[reporter] Officer Darren Wilson will not have charges brought against him
in the shooting death of Michael Brown.
The crowds have been growing.
The intensity has been growing as well.
It has remained peaceful, though,
and police hope that continues.
[woman] Tuesday was the first day I was tear-gassed.
It's not the last,
but the first day I was tear-gassed in Ferguson.
[man] You were in the protest overnight. Tell us what you saw.
Well, I certainly saw a lot of things.
I think mostly I saw a community in profound grief
and utter anguish.
[man] Hands up! Don't shoot!
The call happening on the streets was "Hands up, don't shoot,"
because we were being told that Michael Brown had his hands up in the air
when Darren Wilson shot him.
What we see is a systemic injustice.
Dr. King told another newsman that riots are the language of the unheard.
I'm tired of it. I'm fed up.
[horn beeps]
[siren wails in distance]
[protesters] Hands up! Don't shoot!
[chanting] Black Lives Matter!
[Cunningham] We will take the protesting that is happening now,
modeled after the protests of the past,
and call it disorderly, impatient,
without remembering exactly where we got our blueprint.
Dr. King wasn't talking about having more than anybody else.
He was talking about us having what we are finally owed.
We deserve all those inalienable rights you promised us.
Whenever marginalized people have the audacity
to fight simply for what is fair,
we are told to wait.
Wait, slow down.
And I find myself asking people,
"How do you want us to stand up for our rights?"
You don't want us to protest in our own streets.
You don't want us to interrupt football games.
You don't want us to block street traffic.
You don't want us to block highways.
You don't want us to stand up for our rights,
and you don't want us to kneel for our rights either.
There is literally no acceptable protest
if all you are determined to do is always tell me to wait.
["Speak Ez" by Matt Large playing]
In 1863, President Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation,
freeing all enslaved people in the South.
In 1868, the 14th Amendment is ratified.
All citizens of America are now equal under the law.
So, technically, Black Americans are now full citizens.
But that's not actually what happens.
[whistle blows]
[narrator] As late as the 1950s, every time Black Americans
push and demand their rights under Fourteen for due process,
for equal protection, really any progress,
they're told to wait.
Well, wait until when?
If someone makes you a promise
and 100 years later they still haven't kept it…
that could get a little frustrating.
We want all of our rights.
We want them here and we want them now.
[applause]
[narrator] So, how did we get here? Here's what happened.
Southern governments were trying to figure out
how to get around the 14th Amendment,
and the most successful attempt was to take the idea of equal protection
and twist it into separate but equal.
It's like, "Okay, we'll be equal but we'll just be separated,"
and instead of upholding the words of the 14th Amendment,
the Supreme Court agrees with the Southern governments.
And that's how we get the Jim Crow era.
[woman] There is no such thing as "separate and equal."
There never was "separate and equal,"
this is the fiction that allowed white Southerners
to impose a rigid racial caste system, a form of legal apartheid.
Marginalized Black people were living almost as they did as slaves.
Couldn't eat in the same restaurants. Couldn't go to the same movies.
Hotels, trains, public waiting spaces.
[woman] A lot of the good jobs were in the factories.
Blacks couldn't work there, they were segregated.
[man] Black people suffered through economic inequality,
through limited opportunities
to secure the jobs that will help them survive and thrive.
[Stevenson] Southerners are trying to restore
the optics and the dynamics of enslavement.
They're reinforcing the narrative of racial difference.
There's a lot of white people here that say this,
that even the dumbest farmer in the world
knows that if he has white chickens and black chickens,
the black chickens do better if they're kept in one yard,
and the white ones do better if kept in a separate yard.
They do better under those conditions.
[inhales, then exhales deeply]
We know signs of Jim Crow,
the water fountains, the bathrooms, the pools,
but consequences could be seen everywhere in America.
I don't feel that they should be oppressed,
but I moved here--
One of the main reasons was because it was a white community.
Decades with constant threat of violence,
with crumbling schools,
fewer job opportunities, fewer loans and fewer homes
meant African Americans could not build the intergenerational wealth needed
to climb the economic ladder.
This way of life is a part of us.
The more they try to force us into doing something
then the worse the reaction will be.
So, segregation was not just about water fountains.
It was a cage, and white America had no intention of handing over the key.
[woman] The Fourteenth Amendment had been shattered, destroyed.
The idea that we were all citizens,
that we were all equal in front of the law,
took a back seat to basically reflect the idea that African Americans
have no right to expect equal treatment.
[woman] Black Americans are disappointed
with the failure of the promise of the 14th Amendment
[Stevenson] The notion of equality, the notion of 14th Amendment rights
never really took shape.
