[ocean waves crashing]
[women singing]
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES: They say our people were born on the water.
The teal eternity of the Atlantic
had severed them so completely from their home,
it was like nothing had ever existed before.
These African men and women from different nations,
all shackled together in the hull of a ship.
They were one people now.
And although they tried to break our ancestors,
to erase our identities,
we forged a new culture of our own,
giving birth to ourselves.
It didn't matter we were told
that, by virtue of our bondage, we would never be American
because it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.
♪
This is The 1619 Project.
♪
WOMAN: Uh, Dad's here. Happy Valentine's Day, Nikole.
This is a tape for Nikole.
Hello, darling. How you doing?
Excuse me while I partake of this cancer stick.
[woman laughing]
NIKOLE: My memory of my father, Milton Hannah,
is tender and complicated.
He was brilliant, tough, funny, hard-working, and hard-living.
He always flew a flag in our front yard.
Our home on a corner lot of a distressed block was humble,
but my father made sure that flag was pristine.
When I was young, I didn't understand
how he could so proudly display his patriotism
for a country that had treated him and our people so poorly.
♪
You see, my father was born into poverty in 1945
on a sharecropping farm in Leflore County,
just outside of Greenwood, Mississippi.
The region was notoriously violent
when it came to its near-majority Black population.
Mississippi lynched more Black people than any other state in the nation.
And Leflore County lynched more Black people
than any other county in Mississippi.
In 1947, my grandmother joined the flood of six million Black Southerners
who fled north during the Great Migration.
Still, my father and his siblings grew up
in a poor, segregated neighborhood in Waterloo, Iowa,
and went to segregated schools.
So in 1962, at the age of 17,
my father took what seemed like the best option
for a poor Black teen:
he signed up for the army.
So you were a-- a-- a child
- when he came back from-- from service. - Yes. I remember it so plain
because, uh, we had a porch--
- Remember we had that porch-- - Yeah.
- And, uh, when that cab pulled up, Mama said, "Milton's here."
Yeah.
LARRY TILLMAN: And, uh, got his-- Popped the truck, got his duffel bag out
and everybody's looking like, "Who is this guy?" You know?
NIKOLE: I remember he was proud that he learned to speak German
over there. LARRY: Oh, yeah. He sure did.
- I didn't know any other Black people who spoke German.
And when I was in high school, I took German
because I thought it would be cool to speak German with my dad,
but then I-- I was terrible at German and I didn't get very far.
But it does speak to, like, Dad was, like, so smart.
I just-- MONROE TILLMAN: Yeah.
- He used to read all the time, I just remember--
LARRY: He was smart. All the time.
That's why you got all of them brains.
- [all chuckling] - Thank you.
But despite his intellect and his military service,
my dad was never able to live the so-called American dream.
Instead, like so many Black Americans of his generation,
he would toil his entire life in service job after service job,
never seeming to get too far ahead.
The first thing you always see when you come to our house...
MONROE: Flag in the yard. NIKOLE: ...is that flag on the pole.
And one thing about Dad,
he was patriotic.
MONROE: Oh, yeah. LARRY: Yes, he was.
NIKOLE: I was embarrassed by that flag when I was a kid.
Well, you shouldn't have been.
He was a part of that United States Army.
He was a part of a big group, and he felt that, and he enjoyed that.
You know, they served their country. They-- You know?
But, hey, you serve your country don't mean your country's gonna serve you.
NIKOLE: Looking back at my confusion and embarrassment
over my father's patriotism,
I realize that, like most young people, I thought I understood so much,
when, in fact, I knew so little.
The truth is my dad knew exactly what he was doing
when he raised that flag.
He knew that our contributions
to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world
were undeniable,
and that no people had a greater claim to the American flag than we did.
♪
We laid the foundations of The White House and the Capitol,
and lugged the heavy wooden tracks of the railroads
that crisscrossed the South.
The relentless buying, selling, insuring, and financing of our bodies
would help make Wall Street and New York City
a financial capital of the world.
♪
But it would be inaccurate to reduce our contributions
to the vast material wealth created by our forced labor.
- We can only stop fighting when all our people are free.
NIKOLE: Black Americans have always been foundational
to the idea of American freedom.
[crowd chanting "Black Lives Matter"]
We have to be that voice.
We have to be the change.
How would the history books remember you?
What will be your legacy?
NIKOLE: Through centuries of resistance,
Black Americans have helped the country live up to its founding ideals.
Without our idealistic, strenuous, and patriotic efforts,
our democracy today would look very different.
In fact, our country might not be a democracy at all.
Our identity as Americans is anchored in the idea
that we are the greatest democracy in the world.
We believe that freedom is, in large part,
defined by the right to choose our leaders.
And so, perhaps, more than any other nation,
we define citizenship by the ability to cast a ballot.
Voting impacts our lives, families, and communities.
It determines what policies we enact,
what we fund and regulate,
what kind of justice we will receive,
and, ultimately, what equality looks like.
Voting is power.
[crowd chanting "Stop the steal"]
And that is why, while calling itself a democracy,
this country has always tried to limit which people are considered citizens
and which people can vote.
And why, after a multiracial coalition of voters
elected the first Black president in 2008,
it spawned the beginnings of a campaign
to challenge the validity of certain votes, certain voters,
and ultimately, by 2020, the results of elections themselves.
