- Every president since George Washington has had to define
what we mean by the words "We the People"
and "a more perfect union."
In moments of harmony and conflict,
of growth and severe distress,
in times of triumph and tragedy,
each of our presidents has had to make a choice
to take us forward or backward,
to unite us or divide us,
to greet the future with open arms or a clenched fist.
The choices they made and how they acted on them
is the story of the American presidents.
(melancholic music)
Race has shaped America's story from the very beginning.
The very fact that slavery continued to exist
after the creation of our republic
ensured that there'd be fierce struggles
over our founding ideals
of freedom and equality for all.
Every president since Washington has had to face
those struggles and the cruel realities behind them.
Throughout our history,
the rights and opportunities of black Americans
have been curtailed by law or practice.
Growing up in the segregated South,
it's a truth I became aware of from a young age.
I was fortunate to spend a lot of my early childhood
in my grandfather's little store in the mostly black part
of Hope, Arkansas where I saw him treat everyone the same
regardless of their race, but when I was 11,
I learned just how uncommon my grandparents' attitudes
toward race were among most white Southerners
when the Little Rock Central High crisis
rocked my home state of Arkansas.
And for the first time,
I saw up close how decisive presidential action
could help to overturn Jim Crow.
(dramatic music)
- [Chief Justice] Do you, Dwight D. Eisenhower,
do solemnly swear.
- [Dwight] I, Dwight D Eisenhower, do solemnly swear
that I will faithfully execute the office
of the president of the United States.
- It's an extraordinary thing to be a general,
and then to transition to a political career,
and it was difficult for Eisenhower to do that,
and a key to his political success is that
he had that it thing.
He had that character thing.
He was a person that people wanted to be around,
and that's just political gold.
Eisenhower's presidency is a really important one
in the history of race relations in America.
- As we move through the mid to late-1950s,
the period he becomes president,
America had come out of World War II
feeling confident and powerful, had conquered fascism.
incomes were increasing a growing middle-class.
Lots of things were getting better for a number of people
which is in part also why the civil rights movement
is so important because there were things
that weren't getting better for a whole number of people.
- Eisenhower grew up in Abilene, Kansas.
He had no black friends. (melancholic music)
He then went on to a career in the segregated US military.
So in a sense, he really had no notion of what it was like
to be black in America.
- What we have to consider about Eisenhower is that
Eisenhower doesn't really understand the lengths
that the South will go to to preserve segregation.
- He wasn't looking to make civil rights
his main issue in the 1950s.
He wanted to build the Interstate Highway System.
He wanted to get the economy humming.
He wanted to help corporate America,
and suddenly civil rights is dumped on his desk daily
through his eight-year presidency.
- Dwight Eisenhower might not have been interested
in claiming civil rights as his own issue,
but civil rights was interested in Eisenhower,
and it came to him in 1957,
at the town of Little Rock, Arkansas.
(dramatic music) (people shouting)
This was a explosive moment
in the modern civil rights movement.
- In order to understand Little Rock,
you have to start in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education.
Now, Brown v. Board of Education rules that
separate but equal is in fact not equal
and ends segregation in education.
This becomes the law of the land.
- It's one of the most important decisions
of the 20th century,
and it would shape race relations in America
for the rest of the century.
It was the direct existential threat
to the Southern way of life.
(dramatic music)
Eisenhower wanted things to go slow.
He feared that all of his Southern friends
would stand up and say, "This is an outrage,
"that this is an invasion of our state's rights.
"This is going to set off racial conflict.
"This is gonna be destabilizing."
And as it turned out, Eisenhower was right.
(shutter clicking) (melancholic music)
- Eisenhower really didn't want to be involved
in trying to solve the country's racial problems,
but in assessing the situation,
Eisenhower was animated by the fear of chaos
if he did not bring the full authority
of the federal government to play in this particular crisis.
- Now increasingly, what we end up seeing is that schools
become contested spaces of segregation and inequality,
and this is the case in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Little Rock prides itself on being essentially
a moderate city where people have gotten along,
but things are very different when we get into
the intimate space of the school.
Now predictably, Brown v. Board of Education,
it creates an explosive situation
where nine black children
go into a situation where white segregationists,
a white mob, have essentially gotten together to conspire
to prevent these black children
from coming into the schools.