We needed to put some teeth in the 14th Amendment.
[reporter] Thurgood Marshall, great grandson of a slave,
the first Negro to serve on the United States Supreme Court,
puts on his robes with the assistance of his wife.
[Jones] Marshall is bad,
and he is confident. He is cocky.
Extraordinary man.
"The 14th Amendment and it's grand ideal of equality under the law
have meant no more than succeeding generations
were willing for them to mean."
"What is essential now is a new kind of activism,
an activism in the pursuit of justice."
[narrator] Thurgood Marshall comes from a segregated state,
yet he eventually makes history
as the first Black Justice to join the Supreme Court.
His journey relies in part on one of the legacies of Reconstruction
and the 14th Amendment…
Black colleges.
[Ifill] He's raised in West Baltimore,
but he cannot apply to the University of Maryland Law School
because it doesn't accept Black students.
That's the reason that Marshall ends up at Howard Law School.
Vice Dean of Howard Law School is a man named Charles Hamilton Houston,
probably the most brilliant lawyer of the 20th century.
He begins to mentor and develop a group of young African American lawyers.
He indoctrinates them into the idea,
"Your job as a lawyer, as a young Black lawyer,
is to seek justice."
Houston and Marshall set about
knocking out the foundation of "separate but equal,"
winning case after case in the United States Supreme Court.
They bring a challenge to segregation at University of Missouri Law School,
and they win that case.
And they continue to work through the system,
challenging segregated education in higher education,
graduate schools, the School of Pharmacy, Law School.
But all along, they have their mind's eye
on challenging segregation in K-12 education.
[reporter] This is Larry. This is Larry's school.
Ample buildings, ample grounds…
And this is Tad. He lives in Clarksdale, too.
This is Tad's school.
It is seriously overcrowded, dilapidated.
One of the most significant barriers to challenging segregation
was this idea that there was really no injury to it
other than what Black people felt.
[Ifill] There were many who carried on this fiction
that Black people want to be with Black people
and we want to be with our people,
and as long as it's equal, what's the harm?
What's the problem with us being segregated?
[man] Well, segregation was and is
a way in which a society tells a…
a group of human beings that they are inferior.
[narrator] In order to prove to the Supreme Court
that separate can never be equal,
Thurgood Marshall has to show the emotional weight of segregation.
He turns to the doll test.
In the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark
showed children two identical dolls,
except one is white and one is Black.
They ask a simple question,
"Which doll is bad? Which is nice?"
Most children, Black and white,
say the white doll is nice and the Black doll is bad.
This is really how kids feel.
This is how quickly and deeply segregation ingrains racism
into the minds of children.
These children saw themselves as inferior.
They accepted the inferiority as part of reality.
It made me, even as a scientist…
…upset.
Thurgood Marshall, he argued that,
in order to show the violation of the Fourteenth Amendment,
you needed this evidence of the damaging effects of segregation.
[Ifill] Kenneth and Mamie Clark,
they've shown segregation sends a message of inferiority.
Black schoolchildren
essentially internalize the message of white supremacy.
Marshall, and now his team, is ready to bring the case
challenging segregation in K-12 education.
"Any segregation which is for the purpose of setting up either class
or caste legislation
is in and of itself a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment."
Now the Court is prepared to look at the social meaning of statutes
that require Blacks and whites to go to different schools.
What does it mean to have Black schools?
What does it mean to have white schools?
What message does that send?
[Crenshaw] Segregation impacted the hearts and minds
of Black schoolchildren,
and undermined their ability to participate in a democracy.
[Ifill] If Dred Scott
is one of the most monumental decisions in the history of the Supreme Court,
the only one more monumental perhaps
is Brown versus Board of Education.
[woman] "Today, education is perhaps the most important function
of state and local governments."
"It is the very foundation of good citizenship."
"Such an opportunity is a right,
which must be made available to all on equal terms."
"We conclude that in the field of public education,
the doctrine of separate but equal has no place."
"Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
That decision begins the tumble of legal segregation in this country.
Affirming democracy, affirming citizenship,
Brown versus Board of Education is a revolution
on the part of Black lawyers, mainly.
They believed that inside the law is always the possibility
to recapture what equal protection and citizenship actually meant.
[Stevenson] The Supreme Court begins to recognize
that there is something fundamentally at odds
between the language of the 14th Amendment and what they're seeing in our nation.
There was a lot to celebrate, but there was a lot to worry about,
and the worry turned out to be accurate.
After the Brown decision, the South says, "Never."