WOMAN: I just wanted to tell you, team,
that we're glad you are up bright and early.
All of us will have our assignments.
So far, there haven't been any problems at any of the polling locations.
You all voted this morning?
- Yup, first time. WOMAN: Where did you vote?
- First time? - First time.
[all cheering]
HELEN BUTLER: I'm Helen Butler,
executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples' Agenda.
And I've been working in this civic engagement work since 2000,
but with the Peoples' Agenda, I've been here since 2003.
So it's over two decades of work, uh, to protect the right to vote,
to get people, uh, engaged
and to really have them be participants in the electoral process.
They will call you with all issues.
There will be things that you'll need to escalate to me, to Lyndon, or to Susan.
NIKOLE: The Georgia Coalition of the Peoples' Agenda
is a non-partisan organization working to defend the right to vote.
In 2020, they helped mobilize a multiracial group of voters
who, in a perennially red state,
chose Democrats for both Senate seats and the presidency.
A move that shifted the balance of power in Washington
and prompted President Trump
to infamously call Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger.
DONALD TRUMP: All I want to do is this.
I just want to find 11,780 votes.
NIKOLE: By the winter of 2021,
the fight for voting rights had ignited into a pitched battle
after Georgia's Republican-controlled legislature
passed new restrictive voting laws.
- Today, the Department of Justice is suing the state of Georgia.
Our complaint alleges that recent changes to Georgia's election laws
were enacted with the purpose of denying or abridging the right of Black Georgians
to vote on account of their race or color.
NIKOLE: By the 2022 mid-term elections,
Helen Butler and her team were on high alert
for any voter disenfranchisement.
[phone ringing]
WOMAN: Good morning. Peoples' Agenda.
MAN: [over phone] We just got a report
that, uh, because of an issue with the zip codes of some voters,
um, this is their assigned voting place,
but they're telling them that they can't vote there.
When I get there,
I should ask for the election, um, the poll manager.
MAN: [over phone] Yep.
And Anna will meet you there outside as well.
MARY-PAT HECTOR: Okay.
So we are about to head to a polling location, um, in Atlanta.
Apparently, as you heard,
um, some of the elderly people in the community have been told
that they cannot vote at that location
despite that being, um, their designated precinct location.
Um, so we're gonna head there and speak to the poll manager
and see if there's anything that we can do.
NIKOLE: The Cosby Spear Towers are an affordable housing community
in midtown Atlanta
for seniors and people living with disabilities.
- They told me I could not vote until I do a provisional vote or something
because of the error that they put 30309 for my zip code,
which is 30308.
They trying to send me to Hapeville.
NIKOLE: Because of what appeared to be a clerical error
that mixed up zip codes,
June Williams and other residents in her building
were being rerouted to a precinct roughly 20 minutes away.
WOMAN: And have you voted at this precinct before?
- Yeah, I vote here every time and never had a problem 'til today.
NIKOLE: If Williams wanted to vote at her regular precinct,
she would have to cast a provisional ballot
and a County Board would later determine whether her vote counted.
But instead of being able to cast her ballot immediately,
the new restrictive laws required her
to return near the end of the day to do so.
- So, they told them to come back at 5:00.
Once they come at 5:00--
To me, it sounds like they're trying to say,
"Oh, we can guarantee your-- your ballot will be casted."
It just doesn't make sense to me.
And what was-- It just doesn't make sense.
- Lyndon's calling the election office, so hopefully...
WOMAN: It just makes me feel very uncomfortable.
It should not be this hard to vote.
It just does not-- Especially considering--
And it kind of brings tears to my eyes
because these people are disabled, you know?
It's just messed up.
Just messed up.
MARY-PAT: We're gonna fix-- We're gonna get it fixed.
My shift was supposed to end at 1:00,
but I'm like, I'll be here 'til ten o'clock if I need to.
NIKOLE: Black Americans have always had to fight
to participate in this country's democracy.
And even before that democracy was established,
we were fighting for the very principle that laid its foundation:
freedom.
♪
NIKOLE: In this country,
we are taught that we are a democracy because of our freedoms.
Among them: freedom of speech,
freedom of religion,
freedom of the press,
the freedom to protest.
And our national mythology credits the Founding Fathers
for establishing America as the land of the free.
But even after independence,
white freedom in America was predicated on Black slavery.
Black people dreamed of freedom even as they lived without it.
And they fought for freedom for centuries,
all the way back to before our country's founding.
It is Black people who have been the perfectors of our democracy.
♪
Slavery would be foundational
to the economy, politics, and laws of the new nation.
And so I've always found it strange
that Black people are so absent from so many historical colonial sites,
our presence virtually erased.
Especially here in Williamsburg,
where at the start of the revolution,
enslaved people made up nearly half of the population.
And the question of their freedom sparked a historical event
that created a tipping point in the Southern Colonies
at the dawn of the American Revolution.
Look at this perfect coordination, though. You see this?
- Air Jordans! I-- I'm wearing Costco Jordans.
Costco Jordans! Is that a thing?
No. It is now!
[both laughing]
NIKOLE: I think I wore Costco Jordans the first,
you know, 15 years of my life as a child--
WOODY HOLTON: I think you've earned some Airs.
NIKOLE: So we are here on the grounds of the Governor's Palace
in Williamsburg, Virginia.