(dramatic music) (people shouting)
- So the Little Rock Nine are a collection of young people,
and that's really important to know, young people,
who were selected through a vetting process
by the local NAACP to challenge the, or frankly,
to be the Guinea pigs to integrate Central High School
in Little Rock, Arkansas. (melancholic music)
- Well, at this moment, the governor of Arkansas,
a man named Orval Faubus who actually was
a World War II veteran, who had served in Europe
while Eisenhower was the supreme commander.
He stepped into the mix.
Orval Faubus smelled a political advantage here.
He figured I'm gonna get on the side of the segregationists
because that's good politics here in Arkansas.
- We are now faced with a problem,
and that is the forcible integration
of the public schools of Little Rock
against the overwhelming sentiment
of the people of the area.
- Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard
to come to the school and to stand guard,
and their role allegedly was to keep the peace, but in fact,
their role was to make it impossible
for the Little Rock Nine, the nine black students,
to come into the school.
(dramatic music) (people shouting)
- There must have been 1,000 Arkansas National Guardsmen,
and their job was to keep us out.
(dramatic music) (people shouting)
So the first day, we were barred.
We didn't go into class.
There were people who wanted to lynch us.
- They're not simply met with armed forces or local police.
They are met with a mob, and they are met with violence.
What the mob is doing
is ensuring that the racial hierarchy
of Little Rock, Arkansas is upheld, and it escalates.
It escalates and it continues to grow and grow and grow.
- [Douglas] So Eisenhower is certainly
being brought up to speed,
and I'm sure he's being shown the movie clips
or the film clips.
- [Will] And now, Eisenhower began to see the images,
and there are some searing photographs of white students,
their faces contorted in hatred and anger,
screaming at Elizabeth Eckford and a few
of the other students who were there that day
trying to get into the school.
So this was an explosive situation,
and Eisenhower was profoundly distressed to see it.
(ominous music) (bird cawing)
Eisenhower loathed the idea of using force,
and he was seeking a way out,
so he invited the governor to come to see him up in Newport.
(helicopter blades whirring) (camera shutter clicking)
- Eisenhower leaves the meeting thinking
that he's convinced Faubus and that Faubus is quite rational
and will go home, and this all will be nipped in the bud,
and what happens?
Oh, Faubus does the exact opposite.
He says, "All right,
"I'll withdraw the Arkansas National Guard,
"but now I'm gonna leave it in the hands of local police,
"and I'm gonna leave it in the hands of the mob,"
and so the crisis escalates even further because now,
the mob is unchecked.
Now, they are even more vicious,
they are even more dangerous.
- [Douglas] Eisenhower was put in a corner.
Orval Faubus pushed him into a corner,
and that's not a place you wanna put Dwight Eisenhower,
especially when he's president.
- [Bill] President Eisenhower's been put in a corner.
He wants to avoid using force
to integrate Little Rock Central High School,
but since governor Faubus has now left
the nine black students who want to enroll
exposed to a white mob,
the president might not have a choice.
Above all, Eisenhower is adamant that the law of the land
as defined by the Supreme Court must be
faithfully executed and the Constitution respected.
(dramatic music)
- Orval Faubus, he said, "We'll see what happens
"when those students come to school now,
"now that there's no soldiers there to look after them.
"I sure hope there isn't any violence," he said,
"and I sure hope nobody gets shot."
What Orval Faubus was doing was ginning up
the hatred in Little Rock.
- Eisenhower found himself without much of an option,
that the governor in Arkansas was refusing his authority,
and if he let that happen,
so many other Southern governors would then have
the precedent to do the same thing,
and Eisenhower wasn't gonna let that happen.
It would be chaos, and it's not hyperbolic to say
it could lead to a second Civil War.
(dramatic music)
- [Will] Now was the moment Eisenhower had to act.
- [Dwight] We are a nation in which laws,
not men, are supreme.
Mob rule can not be allowed to override
the decisions of our courts. (dramatic music)
- He decides to send in the 101st Airborne
to enforce the law.
This was one of America's proudest,
most storied military units, liberated Europe,
and that was not going to play a role
in defending the Constitution in Little Rock.
- Here, we have the president of the United States saying,
"I am fully prepared to use the full force of my office,
"of the federal government,
"in order to uphold and enforce the law of the land."