[Ifill] The reaction to Brown was Massive Resistance.
That's not me saying it, that's actually what it was called, "Massive Resistance."
You are the heart and inflexible core of the resistance.
They must be reckoned with.
[Ifill] This was an astonishing moment in this country.
People should remember that Prince Edward County, Virginia
closed the public schools for five years
rather than integrate.
We've got this Supreme Court decision
and we have jurisdictions that are defying the decision at every turn.
[narrator] So what do you do when even a Supreme Court decision
doesn't give you the change you're owed?
Wait?
Dream?
Or do you roll up your sleeves and claim your rights,
even if it could cost you your life?
[shouting and chanting]
[Ifill] The Brown case, that's a powerful articulation to people
that they should fight.
Ordinary people on the ground decide to play a role.
This very powerful grassroots movement is unfolding.
Brown is decided in 1954.
A year later, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy
is killed by grown white men
for, they claim, whistling at a white woman.
Over 10,000 people walk past his casket,
which his mother left open
so that, she said, "the public can see what they did to my son."
I'm Rosa Parks. I live in Montgomery, Alabama.
In 1955, Rosa Parks decides that she's not going to give up her seat on that bus,
and we enter the Civil Rights Movement.
This has not been an easy road by the time we get to the early 1960s,
and there needs to be a breakthrough.
[pounding drum beat]
[cymbal crash]
We all know who Rosa Parks is. She's a hero.
She refuses to go to the back of the bus,
Outkast names a song after her.
I counted the "uh-huhs" and the "yeah, yeahs"
and the rest was history, right?
I wouldn't be here if that was the whole story.
[steady drum beat]
Now she does get on a bus and the bus driver of said bus
does ask her to move to the back of it.
He says, "This is Alabama, ma'am."
"Down here we got them laws, we callin' them Jim Crow."
She says, "Well, I've had enough. I won't get up. Hell, no."
And that simple seismic act lights the match.
All in favor let it be known by standing on your feet.
[cheering]
[man] They galvanize the Black residents of Montgomery
and the momentum grows to jettison Jim Crow.
Her and her husband are outcasted. They can't find employment.
She moves to Detroit, becomes a secretary
and she's buried under a stack of unjust policies.
She says, "I will topple these."
"If our souls are free, then so shall our bodies be."
She goes back to acting with the same passion
that kept her from the back of the bus and, no question,
leaves an everlasting impression to give back to us.
[cheering]
She never asked us to follow her light.
All she ever asked is that we uphold what is right.
[man] "Segregation has wreaked havoc with the Negro."
"It's sometimes difficult to determine which are the deepest,
the physical wounds or the psychological wounds."
"Only a Negro can understand the social leprosy
that segregation inflicts upon him."
"Every confrontation with the restrictions imposed
is another emotional battle in a never-ending war."
"We will continue to insist that right be done
because both God's will and the heritage of our nation
speak through our echoing demands."
♪ Oh, well, a young man ♪
♪ Ain't nothing in this world these days ♪
After emerging as a leader of the Montgomery bus boycott,
Martin Luther King, Jr. launches into the spotlight
at only 26 years old.
But even at a young age, Dr. King devotes himself to the cause.
Give these people what we owe them,
and what their God-given rights and their Constitutional rights demand.
[narrator] And in 1963, his devotion is put to the test,
because now he has to change the mind of a president.
[male voice] Good evening, Senator John F. Kennedy.
I'm not satisfied until every American
enjoys his full Constitutional rights.
I think we can do better.
[man] When John Kennedy was running for president in 1960,
Black people started flocking to him as their candidate
because he had shown compassion for the Civil Rights Movement.
When the election came around,
they turned out for him in huge numbers.
But very quickly after he got into office,
Kennedy started backpedaling.
[Kennedy] The Soviet Union made a breakthrough in outer space,
but that made the world wonder whether we were first in Science.
Anyone reading the paper and any citizen of the United States
must come to the conclusion
that the United States no longer carries the same image
as it carried a decade or two decades ago.
John Kennedy was not that interested in what was going on
with the Civil Rights Movement.
The question before us all is can freedom in the next generation conquer,
or are the Communists going to be successful?
That's the great issue.
[man] Kennedy mostly campaigned on the Cold War.
He saw the Civil Rights Movement as sort of an impediment
to the US conducting the Cold War,
so, for the first two years of the administration, little happened.
[Levingston] The Blacks believed that they got President Kennedy elected,
and they wanted Kennedy to pay back the debt.
I think the time has come for the President of the United States
to sign an executive order
outlawing segregation or declaring it unconstitutional
on the basis of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
[cheering]
More than ten years after Brown was decided,
most Black school children who were segregated in the time of Brown
were still going to single race schools.