WOODY: It is the symbol,
the pinnacle of power
in the largest British American Colony of Virginia.
It's where the governor resided.
The governor in 1775 was Lord Dunmore, a Scottish Lord.
And he was extremely popular among white Virginians,
because he had just led them in a race war against Native Americans
whose land they coveted.
NIKOLE: So what changes?
WOODY: James Madison, who later will write the U.S. Constitution
and become president of the United States,
reported that African Americans had started to hold meetings
to choose who would lead them,
to quote him, "when the English troops should arrive."
NIKOLE: In April of 1775,
rumors of slave revolts were running rampant in Virginia,
sparking paranoia among the white colonists.
But Dunmore had other worries.
Even though the fighting had not yet reached the Southern Colonies,
he had become gravely concerned
that the growing patriot sentiment stirring in Virginia against the British
might bring the revolution to his front door.
So in order to preemptively deter an attack,
Dunmore confiscated gunpowder in the capital here in Williamsburg
and decided to make a threat.
WOODY: Governor Dunmore said, "If you touch a hair on my head,
"I will declare freedom to the slaves
and reduce the town of Williamsburg to ashes."
He thought, "If I play this card of threatening to free the slaves,
that will scare them off."
NIKOLE: That's a serious threat to make. WOODY: That's right.
- Dunmore understands that he's playing into the colonists' kind of gravest fear.
WOODY: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jefferson was always worried about a revolution of the wheel of fortune.
That is, we're on top now, but this thing can spin.
- He was just trying to scare the colonists...
- WOODY: Exactly. - ...into not rebelling.
- Exactly. He was-- He was playing the race card.
He was using a threat of-- of slave insurrection
to scare white colonists into standing down.
While all this is going back and forth
between Governor Dunmore and white patriots,
he's issued this threat to free the slaves,
slaves are listening, they heard his threat.
They came and knocked on the door of the Governor's Palace
and said, "Here we are, man. You need us.
"We can be great fighters.
All you got to do is promise us our freedom."
And guess what Governor Dunmore said to those enslaved people?
NIKOLE: What did he say?
- "Get the hell out of here." NIKOLE: Mmm.
- That was an idle threat. You know, we all do that.
We threaten to do things. "I'll take you to court."
It was an idle threat. He-- he didn't mean it.
NIKOLE: But when enslaved people continued to self-emancipate
and presented themselves to Dunmore,
he saw an opportunity to shore up his ranks
by declaring he would free any enslaved person
who agreed to fight against the colonists.
So eventually, this threat that Lord Dunmore makes becomes a reality,
and he actually does issue, uh, an emancipation order,
that we now call Dunmore's Proclamation.
WOODY: Dunmore issued that emancipation proclamation,
November 1775.
And that emancipation proclamation infuriated white Southerners,
'cause this building is supposed to symbolize white rule over Blacks,
and now the guy inhabiting that building has turned things upside down
and is leading Blacks against whites.
So you have this situation
where many Virginians and other Southern colonists,
they're not really convinced that they want to side with the patriots.
And this turns many of them, um, towards the Revolution, is that right?
If you ask them, it did.
The record is absolutely clear.
I can't think of a point that I could make about the American Revolution
where I could compile as many quotes as I can from white Southerners
saying how furious they are at Governor Dunmore.
Some of them said,
"There's-- There's no other expedient you could have thought of
that was as likely as this to turn us against you."
NIKOLE: Further enraging the white colonists,
Dunmore created the all-Black Ethiopian Regiment
who fought the patriots at The Battle of Kemp's Landing
just outside of Norfolk, Virginia.
And the Ethiopian Regiment won.
By the fall of 1776,
approximately 1,000 enslaved people had joined Dunmore.
This understanding of the role
that Black people played in the Revolutionary War,
why is there so much pushback?
This is just historical fact, so why--
Why do we have so much pushback?
- Yeah. It-- It astonishes me as well, because it just seems so obvious
that both economically and politically,
enslaved people were at the center of the story.
I would say-- I think if-- if slaves had been as passive
as I was taught they were in Virginia schools in 1960s,
then the Revolution might not ever have come to the South.
And you can't win the Revolution without the South.
NIKOLE: The way we are taught our history
has a lot to do with how we are supposed to think about our democracy,
how we think about who built it and who should benefit most from it.
When I was a student in Iowa,
for the most part, the America revealed to me in my education,
in museums, and in monuments, was a white one.
And yet my world, my neighborhood,
my friends, the aunts and uncles
who crowded our home for barbecues and card games
was largely Black.
I searched desperately to find our people,
to find myself in the American story.
Except for the occasional passing reference to our enslavement
and the Civil Rights Movement,
the story of America that I learned made it seem
that Black people had not contributed much of value to this land.
And so for most of my life, I never felt fully American.
But then, when I was a high school student,
I took a Black Studies course.
And Mr. Ray Dial, the only Black male teacher I ever had,
gave me a book that told the story of the year 1619,
the beginning of American slavery.
I remember feeling angry that no one had bothered to teach us
that Africans and slavery were here before the Mayflower,
and then empowered
that our lineage as Black Americans went back that far.
I was 15 years old
and had no idea how those emotions would fuel a quest for the truth
that would shape my life,
a quest to understand a country
that the history we had been taught did not, could not explain.
