind of social victory lap,
as symbols that this is what the South is.
These are our gods.
My orders from General Lee
is to hold the Mason-Dixon line,
and no Yankees are crossing it.
General Lee?
Why, the war between the states ended almost 90 years ago.
I'm no clock-watcher,
and until I hears from General Lee official,
I'ma blasting any Yankee that sets foot on Southern soil,
so scram, Yankee!
[gunshot]
[Blight] By the 20th century, the medium of film is extremely important.
The white supremacist epic Birth of a Nation
and one of the most popular films of all time, Gone With the Wind,
became highly popular visions
of the meaning of the Civil War and Reconstruction,
not just for Southerners, but for a lot of Northerners as well.
[Stevenson] Films like Birth of a Nation
were trying to tell a new story about the valor and nobility
of the effort to preserve slavery,
of the Confederacy,
to reinforce this idea that the South never did anything wrong.
[Muhammad] The actual rewriting of history
was another big part of the story or narrative of Black inferiority.
There's a mythology of Reconstruction
that it was the lowest point in the history of American democracy.
And the reason was that African Americans were given power,
the right to vote and hold office,
and therefore an orgy of corruption and misgovernment followed…
…from which eventually the South was rescued by the Klan.
[sinister music playing]
[bleating]
[Stevenson] When that film was screened at the White House,
Woodrow Wilson gave an American stamp of approval
to this new world order where there would be violence and terror.
[woman] "The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct
of self-preservation
to rid themselves of the burden of the votes of ignorant Negroes."
"Negro rule was finally put an end to in the South
and the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites,
the responsible class, established."
[narrator] Once Birth of a Nation premieres,
the KKK explodes all across America,
growing larger than ever.
Having these images seared in people's minds
through this new popular medium
not only reinforces white supremacy,
but also helps to ignite a new type of racial vengeance.
-[gunshots] -[screaming]
[poignant music]
[Muhammad] In every way imaginable,
writers and journalists and scientists set out to prove
that Black people were inferior and a dangerous threat to civilization.
It has allowed white people, with scarcely any pang of conscience whatever,
to create in every generation only the Negro they wish to see.
Yes, ma'am.
[man] Who was that lady I saw you with this afternoon?
That was no lady. That was my wife.
[laughter]
[Blight] The Old South in the Lost Cause ideology
became a kind of cultural escape
of a sentimentalized Old South
that had been an ordered civilization
where Black people
were by and large a contented people,
who had found their place in the order of things.
[Epps] That was the beginning of the retelling of the Civil War Story.
[poignant music]
[man] Would you paint a picture of what it was like
on the plantation in your early days?
[woman] It was a lovely, happy time.
Everyone was happy.
We never heard of all these things that we hear about today.
And then it's no disgrace to say they're like children--
When we say that,
it's because they are like happy children.
There were always dissenters
to this sentimentalized Lost Cause vision about the war,
but, by and large, they weren't winning the cultural battle,
the literary battle for the hearts and minds of the American imagination.
[brass fanfare]
[man] There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields
called the Old South.
[banjo plays]
Here in this pretty world,
gallantry took its last bow.
[sweeping waltz playing]
Here was the last ever to be seen of knights and their ladies fair,
of master and slave.
Look for it only in books…
[dramatic orchestral music]
…for it is no more than a dream remembered.
A civilization…
gone with the wind.
[orchestral music builds and fades]
[Blight] These stories seeped into the American mind.
They could escape into this ordered, older civilization
before the war.
If they were anxious or offended
or fearful of all the new immigrants coming to America,
and all the growing big cities,
and all the industrialization that seemed to be out of control.
[man] On the plantation outside Charleston
where his family has lived for eight generations,
Norwood Hastie was asked if he thinks slavery was immoral.
No, no, I don't because--
Because, uh, when a slave came from Africa,
he couldn't speak the language.
He was totally untrained to do any job at all
that would fit in the civilization.
Someone had to take care of him.
So, I think slavery
just had to be in those early days,
but customs die awful hard.
It takes… takes a long time
and everyone knew years ago
that the Negro would have to be given equality.
But in the South, white people's attitudes will change in time.
I'm a lot more liberal than I was five years ago,
and I know I'll be a lot more liberal five years from now,
and I think almost everyone else is in that category.
[man] What has tended to make you more liberal?
The realization that the Negro
is a human being like anyone else.
[man] Mr. Hastie, what did you think we were
before you began to think of us as human beings?
Well, in a way…
we thought of you almost as a very superior pet.
I was born in 1950 in the South.
This is the period of high segregation.
[atmospheric music playing]
We were in an environment that was almost completely
shaped by this ideology of the Lost Cause,
of the idea that the Confederacy had been this high-water mark in American history
and that we had been falling off ever since then.
When you've grown up with that, it's just all-encompassing.
You know, your vision of what America is,
it turns out to be a vision of white supremacy,
and you don't even really know it.
[hip hop music]
In 1861,
South Carolina was the first state to stand up for its own rights.
The history of that flag has so much to do
with the Southern heritage.
Not slavery.
I'm here to defend my heritage,
my heritage is not that of slavery. My family never owned slaves.
I don't have any slaves.
It represents slavery. No matter how much they say it doesn't, it does.
That flag does not deserve to fly in South Carolina.
We want it down because we think it's disrespectful to us.
We come to show our support
to keep our history and our heritage the way it is,
because it is what made America.