So, it became apparent that this was an ongoing struggle.
[Carson] As the nation was approaching 1963,
it occurred to many people that this is an entire century
since Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
[Levingston] Martin Luther King wanted President Kennedy
to issue a second Emancipation Proclamation,
which would outlaw segregation throughout the nation.
He could, with a simple stroke of a pen,
make up for the denial of 14th Amendment protections and rights.
[Carson] He's playing that role
that Frederick Douglass played in the 19th century.
We have Martin Luther King saying,
"You are not living up to your highest ideals."
I must say that President Kennedy hadn't done enough
and we must remind him that we elected him.
[Stevenson] And what Dr. King wanted to do was to remind Americans
that we've said these things before and we failed,
and so now it's time to say these things again and succeed.
[narrator] In 1962, MLK delivers a draft of the second Emancipation Proclamation
for the President's signature.
JFK refuses to sign it.
[Cunningham] In many ways, that felt like a step far for him.
He wasn't necessarily trying to be Lincoln.
There's an urge to wait,
to slow things down in terms of this struggle for change.
King is convinced that waiting is dangerous.
King has seen and felt the emotional and psychological damage of segregation.
Economic inequality.
Limited opportunities.
Every day that he delays,
every day that civil rights activists delay,
is a day that Black people suffer.
[shouting]
[man] Why, after segregation is ruled illegal, does it continue?
Why can't racist white people let it go? There must be something else here.
It's the way in which some white people see Black people at this time,
viewing them as a social blemish or stain.
Let me explain in terms of something called the one-drop rule.
In the social and even legal system of Jim Crow,
one drop of Black blood made a person Black.
What does that mean?
It means white children grow up thinking that if they touch a Black person,
it'll rub off on them.
It means white folks would rather throw acid in a pool
than let Black children swim in it.
Think about that. They'd rather throw in a real contaminant
rather than coexist with the imaginary one.
That's what one-drop means.
At the heart of it, it means Blackness is a contaminant.
Of course white folks resist integration, they're terrified of being infected.
That's the thing about prejudice.
It would have us believe something completely phony,
that being Black is a disease,
in order to blind us to the real disease
our society has been suffering for far too long…
Racism.
The real disease is racism.
What?
One of the faces of this resistance to integration
is Alabama Governor George Wallace.
He is willing to attack the 14th Amendment to preserve white supremacy.
[reporter] Governor Wallace…
[cheering]
…rising in salute.
[man] George Wallace was a classic Alabama populist,
which meant that he was in favor of the little guy
as long as the little guy was white.
The South was set upon
by the vulturous carpetbagger and federal troops,
so that the infamous, illegal 14th Amendment might be passed.
[Epps] I think it's important to remember that, in general,
the South took a certain approach toward the 14th Amendment
which I can summarizes as follows,
"The federal government can't tell states what to do."
And I heard that argument made dozens of times growing up.
The 14th Amendment was a fraud. It wasn't validly adopted.
States don't have to observe it.
And I say, segregation now,
segregation tomorrow,
and segregation forever!
[cheering]
[Epps] These desegregation orders are in violation of states' rights.
And he drew a line.
There was going to be no compliance
with federal orders to desegregate school systems.
He came in saying that if anyone Black wanted to attend a university in Alabama,
he would stand in the schoolhouse door and block them.
[reporter] Every day, thousands of Negroes would queue to register to vote.
King's organizers battled against continuous white hostility.
What you're trying to do is intimidate these people
and by making them stand in the rain, keep them from registering to vote.
And we will register to vote
because as citizens of these United States,
we have the right to do it.
[clamoring]
[Berry] Nonviolent behavior creates disruption
because when you are attacked by someone, you take the blows.
You plan things so that people will want to attack you.
-[man] Now, get outta here. -[shouting]
The strength of nonviolence comes from the confrontation with injustice.
[Berry] It heightens the contradiction.
What you're doing is trying to make change,
and what they're doing is trying to resist change.
[Cunningham] Dr. King talked a lot about the fact that a lot of people
wanted him to restore order, because civil disobedience is chaotic,
but we actually have to create a crisis,
otherwise folks with privilege will just go on about their business
and act as though there is no injustice in the world.
[man] There are three ways to deal with injustice.
One is to accept it slavishly,
or one can resist it with arms,
or one can use nonviolence.
Oh, my goodness.
[laughs]
Bayard Rustin was a man of many parts.
[Bonner] King is forming this coalition.
He's connecting with other activists like Bayard Rustin.