♪
- Please welcome back Pulitzer Prize winner Nikole Hannah-Jones.
[audience applauding]
NIKOLE: As the project's success grew,
it became a target of conservative politicians.
- You know, the-- the whole project is a lie.
The 1619 Project
and the crusade against American history
is toxic propaganda.
[crowd chanting "Shame on you!"]
NIKOLE: The backlash had real consequences.
As of October 2022,
there were at least 33 state-level efforts,
as well as a federal bill,
seeking to restrict educators from teaching The 1619 Project
or discussing systemic racism.
- Nevada groups, they want teachers there to wear body cameras
so they can monitor what they are teaching
to make sure that they're not teaching things like The 1619 Project.
MAN: 1619-related curricula banned in Texas, banned in Florida.
NIKOLE: And while the backlash to the project may seem surprising to some,
the truth is, the fight to include slavery and Black contributions
in the full story of America
mirrors the fight to include Black Americans in democracy itself.
And that is a fight that stretches back centuries.
♪
Through 250 years of slavery,
Black Americans resisted their bondage.
They continually plotted, rebelled, and escaped.
Some of those who ran away
found safe haven in Brooklyn's Plymouth Church,
a place often called the Grand Depot of the Underground Railroad.
In 1860, then-presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln prayed there
before giving a campaign speech
outlining his plan to limit the expansion of slavery,
an issue that would define his presidency.
So in 1862, a year into the Civil War, President Lincoln--
This is before he issues the emancipation, but he's considering it.
Lincoln invites a delegation of five Black men to the White House.
What is this meeting about? What happens?
- So Lincoln is contemplating emancipation.
And so what he believes
is that if he can convince Black people to leave the United States,
then it'll be easier to get the white majority to accept emancipation.
So what Lincoln does in that conversation
is try to guilt, insult, do anything he can
to persuade the Black folks who were there in that meeting
to leave the United States.
And what they are very clear on is that they are not going to leave.
Robert Purvis says,
"Sir, this is our country as much as it is yours,
and we will not leave it."
And Purvis isn't alone on that.
The vast majority of the Black population,
the free Black population even, said, "No. We're not going anywhere."
Frederick Douglass said, "We were with you when you arrived on these shores.
"We leveled your forests.
"Our blood, sweat, and tears are in this soil.
"We've been with you,
and we are going to be with you in the future."
NIKOLE: Instead of promising to leave the land of their birth,
Black men pushed Lincoln
to let them sign up to fight in the Union army.
And desperate, Lincoln finally did.
As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, "The North had to call in the Black men
to save the Union, abolish slavery, and establish democracy."
And amid the ruin and devastation of this nation's deadliest war,
in an era known as Reconstruction,
this country finally began to try to redeem the grave sin of slavery.
These newly emancipated people pushed lawmakers
to pass the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment:
Abolishing slavery;
guaranteeing equal protection under the law;
and citizenship not just for Black people but for any person born on American soil;
and making it illegal to deny voting rights based on race.
In this moment of rebirth,
Black Americans embraced democracy and its promises of equality
with the type of fervor
that comes from living so long with no freedom at all.
KIDADA WILLIAMS: What they want after slavery is over is justice,
and they go about building it.
They knew that if Black people
enjoyed all of these rights, privileges, and protections,
then all Americans would be able to enjoy them.
And that's the beauty of who they were as a people.
- We know how the story of Reconstruction ends.
A deal is struck that if, um,
Rutherford B. Hayes can get the presidency,
then he will agree to withdraw the federal troops from the South.
And in doing so,
he leaves these newly freed people
to the mercy of their former enslavers.
Can you talk about, um, what happens in that period when Reconstruction ends?
- And so what we see over the next 25 years
is whites in the South constructing the new order.
And this new order will be what we call Jim Crow.
But they can't construct it until they disfranchise Black men,
which is what they spend the next decade trying to do.
NIKOLE: White men in power passed new allegedly race-neutral laws
to get around the 15th Amendment.
Grandfather clauses said
you could only vote if your grandfather had,
but most Black men's grandfathers had been enslaved.
Slavery had ensured
most Black people entered freedom illiterate and impoverished,
so white officials instituted literacy tests and poll taxes to vote.
I-- I think it can't be overstated
how much violence Black Americans were subjected to
during that period.
KIDADA: So we saw that during Reconstruction,
but we also saw that in 1898, in places like Wilmington, North Carolina,
where the democratically elected government is overthrown
by white mobs rampaging through the city.
And they had held on to the promise of Reconstruction
for much longer than anyone else had.
And it has a chilling effect.
Not only massacres like Wilmington,
but also widespread lynching throughout the region.
And lynchers are not targeting Black people
who are committing crimes against them.
They're targeting Black people who are successful,
who are prosperous,
and who won't stand down and submit to white supremacy.
♪
MAN: This picture is essentially for Americans,
people who call themselves American.
It begins with the painful and hard-felled assumption
that we are not an island of perfection,
but in fact, a land of imperfection in an imperfect world.
Negroes are trying to register to vote
and help to change the situation that they're existing under today.
Help to bring about democracy in our land today.
NIKOLE: The system of racial apartheid
that was created after Reconstruction was so savage
that Nazi Germany would take inspiration from it
for its own racist policies.
But Black Americans would never stop fighting
to democratize America.