We haven't seen these kinds of deployment of troops
used since Reconstruction. (dramatic music)
(soldier shouting)
- We had a real show of force,
soldiers that were ringed all around the school,
and we had helicopter overhead.
When we walked in the class,
we were surrounded by a cadron of paratroopers.
It took the entire United States Army
to get me into high school. (laughs)
(melancholic music)
And it made you feel great.
You felt like one week, here we had a mob of people
who were trying to keep us out and that we were now
being able to go into the school with the support
of the United States Army.
I'm the first African-American to graduate
from Little Rock Central High School, May of 1958.
- That was very heartening in Arkansas
to suddenly have Eisenhower, the hero of World War II,
on the side of young people integrating Central High.
- We received the Congressional Gold Medal,
the nine of us, and the person who presented it to us
was President Clinton, an Arkansan to another Arkansan.
(people applauding)
- 40 Years later, we know there are still more doors
to be opened, doors to be opened wider,
doors we have to keep from being shut again now.
40 years later, frankly we know we're bound
to come back where we started,
after all the weary years and silent tears,
after all the stony roads and bitter odds.
The question of race is, in the end,
still an affair of the heart.
- And so, we wind up with this extraordinary story
of a president who was not prepared to deal
with the crisis of race in America,
didn't really understand it,
but the crisis came to him and found him.
- By sending in the 101st Airborne,
Eisenhower sends a signal to those states
that will try and defy the federal government that, oh no,
I'm going to preserve the union,
I'm gonna uphold the law,
and I'm going to knock down your disorder.
It just so happens that he does it
in defense of civil rights,
and it's this moment that helps him understand
what is at stake in the struggle
for the civil rights movement. (hopeful music)
- School integration happened in the Arkansas of my youth
because president Eisenhower took action
to enforce the ruling of the Supreme Court,
but exactly 100 years earlier, a different president,
James Buchanan, took different action
to influence the ruling of the Supreme Court itself
in a very different direction.
Buchanan pressured the court to rule that black people
had no rights and that slaves were property, not people.
The case was called Dred Scott v. Sanford,
and it would set back the fight
for racial justice for decades.
(dramatic music)
- Presidents have to have moral authority.
Eisenhower had that moral authority.
He was a military leader, had a great deal of respect.
People expected him to do the right thing, and he did.
Buchanan did not.
- James Buchanan was from Pennsylvania.
He had been a Congressperson.
He was Secretary of State.
He was a diplomat.
He was a minister to Russia at one point,
and he won office largely because he'd been away
from the country while a lot of the battles
about slavery were taking place,
so he never really had to take much of a position,
but he was sympathetic towards the South.
- Buchanan was a Northerner,
but he had also won the support of pro-slavery states
and was driving a pro-slavery agenda,
and he was trying to cement that
into the DNA of the country.
- And he believed that this court, this case,
and his ascendancy to the presidency was an avenue
for solving the issue of the expansion of slavery.
(melancholic music)
Dred Scott was an enslaved man who started a legal case
that is one of the most infamous cases in American history.
- Dred Scott was my great-great-grandfather.
He fought for 11 years for his freedom,
and his case was a major catalyst for the Civil War.
- Dred Scott had been born in Virginia,
but was taken to Mississippi, and then to St. Louis.
He also had spent time in a free state,
the state of Illinois, and in Wisconsin territory,
which was free.
- Scott was staking a claim
that because he was living in free land,
he could not be a slave and therefore
deserved the rights of citizenship.
- And so it ends up in the US Supreme Court,
and that's when things really start happening.
(dramatic music) (people chatting)
- James Buchanan contacts a couple
of the Supreme Court justices because he knows
that the Dred Scott case is coming up,
and he tells them that they should resolve the question,
the question of slavery.
- In other words meaning don't just settle
the case of Dred Scott,
but say something that will help us decide,
once and for all, whether or not slavery can be extended
into the territories.
- It was very clear that Buchanan was trying to
sway the courts by influencing at least two judges
to vote in a way that would allow him
a major majority decision,
and that decision he preferred to be pro-slavery.
- [Melody] What is unusual is that a president
would try to influence the court that way.
This was so blatant.