[Berry] Bayard had been a pacifist
and he was one of the leading intellectuals
of that period of the Civil Rights Movement.
One depends upon his body and his spirit.
He puts that in the breach when everything else fails.
[man] You've probably never heard of Bayard Rustin.
Not only did Rustin work with MLK,
he actually introduced the idea of nonviolent resistance to Dr. King.
So why don't we know his name?
Well, because he was an openly gay man
at a time when being gay was considered a mental disorder and a crime.
He was pushed to the fringes of a movement that he devoted his whole life to.
Bayard once said, "We need in every community
a group of angelic troublemakers."
"Our only weapon is our bodies
and we have to tuck them in places so wheels don't turn."
Bayard Rustin was an angelic troublemaker.
[Ifill] 1963 is a really important year,
for the whole country and for the whole world.
King, at this point, is starting to receive a lot of resistance,
that he is pushing too far, that he's going too fast.
So that idea that he's pushing too far and going too fast
but it's 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation,
is kind of a disorienting juxtaposition for him.
[Carson] In order to get the movement on the right track,
he needs to get action on the part of the federal government.
He wants to create a situation that Kennedy has to respond to.
He wants to create a crisis
by going to the place where segregation is strongest.
[fanfare]
The City of Birmingham works for its citizens in many ways.
None outrank the Birmingham Police Department.
Bull Connor's police force had a reputation for being very brutal.
[man] The dog will not stop until his duty and his command is finished.
[woman] I was dragged off to jail in August.
My dress was torn because they handled me so roughly.
[Foner] Birmingham was called the Johannesburg of America.
You've got to keep the white and the Black separate!
Let the law enforcement agencies, that's what you got them hired for.
[Foner] Black people could not get jobs in downtown stores.
Black people were subject to violence very frequently.
Life in Birmingham, as far as I'm concerned, is hell.
[Bonner] Birmingham is called "Bombing-ham"
because there are so many dynamite attacks on Black families,
on Black activists,
on any Black person who white Southerners think is stepping out of line.
[woman] "Some of my earliest childhood memories
are the sounds of dynamite exploding."
"Terrorism is a part of our history."
"It is not something that is alien."
Bull Connor…
uh, would often get on the radio and make statements like,
uh, "Niggers have moved into a white neighborhood."
"We'd better expect some bloodshed tonight."
And sure enough, there would be bloodshed.
[man] Communities of color are all too familiar with domestic terrorism.
Historically, when we pressed for change,
violence would follow.
Nowhere was that clearer than "Bombing-ham."
The KKK would bomb homes and churches
to terrorize Black people for holding civil rights meetings.
And no government agency,
not the police, not the Army, not the National Guard, stopped them.
Nothing emboldens terrorists more
than a legal system that willfully ignores their existence.
[as Dr. King] "Birmingham is a symbol of hardcore resistance to integration."
"If we can get a breakthrough in Birmingham,
and really break down the walls of segregation,
it will demonstrate to the whole South
it can no longer resist integration."
[crowd sings]
Keep moving.
[Levingston] During the protests in Birmingham,
Bull Connor was just arresting people, throwing them in jail,
but the protests were not garnering the publicity that was necessary
to send the message back to John Kennedy.
[Carson] Almost out of desperation,
he makes a decision that he has to go to jail.
He leads the march,
is arrested,
and at that point he's concerned
that the Birmingham campaign might not succeed.
He reads a response to the campaign by white religious leaders,
and he's very upset by that.
He had thought that the religious leaders
would be one of the sources of support.
[woman] "We appeal to both our white and Negro citizenry
to observe the principles of law and order and common sense."
"We recognize the natural impatience
of people who feel that their hopes are slow at being realized,
but we are convinced that these demonstrations
are unwise and untimely."
The clergymen write this letter
thinking they're not going to get a big response.
But instead, they get an iconic message
demanding justice,
written from inside a jailhouse.
[as Dr. King] "My dear fellow clergymen,
while confined here in the Birmingham City Jail,
I came across your recent statement
calling my present activities unwise and untimely."
[Levingston] He began writing on pieces of toilet paper,
on the edges of newspapers.
[Berry] The jailer didn't give him a piece of stationery
to write his letter on.
[Epps] He didn't have any books to rely on. He had to rely on his memory.
"For years now, I have heard the word 'wait.'"
[rumbling]
"It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity."
"When your first name becomes 'nigger,'
your middle name becomes 'boy,' however old you are,
and your last name becomes 'John,'
and your wife and mother are never given the respected title 'Mrs,'
then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."
"This 'wait'…
…has almost always meant never."