Black Americans have always believed in this nation
with a faith it did not deserve,
risking and losing our lives, generation after generation,
to make this country what it already claimed to be.
And nowhere was the fight for democracy more dangerous
than in my father's home state of Mississippi.
MAN: Well, hi there.
NIKOLE: MacArthur Cotton was born just three years before my father
and about 50 miles away.
MACARTHUR COTTON: I was born in April 23, 1942.
I was a person who championed the underdog.
So it was just a natural thing that I would want to be in the movement
because, uh, the choice to me was,
you know, accepting things like they were.
And that wasn't much of a choice.
This is one of the pictures that a friend sent to me
when we were in SNCC.
This-- This should be about '63, I believe, when it was taken.
[people singing]
NARRATOR: In the fall of 1962, a group of students arrived in Greenwood.
They came to organize the Negro population,
to spread the word of the new gospel.
They called themselves SNCC:
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
NIKOLE: In the 1960s,
Greenwood, Mississippi, became a battleground for voting rights.
At the time, Leflore County was more than two-thirds Black
but only five percent of the Black voting-age population
was registered to vote.
And in a state where nearly half the population was Black,
there was not a single Black elected official in the State House
or in U.S. Congress.
Thank you, Mr. Cotton, for meeting with us today.
Let's start by just telling where we are sitting.
Where-- Where are we right now?
- Well, we are in Leflore County Courthouse
in Greenwood, Mississippi.
NIKOLE: So how-- how does a young Black man decide
that he's going to get involved with the Civil Rights Movement here?
- Well, uh, I was always taught, uh, civic responsibility.
It was a civic thing to do. The right thing to do.
I had no interest in being a slave, so. NIKOLE: Mm.
MacArthur Cotton was a student working in the Tougaloo College Library
when the legendary civil rights activist Bob Moses
recruited him to join
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
also known as SNCC.
At the time, SNCC was making a big push to register Black voters in the South.
Cotton eventually left Tougaloo
to work full-time in the Civil Rights Movement.
He sacrificed his college degree to fight for democracy,
eventually becoming a field secretary
for the Greenwood voter registration project.
MACARTHUR: You know, in the back of my head,
I thought that we probably would be able to register people to vote.
I didn't expect, uh, the kind of opposition that we had,
even though I knew it wasn't going to be easy.
But, uh, after a while, we found out it was almost impossible.
- Why was it that so few Black people were registered to vote here?
What type of opposition did they face?
- State-sponsored terror.
You know, just straight out, they-- they killed people
for trying to register.
NIKOLE: I read some of Bob Moses' reports,
and he said that Greenwood was a hardcore resistance area,
that almost no progress had been made here
after at least two years or more of intensive organizing,
and even the SNCC offices were bombed.
They were burned. MACARTHUR: Of course. Burned.
They were shot up.
Um, and you're entering into that
to try to-- to reinforce the local efforts.
We expected that.
We knew that, uh, there would be bombings and shootings and-- We knew that.
You know, we always hoped that it didn't happen to us,
but we knew that that was a possibility.
So we could have retreated,
which we didn't feel like that was an option.
- So-- - You say that so calmly now.
Were you-- Were you calm about it back then?
MACARTHUR: Probably even more so. NIKOLE: Really?
- Yeah. You know, when you're 18 or 19 or 20,
- you're invincible anyway. - Mmm.
MACARTHUR: You think about what you want to do.
You don't think about the consequences as much
even though, you know, we were intelligent enough to know that,
you know, there were terrorists and all kind of opposition.
NIKOLE: Cotton and his fellow activists came up with a strategy
to overwhelm the system.
In June of 1963, they turned up at the county courthouse
with a group of local Black residents who dared register to vote.
MACARTHUR: Our idea was to, you know, maybe double that the next day,
and on and on,
until we got some kind of concession from somebody.
Okay.
And what happens?
So you-- you go in, you march up here, and what happens?
MACARTHUR: So we got to-- As they began to go in,
I think they took a couple of them in
and then they say, uh, "Well, we're closing the courthouse for lunch,
so y'all gotta get out."
So we-- we refused to, uh, leave.
So they, uh, arrested us.
NIKOLE: After the Sheriff's office arrested Cotton and the other SNCC leaders,
they were fined and initially sentenced to four months of hard labor.
But instead of staying on the County Penal Farm
for their full sentence,
partway through, they were transferred to State prison.
So they take you to Parchman?
Was one of the worst places to be in America.
MACARTHUR: Right. That's what it's supposed to be.
And I think part of that, you know, they inst-- instill fear in people.
And, uh, I think it kind of bothered them that we didn't care.
That didn't scare you at all?
- Well-- Well, you know, really, we, uh, we were living in Parchman.
We couldn't st-- We couldn't stand up to the courthouse.
We couldn't walk down the street without being harassed, so.
You know, it wasn't-- It wasn't a big change, you know,
from being inside or outside.
- Talk about Parchman. What-- What was your experience there?
- We were on-- on death row.
- So they housed you with the... MACARTHUR: Yeah.
With the death row inmates?
Right, that's where we were kept.
NIKOLE: Activists faced extreme violence and deprivation at Parchman.
Cotton told me of the brutality he experienced
after he asked for food that another inmate had refused.