- On the day of his inauguration,
he moves to take the oath and to give his inaugural address.
(people applauding) (pleasant music)
Essentially, he stands before the United States,
those gathered to hear him, and said,
"This is a decision for the Supreme Court.
"It's a constitutional decision, and whatever they decide,
"I'm going to cheerfully accept it," when in fact,
he already knew what that decision was going to be
because he had tampered with the decision-making process
of the Supreme Court.
(people shouting) (people applauding)
- The most important part, I think,
about the Dred Scott decision is that it declared
that slaves were not citizens,
and Justice Taney went further, and I'm paraphrasing here,
but pretty closely, that slaves, black people,
had no rights that a state should be bound to respect.
- Today, we're still reeling over the fact that we were told
that they were property and not people,
(melancholic music)
and I personally believe that the psyche
of African-Americans was damaged,
and there are many people who are still suffering
from that today. (melancholic music)
- [Jonathan] When I think of
the African-American experience,
so much of it is a wrestling over who belongs,
who can be a citizen, who can be an American,
who can be fully human.
- [Melody] Certainly, Buchanan underestimated the damage
that was done to the nation,
and so what you see is even greater tension
between North and South.
- So Buchanan's legacy is one of pushing the country
further and closer towards its ultimate fracturing
leading to the Civil War.
(dramatic music)
- The quest for racial equality has come close to being
completely extinguished many times in our history.
Thankfully, great leaders and everyday citizens alike
have kept that struggle alive even in the darkest times,
and at key moments, presidents have helped us move forward,
none more than Abraham Lincoln did
with the Emancipation Proclamation and the passage
of the 13th Amendment ending slavery.
Sometimes, presidents made what today seems small gestures,
but at the time they were made, had a big, symbolic impact.
Theodore Roosevelt was one of those presidents.
The decisions he made to advance and embrace equality
took place one person at a time.
(dramatic music) (mechanical clicking)
- Theater Roosevelt was a human dynamo.
At the age of 41, he had been an assemblyman in New York,
the head of the police commission,
the assistant secretary of the Navy,
the governor of New York, the vice president of the country.
But when Roosevelt became president,
race relations in 1901 were in a terrible, terrible place.
- This is a period in time where all across the South,
roughly three to four African-Americans per week
were being lynched, violently murdered, tortured
as a warning for African-Americans
to stay in their place.
Now, Roosevelt has earned a reputation of being
a kind of racial egalitarian figure,
but he certainly believes in the superiority of white men,
and he's very clear about that, particularly in the way
that he talks about indigenous populations:
Asian-Americans, African-Americans.
He considers them the lesser races.
- Theodore Roosevelt was my great-great-grandfather,
and he was, in several ways, a man of his time,
and he absorbed many of the prejudices of those times,
and his views on race were not what we would nowadays
consider enlightened or egalitarian.
(melancholic music)
But in his defense,
he did strongly believe that every person was entitled
to be judged as an individual,
and he believed that every person should be treated
on their own merits.
- And Booker T. Washington was one of those people.
- Booker T. Washington was my great-great-grandfather.
He had been born into slavery, and he was freed
when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued,
and he was nine years old, and then in 1881,
he got word that there was a group of people
down in this place called Tuskegee, Alabama,
and this group had some money to start a school
for formerly-enslaved people.
- He became the principal of Tuskegee,
and he became the most prominent black person in America,
and ultimately in the world at that time.
(melancholic music) (bell ringing)
- Booker T. Washington was constantly on the road,
and at some point, he meets the president,
Theodore Roosevelt, and they developed a relationship.
When Roosevelt was looking to place
federal judges in the South,
he would call on Booker T. Washington to get
his recommendations and to get his advice to edit anything
that had to do with race in his speeches.
- So the two men set up a meeting in Washington,
and it occurred to him instead of a late night meeting,
why not invite Booker T. Washington for dinner?
(melancholic music)
So he starts to send out the invitation, and then clutches.
Is it a good idea to invite a black man
to dine at the White House?
It had never been done before.
He told a friend later, "I was so ashamed that I hesitated,
"that I hastened to send the invitation out
"before I could change my mind."
- When Booker T. Washington received the invitation,
he was also hesitant to accept it because I think he foresaw
some of the backlash that they would get after the dinner.