The Negro is not able to talk in any terms
less than complete integration.
[Cunningham] This is the same letter where Dr. King talks about
the danger of the "white moderate."
He said that the white moderate
is actually more dangerous than the Ku Klux Klan-er
because it is the white moderate, again,
who wants to be the one to tell you to wait.
The gradual approach has been pretty well shelved for the time.
We're in a situation. We know it.
It came too quickly.
White liberals love the word "wait," because to say "no" makes you a racist.
To say "wait" just makes you sound patient, rational, thoughtful.
I think he is writing that letter to President Kennedy
and anyone who believes that it is morally right
to assert that people without their rights wait for them.
[man] "We think that sometime this week
we should, uh, meet with the Negro leaders,
Martin Luther King and some of these other people,
and talk to them about the steps we're trying to take."
"The trouble with King is everybody thinks he's our boy anyways."
"Everything he does, everybody says we stuck him in there,
so we ought to have him well surrounded."
"King's so hot these days that
I'd like to have some Southern Governors or Mayors or businessmen in first."
[Bonner] He's a politician,
and so he's invested in maintaining political power.
He's also the most influential of the white moderates,
and if he can be persuaded that what King is doing is right,
then King will have won an incredible victory.
King's letter is powerful.
He's demanding action,
and he's about to back up those words with a radical new strategy.
Something nobody, not even the president, can ignore.
"I was not a courageous kid. I didn't get into any fights."
"The only thing I would attack was a math problem,
so this wasn't about courage at all."
"It was about having a dream for a better day."
[Carson] At that point, there are these young teenagers
who have wanted to participate in the demonstrations.
These are children.
I think under normal circumstances
King would have said that's just too dangerous a strategy.
What if one of them is seriously injured? One of them might be killed.
But it was a measure of his desperation at that point.
He needed to gain a victory, not just for himself,
but for these young people.
The Children's Crusade started on May 2nd, 1963.
There were some kids as young as seven.
Hundreds of kids got arrested.
They were now being sent to jail in the same school buses
that dropped them off each morning.
They decided that, in spite of the danger,
they were going to participate in nonviolent resistance.
They knew what they were risking, and decided that it was worth it.
[Levingston] Children came out of the churches
and marched onto the streets, and they were joyous.
Bull Connor wasn't pleased.
[Berry] He saw the children as vermin that he wanted to get rid of.
[siren wails]
Bull Connor decided to call out the dogs and to call out the fire hoses.
[shouting and screaming]
-[sirens wail] -[shouting]
[Bonner] Teenagers and children.
Bodies bent.
Pushed down the street by the spray of a fire hose.
[Foner] Martin Luther King was a master of public relations
and he knew that white violence…
-[siren wails] -[dog barks]
…coupled with Black nonviolence…
…would force large numbers of white people in America to really look in the mirror.
This was exactly the response Martin and the others wanted to provoke.
[Foner] It shocked the world.
It just was a total embarrassment to the United States.
[Cunningham] This can't possibly be what the 14th Amendment was meant for.
This can't possibly be the American Dream.
[Stevenson] The spectacle, I think, said something really important
about who was trying to save America,
who was trying to make the 14th Amendment meaningful,
and who was standing in the way.
Front pages of newspapers around the world
with these images of police assaulting young people, children.
[Foner] It made the ideology of the Cold War look ridiculous.
We claim to be the nation of freedom against the Soviet Union,
but here we had people demanding genuine freedom,
and they were being assaulted by the police.
The person who holds in his hands
the power to fulfill the American Dream
happens to be a person who is white.
[Levingston] The Kennedy administration watched what was going on in the streets
and realized they hadn't paid enough attention
to the real racial division in America.
[Berry] There were people who got in touch with the president in the White House
to say this is outrageous.
[Levingston] Before those protests, only five percent of Americans
believed that Civil Rights was the most important domestic issue
in the United States.
After those protests, 50% of people believe that civil rights
was the most important issue.
May I just add that here's one of the great voices in America,
Dr. Martin Luther King.
[applause]
A major part of King's strategy
is the growing medium of television.
We've seen people risk their lives to publish essays,
speeches and newspapers in their fight for justice
and the challenges of getting their message out.
But now, for the first time,
Americans are getting that message immediately, in their own living rooms.
No social revolution can be neat and tidy at every point.
[narrator] They see what's happening to Black Americans on the nightly news,
and they're witnessing injustice in their own country,
and they know it has to stop,
and no one embodies that injustice more
than Alabama Governor George Wallace.
[reporter] The University of Alabama campus at Tuscaloosa
is under a tight security guard of state police.