MACARTHUR: They hung me, uh, stretched me, uh,
at the top of my tiptoes
and hung me, uh, to the bars by my wrists,
you know, put handcuffs...
So they tortured you.
- Of course. That was the name of the game.
They might would've let me stay there until, you know, until I perished.
I don't know. But just so happened,
the International Council of Churches,
uh, came
to investigate.
So their representatives came and saw me hanging.
And of course, by then, my clothes was full of feces and all.
Maybe that-- that was the straw that broke the camel's back.
And they were able to bail us out.
- I'm so sorry. I don't--
MACARTHUR: It's okay.
You should be glad.
You should be glad that we had to sacrifice
to-- to do what we had to do.
'Cause... somebody had to do it.
And, hey, I'm still here.
- We've seen the Voting Rights Act of 1965 gutted by a conservative Supreme Court.
We've seen, in the last year and a half, more voter suppression laws passed.
I just wonder, how do we think about the challenge for democracy ahead,
understanding that history, and what's your fear?
Mmm.
That I won't be here long enough to see it.
That's one thing, but, uh...
It--
Well, for people who were paying attention
and understood,
the opposition never quit fighting.
So actually it wasn't that much change in the mind or heart.
So, just, you know, the struggle continues.
And it-- it will always
be a fight.
Democracy is a fight.
♪
NIKOLE: Just weeks after his release from Parchman prison,
MacArthur Cotton set on his way to the nation's capital...
MAN: We are requesting all citizens to move into Washington.
NIKOLE: ...where he joined a quarter million people
from across the country.
MAN: Go by plane, by car, walk if necessary.
We are pushing for jobs, housing, desegregated schools.
This is an urgent request.
Please join. Go to Washington.
NIKOLE: On that hot August day in 1963,
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke
to Black American commitment to the democratic process.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America
until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.
NIKOLE: Two years later,
after countless activists had been violently beaten
and many others murdered,
Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
forcing the South to stop violating the Constitution
by denying Black people the right to vote
and enforcing the century-old rights promised in the 15th Amendment.
Black Americans, just as they had right after the Civil War,
helped expand legal equality and democracy for all Americans.
With the balance of Congress once again at stake
in the 2022 midterm election,
Mary-Pat Hector was trying to resolve the issue at the Cosby Spear Towers
that was routing residents to another polling location
about 20 minutes away.
- I mean, Hapeville-- That just seems ridiculous.
WOMAN: And there's another polling site right here at the--
NIKOLE: Back at headquarters, Helen Butler worked the phones
with the Fulton County election board representative,
who confirmed the County had made a mistake.
- All right. Thank you. So I'll get it taken--
So they were in the wrong precinct?
WOMAN: [over phone] Yes.
HELEN: Okay. All right. WOMAN: [over phone] Okay. Okay.
HELEN: Okay. Thank you. WOMAN: [over phone] Mm-hmm.
[line ringing]
MARY-PAT: [over phone] Hey, Ms. Helen, you talked to her?
Yes.
MARY-PAT: [over phone] Uh, what's the update?
- They're voting a regular ballot on the voting machine.
If a poll worker tells them that they have to vote provisionally,
ask for the poll manager,
and the poll manager will get it corrected.
MARY-PAT: [over phone] All right. Thank you so much, Ms. Helen.
So, I-- I can leave?
You can leave.
MARY-PAT: [over phone] Okay. Thank you very much.
All right. Okay, bye.
MARY-PAT: They can. They can. Yep. Everything is good.
So I'm about to leave and go back to the office.
That's a win. Small wins count.
MARY-PAT: All right. Very-- Small wins really do count.
So thank you. I really appreciate it.
BIANCA WEBB: Yeah, so myself and some volunteers went over there,
knocked on every door in that building
that was impacted by the error this morning,
just to make sure all of the residents knew
that if they were turned around that they can come back and vote.
NIKOLE: And while June Williams finally cast her ballot,
the mistake felt all too familiar.
Speaking with Miss June
and hearing how she's actually been a part of the Civil Rights Movement
and actually lived in those times,
uh, where it, in her own words, feels like a repeat.
But to see her go the extra mile
and say, "I will sit out this door until seven o'clock
because I'm going to vote."
Um, I think she really charged my generation to have that same tenacity
and do what needs to be done
to correct whatever wrongs that may be happening.
NIKOLE: For nearly 50 years,
the Voting Rights Act that protected Williams' generation
was reauthorized with bipartisan support from Congress and the White House.
- So Bush actually signed the last reauthorization
of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
I got a personal invitation from George Bush.
That's-- The red ticket is my ticket to the event.
We were out on the lawn of the White House.
And in the middle, we got to take our picture,
our little Georgia delegation.
So it-- it is us there, uh, enjoying the moment.
But of course, we know Shelby v. Holder changed that in 2013.
NIKOLE: After President Obama won a second term in 2012,
the Supreme Court,
determining the nation had largely moved on from the racism
that had once made the Voting Rights Act necessary,
overturned key protections in the law.
NEWSCASTER: The decision invalidating a section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965
deeply divided the justices,
but it rested on a simple premise.
As Chief Justice John Roberts said,
"Nearly 50 years later, things have changed dramatically."
NIKOLE: Following the ruling, by the 2016 election,
14 states had enacted new redistricting plans
or new restrictions on voting
that, before, would have required preapproval by the Justice Department.