(melancholic music)
- Social equality was the big fear,
especially in the South.
Blacks would never be welcome to be social equals,
and it had to be prevented at all costs.
(ominous music)
If we look at the lunch counters in the 1960s,
where we can or cannot dine is often a measure
of equality,
and the dining room table at the White House
was the first battle ground in that war.
It was a very low-key, convivial kind of evening
where they could talk about politics,
the upcoming 1904 election,
(uneasy music)
and it was unlikely that you could ever get
Theodore Roosevelt to stop talking,
and the evening ended at about 10 o'clock.
- After the dinner, there was a firestorm,
a backlash, from Southerners because that dinner,
that show of equality,
was something that people could not accept.
- [Deborah] The response,
especially in the South, was deadly.
- There are newspaper headlines
condemning Theodore Roosevelt saying that he has
sort of besmirched or dishonored the White House
by allowing a black person there, which is ironic
when you think about how the White House
was actually built by black people.
I don't think Theodore Roosevelt
regretted the dinner invitation,
and while he did meet with Booker T. Washington again
and continued their relationship,
he didn't ever have him over for dinner again.
(dramatic music)
- When he opened the door to the White House
to Booker T. Washington,
Theodore Roosevelt unleashed a chain of events
that made it possible for what followed
in terms of the fight for civil rights.
It was that symbol of a place at the table,
of being welcomed where no other black man
had gone before.
It was the new frontier, and once you see it,
you can't unsee it.
(dramatic music)
- [Bill] With his dinner at the White House
with Booker T. Washington,
President Theodore Roosevelt opened the door
to racial equality a tiny crack,
leaving his successors to decide whether and how
to open that door further.
Almost 50 years after that dinner,
an unlikely president, himself the grandson of slave owners,
would take up the cause.
(dramatic music) (mechanical clicking)
- [Chad] Harry Truman underwent a remarkable transformation
when it came to race.
- I'm not asking you just to vote for me.
Get out there on election day and vote for your future.
- He was a native Southerner.
His family were Confederates.
Throughout his political career,
he exhibited very little commitment, much less interest,
in fighting for African-American civil rights.
That changed when he assumed the presidency in 1945.
(dramatic music) (people applauding)
- [Wesley] When he took on the leadership mantle
of the president of the United States,
and he saw injustice, he took it personally.
He had character, he had backbone.
(patriotic music)
African-Americans always served in the armed forces.
In the Revolutionary War, there were African-American men
who served and fought. (cannon booming)
In the Civil War,
there were black regiments that were put together,
but the majority were consigned to the rear areas,
and for the most part we're not in the front lines.
(propellors whirring) (explosions booming)
- [Chad] However, when the United States
officially enters World War II,
nearly 2 million African-Americans served
in a military that is thoroughly segregated.
They performed incredible acts of heroism
from Dorrie Miller at Pearl Harbor to the Tuskegee Airmen
in Italy and other theaters of combat.
(melancholic music) (people shouting)
- So black soldiers are returning from World War II.
They come home expecting a hero's welcome,
and they find themselves attacked.
They find themselves spit on.
They find themselves ostracized and excluded.
- African-American soldiers, veterans, were assaulted.
Some were killed, pulled out of cars.
Truman saw it happening. (melancholic music)
- Isaac Woodard was a black soldier from South Carolina.
He served overseas in the Pacific Theater,
was honorably discharged in 1946.
He was on his way home.
He got into an argument with the bus driver
about using the restroom.
The bus driver had already alerted local authorities
that there was a troublemaking black soldier on the bus.
They removed him from the bus, and in an alleyway,
began to viciously beat him.
The beating continued at the local jail
where Woodard woke up the following morning blinded
by the blows that he had received by the police chief
and other officers.
So it was a combination of the visceral nature
of Woodard's beating that shocked Truman,
but also recognizing that he was going to continue to face
increased pressure from African-American
civil rights groups and that African-Americans
would engage in civil disobedience,
that they would refuse to fight for their country
if segregation remained intact
in the United States armed forces.
Harry Truman was many things,
but perhaps first and foremost, he was a politician.
So he makes the calculation that supporting
the desegregation of the military will garner him
political support in the North and amongst
African-Americans that will ultimately offset
the losses that he would inevitably have
amongst white Southern Democrats.