He made a campaign promise to stand in the doorway himself
to prevent the integration of the last all-white state university.
[Levingston] There was a court order demanding that George Wallace
allow Black students to attend the University of Alabama.
George Wallace was determined to fight that.
[Carson] Wallace wants to make it clear to Kennedy and the federal government
that they are going to resist this with every means at their disposal.
So, something's gotta give.
[sirens wail]
-[man] Governor Wallace… -Just a minute.
As Governor and Chief Magistrate of the State of Alabama,
I deem it to be my solemn obligation and duty to stand before you
representing rights and sovereignty of this state and its peoples,
to hereby denounce and forbid this illegal and unwarranted action
by the central government.
[Levingston] Wallace was denying everything that America stood for.
He denied the rights of Black students to equal protection
guaranteed under the 14th Amendment
which included the ability to attend the schools of their choice.
[woman] "It was more than a hot day."
"It was dangerous day."
"No one knew for sure what might happen."
"I didn't feel I should sneak in."
"I didn't feel I should go around the back door."
"If Wallace was standing in the door,
I had every right in the world to face him and go to that school."
[Foner] Kennedy still, at this point, had not really identified himself
with the demands of the Civil Rights Movement.
[Bonner] To see a state government official
restricting Black people so actively
convinces him that the federal government has to intervene.
Kennedy, I think at that point, recognizes that Wallace has gone too far.
[reporter] The National Guard troops arrive by mid-afternoon.
[narrator] President Kennedy calls on the Alabama National Guard
to force Wallace to integrate the University of Alabama.
[reporter] Now, the General confronts the Governor
as a representative of the federal government.
[Levingston] Wallace knew he was defeated.
The federal government would prevail.
[reporter] This, then, is the moment when Governor George Wallace of Alabama
walked away from the schoolhouse door.
[Levingston] He gave up, walked away…
…and the two students were allowed to enroll.
[cameras click]
[Levingston] Kennedy decided that he needed to go on television that night.
He had an epiphany.
He realized that this was the moment that he had to act.
[man] An address by the President of the United States,
speaking live from Washington.
Good evening, my fellow citizens.
"This nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds."
"It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal."
[Carson] When I think of that speech, I think of it in terms of the way
Lincoln eventually responded to the moral issue of the Civil War.
I think that in both cases you have a president who is reluctant
to face the moral implications of what's going on,
who's finally convinced that they need to catch up with the world.
"One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves,
yet their heirs, their grandsons are not fully free."
[Kennedy] They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice.
They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression.
And this nation, for all its hopes,
will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.
My fellow Americans, this is a problem which faces us all.
That phrase, "our fellow Americans, "
that he repeats over and over and over again as if he's giving a sermon,
is exactly why King invoked the 14th Amendment in the first place.
Kennedy calls upon folks with privilege
to recognize the humanity and the citizenship
of folks with darker skins.
We have to treat them like you want to be treated.
"Who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed,
and stand in his place?"
"Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?"
Given all the things that have been happening to Black people,
it is time for you not to wait any longer.
I am therefore asking the Congress to enact legislation.
[Berry] He finally had done what Martin had asked him to do
way back on the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation
when he would not announce then a Civil Rights bill.
I think it's one of the most profound address
ever made by an American president since Lincoln.
"Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise."
[Carson] I think King must have been surprised when he heard the speech,
'cause this was something that Kennedy had been pushed to do
by the movement that was going on in the South.
I am therefore asking the Congress to enact legislation
giving all Americans the right to be served
in facilities which are open to the public.
Hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments.
This seems to me to be an elementary right.
[Berry] And his Civil Rights bill would use the 14th Amendment
to pass a law that provided for equal access to public accommodations.
I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives,
will stop and examine his conscience.
For the first time he presents the need for civil rights reform as a moral issue.
King achieved the goal
of getting the engagement of the Kennedy administration.
♪ I see the future ♪
♪ Martin Luther dreamt ♪
♪ When he was a man ♪
♪ I feel the blood my momma fought for…♪
[Carson] There's this momentum building, and King symbolizes it.
There are demonstrations in Chicago,
there are demonstrations in the San Francisco Bay Area,
there are demonstrations in New York going on.
The March on Washington was the culmination.
♪ Go tell 'em, go tell 'em ♪
[Carson] I was only 19 years old,
and decided that I wanted to be there at the march.
I had grown up in a small town in New Mexico, not very many Black people,
and then suddenly it was more Black people than I'd ever seen.
I had a real sense that this was something really special.