And just like the laws passed during Jim Crow,
these new laws were allegedly race-neutral.
But the intent was clear.
For example, a federal court found
North Carolina's voter ID laws had targeted Black Americans
with, quote, "almost surgical precision."
And the attack on the democratic process
only escalated in the wake of the 2020 election.
CHUCK SCHUMER: We are witnessing an attempt
at the greatest contraction of voting rights
since the end of Reconstruction
and the beginning of Jim Crow.
NIKOLE: Since 2021,
lawmakers have passed at least 42 restrictive voting laws
in 21 states.
And in Georgia,
one of the most heavily Black states in the nation,
Republicans passed the Election Integrity Act
that created a long list of voting restrictions.
After a pandemic-era election saw the use of mail-in ballots in record numbers,
the law shrunk the number of ballot drop boxes
and added ID requirements for absentee voting.
Data shows Black Americans, on average, wait longer than white voters
to cast their ballot
And yet, the law criminalizes passing out food and water
to those standing in line to vote.
And finally, the law allows anyone
to legally challenge the right of their fellow citizens to cast a ballot,
and created a new hotline to accept anonymous tips
to report voter fraud.
So we are here today, uh, to talk about democracy.
Can you talk about the state of American democracy right now?
- Well, the state of American democracy is really on life support in my opinion.
You had the insurrection of January 6th.
You have all of these draconian, uh, policies being implemented,
uh, to prevent people from being able to select their representatives
and to have a voice.
The takeover process where they have total control of the outcome of elections,
uh, that kind of thing is really putting us in peril.
MARY-PAT: I think, you know, Coretta Scott King once said,
like, "Freedom is-- is a never-ending process.
"Struggle is never really won.
You win it and earn it in every generation."
And, um, one thing that Mrs. Helen often says is, "This is our Selma moment."
And so while I know our democracy is in a very, very bad place,
I feel like we've been here before.
- And really, if you look at the Civil Rights Movement,
it wasn't won overnight.
It was a drawn-out period of time before we could get that right.
We are just really a resilient community.
Uh, we have fought.
And who is the "we"?
We, Black people.
Black people are the--
- MARY-PAT: And Black women. - And Black women, yes.
We are resilient.
We can make it happen.
- And we can't give up. - Yeah.
Uh, I'm a fighter.
And, you know, if you don't believe in something that you would die for,
then you really don't believe in it.
It has to be so incredibly frustrating
that you convinced people to have a stake in their democracy,
that their vote matters.
How do you return to those people again in 2024
and say, "Yes, they didn't protect your rights.
"They're not respecting your agenda.
"They pass more laws that's gonna make it harder for you.
Do it again because your vote matters."
- It is a hard message, but it's a necessary message.
We can't tell them, "Give up."
I can't tell anybody to give up.
HELEN: You can't tell 'em, "Give up"
because you don't want 'em to stay at home,
because that makes it even worse.
So it's always the lesser of two evils.
Quite honestly.
It's the lesser of two evils
until you can get in
and have a true majority.
♪
NIKOLE: Black American freedom struggles
have laid the foundation for every other modern rights struggle.
The laws born out of Black resistance,
first during Reconstruction
and later during the Civil Rights Movement,
guaranteed equality in law and banned discrimination
based not just on race but on gender, nationality, and religion.
When other marginalized groups demand their rights,
they sue under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment,
including when same-sex couples used it
to win their constitutional right to marry.
We have made tremendous progress toward realizing our democratic ideals,
and yet the ongoing fights over voting and elections
show that a significant portion of our country
still does not believe in democracy
if democracy requires sharing power with multiracial citizens
in our multiracial nation.
I think a lot about what it will take
for a true democracy to take shape in this country.
And I worry about how the nation will respond
to what is clearly a democratic crisis.
So you both are, uh, political scientists
who study how democracies work around the world.
But you guys argue that this backsliding of our democracy
really began as early as the 1980s.
Can you tell me more about that?
Well, the Civil Rights Revolution
and the increasing diversification of our society
with large-scale immigration
triggers a dramatic transformation of the party system,
where, by the early 21st century,
the Republican Party was an overwhelmingly white Christian party
in a society that was much more diverse than ever before.
And it was a party that concentrated the vast bulk of white Americans
who were uncomfortable with racial diversity.
And that's the base that Trump eventually taps into.
But that's a slow movie. That doesn't get invented by Trump.
Trump is a product of that, more than a cause of it.
[crowd chanting "USA"]
- In order to understand our current moment,
it's actually useful to look back to the 19th century
and the first effort to create a multiracial democracy
after the Civil War.
And this was a major effort.
All these Constitutional Amendments to guarantee voting rights
failed by 1876, at the earliest by the 1890s, certainly.
And what this meant is that voting rights were now excluded
for African Americans in the South.
By the time we get to the 1960s, their second effort at this,
and the question of political equality
for all groups and all individuals of all backgrounds
is now on the political table.
It's explosive, and there's a backlash against it,
just as there was after the first attempt at this.
And so we're living through that moment right now.
And I guess the question is
to what degree will we make the same mistakes we did last time?
White people are being targeted.
- Joe Biden's five million illegal aliens are on the verge of replacing you.
[crowd chanting "You will not replace us"]
- You also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.
[people screaming]
- They openly campaign for racial reparations
and bigoted policies that target white people.