It sanitizes the Confederacy and the Confederate--
The reason the Confederacy existed was to protect slavery.
We're taking pride in our heritage and honoring our ancestors.
It's about heritage, and it's about pride.
Here it's our heritage. It's who we are.
[man] This is everybody's heritage.
People that's saying, "Oh well, it's my flag. It's my heritage."
Your heritage is slavery, oppression, and KKK terrorism,
and that's what that flag stands for.
[man] This is part of who we are.
The problems in South Carolina, throughout the world
are not because of a movie or symbol, it's because of what's in people's heart.
How do you go back and reconstruct America?
Mr. Speaker,
I come today to give you a perspective that you may not have heard.
As a pastor of a church,
of a congregation in Charleston County, Mount Horr AME Church,
I listened to the stories and the pains
of the people who feel so offended by the fact that a flag
that has been used as a symbol to brutalize
demoralize and humiliate them
still flies in our state capitol.
Let us be the shining example to this great state,
to all of the people that we represent,
that for maybe the first time in our great history,
we are willing not to do what is in our own self-interest,
but to do what is for the best of all of South Carolina,
and I say to you again today this… [sound fades]
[Blight] In April of 2015,
I was at a conference in Charleston, South Carolina.
A remarkable conference all about the ending of the Civil War.
But the principal speaker of the day was the Reverend Clementa Pinckney.
[Pinckney] I stand with mixed emotions, with joy, but also, as a man of God,
with sadness, knowing that so many died for the freedom of others.
[Blight] Pinckney argued, as a preacher would,
that since the Civil War
we had, to some degree, experienced a redemption.
He even honored Confederate veterans.
His "fellow South Carolinians," he said.
We sang "America the Beautiful,"
and I actually held a program with Reverend Pinckney.
We sang from the same printed lyrics.
One of the most remarkable public history events
I had ever participated in.
The problem, of course, came two months later.
[echoing boom]
[choir sings] ♪ America ♪
♪ America ♪
[news anchor] …reporting a shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.
[reports continue and overlap]
[all sounds end abruptly]
That was Clementa Pinckney.
♪ God shed his grace on thee ♪
In 1961,
the state of South Carolina raised a Confederate flag
over the dome of their capital,
and they wrote into the law that the flag couldn't be lowered for any reason
without approval from the State House.
Well, that's where the flag was
when, in 2015, a white supremacist named Dylan Roof
entered a historically Black church, Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston,
and murdered nine Black parishioners during a prayer meeting.
[reporter] One of the deadliest attacks against a Black church in US history.
One of the victims is the pastor of the church,
41-year-old Senator Clementa Pinckney.
[man] Senator Pinckney was the moral conscience
of the General Assembly.
[Newsome] When it came time to bury the pastor of Mother Emanuel,
his casket was processed through the streets,
and the state of South Carolina lowered the American flag,
but because of this law that they had written,
the Confederate flag stayed at the top.
It sent a clear message
that even though the South had lost the Civil War,
white supremacy reigned above every other form of power.
I have a deep personal connection
to the history of slavery in South Carolina.
My ancestors were enslaved in South Carolina,
I've had relatives tell me about their experiences with the Klan.
I felt very strongly that a statement had to be made.
-[man 1] Ma'am! -[man 2] Ma'am, get off the pole.
-[man 2] Come down off the pole. -[man 1] Ma'am, come down off the pole.
[horns beep]
[man 1] Ma'am! Ma'am!
You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence.
This flag comes down today.
[man] Get off the pole.
[Newsome] Of course, I knew that I was going to be arrested,
but we could not carry on like this anymore.
[dramatic pulsing music plays]
[Blight] There's nothing automatic about progress.
There is nothing inevitable about progress.
Progress comes because people make decisions and people make choices.
It seems to me that Pinckney and his parishioners
died in a horrific sacrifice,
perhaps to force the rest of the country
to finally have a reckoning,
if we can,
with the meaning of the Confederacy, and the meaning of the Civil War,
and the meaning of emancipation and the meaning of the 14th Amendment
in our ever-recurring present.
[crowd chatter]
[shouting]
[clamoring]
[applause and cheering]
[crowd chatter]
[cheering]
[poignant music playing]
[cheering intensifies]
[music swelling]
[cheering continues]
[man] These monuments celebrate a fictional Confederacy,
ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement,
ignoring the terror that it actually stood for.
We cannot be afraid of the truth.
[narrator] Progress does not come without resistance.
It is not a straight line.
It's messy. It's urgent.
Even people who are sympathetic to the cause sometimes say,
"Just wait, there are bigger issues,"
or, "That's too much, too fast."
But for the people who are suffering,
justice cannot wait.
[Martin Luther King Jr.] We'll be able to join hands and sing
in the words of the old Negro spiritual,
"Free at last, free at last, Thank God Almighty, we are free at--"
[gunshots]
We are in a state of emergency.
[protesters] No justice, no peace!
Hands up, don't shoot!
[man] America, you have proven yourself for 435 years now
to have no respect for a Black life.
[protesters] Black lives matter!
[chanting]
[woman] This is a coordinated activity happening across this nation.
Enough is enough.
[shouting]
It's time for us to stand up and say, "Get your knee off our necks!"
-[man] What? -[crowd] I can't breathe.
[woman] We're gonna honor the fact that I have to fight
through all these people to say my life matters!
They are lucky that what Black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.
Let's get Gone With the Wind.
-Can we get Gone With the Wind back? -[cheering]
[hip hop music plays throughout]