[Berry] Most people who've heard about the speech he gave
at the March on Washington
think that it has something to do with how his little children will grow up
and how we want everybody to be known
"not by the color of their skin, but by their character" or something,
and they've probably forgotten completely the first part of the speech.
[applause and cheering]
Five score years ago,
a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today,
signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
But, 100 years later, the Negro still is not free.
[Carson] Like many at the March,
I thought it was about just passing Kennedy's civil rights proposal.
But what King is doing is saying it's about much more than that.
[as Dr. King] "America has given the Negro people a bad check."
"A check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'"
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.
[Carson] We've been waiting for the promise
of the Emancipation Proclamation to be realized.
We're waiting for the Fourteenth Amendment to be realized.
A hundred years of patience is quite enough.
[applause]
"Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy."
[Berry] People will say, "Why can't you wait?"
Or, "Eventually, things will change."
You can't wait.
It is "the fierce urgency of now."
[applause and cheering]
Now is the time.
[Stevenson] Dr. King understood how we couldn't endure much longer,
the time for being patient and quiet was over.
Now is the time.
[cheering and applause]
"Wait" almost always means "never," almost always means "never."
That "wait" gets met with another "wait," another "wait" and another "wait,"
until you've died before you can even actually see the rights
that you have been fighting for.
-Now is the time. -[applause and cheering]
It was radical in its insistence on real change now.
"It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment."
[Crenshaw] It was the promise of equal protection under the law.
It was the promise to do what was necessary
to actually deliver
precisely the thing that the 14th Amendment
had put into play.
These were rights that already existed.
This wasn't about new asks.
This wasn't about a favor.
This was about making good on the promise
that is the foundation of the new American society.
[Cunningham] Dr. King said, you don't get to rest because I don't get to rest.
None of us goes to sleep.
None of us goes to sleep until this thing is solved.
Waiting puts my children at risk.
Waiting puts my parents at risk.
Waiting puts my community at risk.
Waiting puts my job at risk.
Waiting puts my ability to breathe the breath of life at risk.
I do not have time to wait.
[as Dr. King] "The newfound strength of the Civil Rights Movement
will not vanish or wither."
"We are ready to suffer where necessary, and even risk our lives,
to become witnesses to the truth as we see it."
"It may mean going to jail."
"It may even mean physical death."
"But if physical death is the price a man must pay to free his children
from the permanent death of the spirit,
then nothing could be more redemptive."
Martin Luther King 20 minutes ago died.
[shocked gasps]
[as Dr. King] "Negroes have learned the strength of their own power
and will unleash it again and again."
"They have left the valley of despair."
"They have found strength in struggle,
and whether they live or die,
they will never crawl nor retreat again."
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
is a powerful answer to the demand for enforcement of the 14th.
It's not the end of the struggle, but it's a key milestone
on that long march toward full citizenship.
It serves as a reminder that the time to demand justice
is always now.
We know, as Dr. King and so many others throughout history taught us,
that protest is actually what creates the pressure
so that the policy can get passed.
[cheering]
When the news stop reporting it two weeks from now,
we gotta band together.
We gotta go beyond electoral politics,
and we've gotta organize within our communities.
♪ Revolution ♪
[narrator] Because when we refuse to wait,
when we combat complacency,
look at what we can accomplish together.
♪ Where will you be for the revolution? ♪
And look who else we can inspire to demand equality for themselves.
I am for freedom and equality for everyone,
and a major oppressed group in the United States today is women.
We want to have control over our own bodies
and equal opportunity.
We want the Fourteenth Amendment to apply to women.
♪ Wake up, things might get rough ♪
♪ No need to stress Keeps you down too much ♪
♪ Wake up, I heard they found a solution ♪
♪ Where will you be for the revolution? ♪
♪ Oh, whoa ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa, whoa ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa, whoa ♪
-♪ Whoa, whoa ♪ -♪ Yeah ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa, whoa ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa, whoa ♪
♪ I'm so high up ♪
♪ So high up and I like it, hey ♪
♪ I'm so high up ♪
♪ So high up and I like it, hey ♪
♪ I am happy today ♪
♪ This not like other days ♪
♪ Somehow I feel okay ♪
♪ Whoa ♪
♪ Yeah, whoa, whoa ♪
♪ Oh, whoa ♪
♪ I'm your big brother ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa, whoa ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa ♪
♪ I'm your big brother ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa, whoa ♪
♪ Let go, life does get tough ♪
♪ No need to stress Holds you back too much ♪
♪ Let's go Heard they found the solution ♪
♪ Where will you be for the revolution? ♪
[instrumental music plays throughout]