- So, what are some of the warning signs we see
when we have politicians that are working to threaten democracy,
or that have become a threat to democracy?
- In our book, we identify four warning signs.
One: If a politician says they won't accept election results
or challenge a democratic constitution.
- We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn't happen.
You don't concede when there is theft involved.
- Number two: If they condone or threaten violence in their rhetoric.
Usually they go on and tend to support this kind of stuff in action.
Those are people that love this country.
- You know, if you didn't know the TV footage
was a video from January the 6th,
you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.
DANIEL ZIBLATT: Number three:
Do they threaten to assault civil liberties?
Do they threaten the press, for example?
- The Republican candidate allegedly throwing a reporter to the ground.
[objects clattering]
And then number four:
Do they challenge the legitimacy of their opponents?
She shouldn't be allowed to run.
Chris, she should never have been allowed to run for the presidency.
Why doesn't he show his birth certificate?
Because I think it's a terrible pall that's hanging over him.
NIKOLE: Today, we once again find ourselves in a chapter of America's story
where some in power are eroding our democratic norms.
REPORTER: One day after top Senate Republicans
decidedly dug in their heels
saying they will not even hold hearings
or even meet with the president's nominee.
NIKOLE: After President Obama was blocked
from appointing a Supreme Court nominee in his final year of office,
President Trump appointed three justices,
creating a conservative Supreme Court
that may soon strike down equality measures
established during the Civil Rights Movement.
One that addresses the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in higher education.
The conservative majority appears ready
to roll back 40 years of affirmative action on American campuses.
NIKOLE: And another that undercuts fair elections.
- The Supreme Court hears arguments this morning
on a significant case focusing on race and voting rights in Alabama.
NEWSCASTER: With Black voter registration at historic highs,
Black leaders say Alabama is using redistricting
to dilute the power of their vote.
NIKOLE: In the 2022 midterm elections,
nearly 200 candidates who did not accept the results of the presidential election
ran for office.
And on the state level,
we saw armed poll watchers intimidate citizens in Arizona.
And in Florida,
Governor Ron DeSantis created a special election police force
to go after voter fraud
even though study after study showed widespread voter fraud wasn't occurring.
- So if a political party or a politician tries to tilt the playing field in a way
to make it so that it's really so hard for the other side to win elections,
that basically the other side can't win elections,
often doing this legally by changing election rules,
by changing how election districts are drawn,
changing who counts the elections.
- And these are things that we're seeing happening in the United States right now.
STEVEN LEVITSKY: Yeah. Um, look, we're at a point
where the bulk of the Republican Party at this point
did not accept defeat in 2020
and has not clearly, unambiguously rejected the use of political violence.
And so to us, that is a warning sign
that one of our major parties is no longer fully committed to democracy.
And when one of two major parties is not committed to democracy,
your democracy is imperiled.
MARY-PAT: This is my first time doing this, so...
WOMAN: Yes. MARY-PAT: Okay.
- You go in to the right and those tables and those chairs there.
MARY-PAT: All right. Thank you.
So we're watching the ballots come in,
and we are watching Fulton County count the ballots,
um, of all of the people within this community.
Seeing all of the work that organizers have put forth
to combat voter suppression in this state, um,
really has me amped up, but it also has me scared.
It has me scared about what's gonna happen either way.
Um, this election takes place tonight.
Either way it goes, it has me scared about what's to come.
HELEN: I think history will show in the future
that the demographics of the United States will be different.
People of color are gonna be the majority.
And I'm hopeful that at that point,
then we'll have the true democracy that we want.
- That's maybe why they're fighting so hard right now.
- I think that's-- I think you hit the nail on the head,
is that they're fighting because they see those numbers changing.
So, to me, when we get that demographic shift,
I think we'll be better
at not having to work so hard for this.
- I wanna be able to look back and say, "I did this so that you didn't have to."
You know, my grandfather did a lot. Ms. Helen did a lot.
She integrated, uh, the University of Georgia, right?
And so, you know, she can say,
you know, "I did this so that Mary-Pat didn't have to do that."
Um, and that's-- that's what legacy is all about.
♪
NIKOLE: As a woman in my 40s,
I am part of the first generation of Black Americans
in the history of the United States
to be born in a society
in which Black people had full rights of citizenship.
Yet, in that brief span of time,
despite continuing to face rampant discrimination,
and despite there never having been a genuine effort
to redress the wrongs of slavery
and the century of legal discrimination that followed,
Black Americans have made astounding progress,
not only for ourselves but also for all Americans.
Our struggles and strivings have made America more fair and more just.
And as much democracy as we have,
it has been born of Black resistance.
In other words,
the very people who were never supposed to be a part of our democracy
have played the most pivotal role in creating it.
So what if America understood,
finally, now, after 400 years,
that Black people have never been the problem
but the solution?
♪
But that solution came at a tremendous cost,
and so much of it has been borne by Black women.
WOMAN 1: There's a direct link to maternal mortality today
and the challenges that women had giving birth during slavery.
NIKOLE: What did she tell you?
- She said, "Baby A doesn't have a heartbeat."
And I couldn't understand. I'm like, "I don't--"
I'm like, "I don't understand."
WOMAN 2: The legacy of slavery is so ingrained in our system,
and we don't even see it.
♪