- So, he decided by executive action,
he would desegregate the United States armed forces.
Just like that, he wrote it.
Let 'em fight it on the Hill.
If they don't like it, too bad.
- The executive order comes out in 1948,
and 1948 is an election year.
We see not only do African-Americans vote
for Harry Truman in the presidential election,
they change their political affiliation to Democrats.
So 1948 is the first year that the number of black Democrats
outpaces the number of black Republicans.
It is a watershed moment
in American political and social history.
By going in a direction of boldness to act
and act decisively on this question
of equality in the armed forces.
Truman really did fundamentally change the shape
of civil rights within the United States.
- [Bill] President Truman ordered an end
to racial segregation in the military.
President Eisenhower sped the end of segregation
in the nation's classrooms.
But in the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson would go
even further in an attempt to overcome centuries
of deeply ingrained prejudice and racism.
He puts the full weight of his presidency
behind the efforts of the civil rights movement.
(people applauding)
(dramatic music) (mechanical clicking)
(dramatic music) (dog barking)
- Once you had the early '60s with the freedom rides
and the birth of SNCC and Martin Luther king
and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
and the fact of showdowns of integration at places
like University of Mississippi with James Meredith
and University of Alabama,
it was clear that civil rights was the issue of the moment.
- The Kennedy administration had started to talk about
and plan for a civil rights bill and to begin
the negotiations necessary to move it forward,
and it wasn't clear what its outcome would be.
(dramatic music) (siren wailing)
- [Reporter] Just a moment, just a moment.
We have a bulletin coming in.
We now switch you directly to the Parkland Hospital.
- [Reporter] President Kennedy has been assassinated,
it's official now.
The president is dead. (melancholic music)
- On the night of November 22nd, 1963,
the day John Kennedy was murdered,
Lyndon Johnson is back home in Washington that night,
and he's lying in bed with his aides all around him
giving orders about what is to be done, and he says,
"I wanna push President Kennedy's civil rights bill,
"and I'm not gonna change a comma,"
and one of the aides said, "Maybe you should wait on that,"
and Johnson said, "What the hell is the presidency for
"if not to do the big things that other men might not?"
- So here comes Lyndon Johnson who makes the decision
that is his first act as president is going to be
to call on the nation to uphold
the vision of John F. Kennedy.
(tense music) (people applauding)
- No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor
President Kennedy's memory than the earliest
possible passage of the civil rights bill
for which he fought so long. (people applauding)
- So this is where we land with Lyndon Johnson
on a national stage essentially saying
I'm going to push through the most comprehensive
civil rights bill that the nation had ever seen.
- It is time now to write the next chapter
and to write it in the books of law.
(people applauding)
- And then it was on. (dramatic music)
- His obstacle was his own Democratic Southerner friends.
People he dined with, laughed with, partied with,
built his career off of, studied.
- Senator Richard Russell of Georgia emerges over time
as the leader of the Southern Caucus.
That is to say, the group of Southern Democrats
who voted together on a whole range of issues,
but none more so than civil rights.
He was really the guardian in many ways of segregation.
- It was very clear that Johnson was going to have to
push back against Richard Russell and others
who were still holding, grasping tightly to their perception
of what the Southern way of life was.
- Richard Russell believed that LBJ would carry on
the proud tradition of defending segregation,
and then of course,
once he becomes President Lyndon Johnson,
not only is challenging segregation,
but really launching a head-on attack as no politician had
in the United States since Reconstruction.
- Lyndon Johnson is a bully.
He is domineering. He is forceful.
He uses his physical space to intimidate people
in order to get the outcome that he wants,
and he puts all of those things into effect
in trying to get the civil rights bill through Congress.
- Lyndon Johnson tells Richard Russell,
"If you try to get in my way, I'm gonna mow you down."
- "I am a steam roller here.
"We're gonna get the civil rights legislation done,"
and Russell said, "You don't know what you're doing
"because if you do it, you will lose the South
"from the Democratic Party," and Johnson said,
"To hell with it. So be it.
"I'll lose it, but I'm not missing this moment."
- Johnson, for all of his pragmatic political skill,
heard the music of history.
- Their cause must be our cause, too
because it's not just negroes, but really it's all of us
who must overcome the crippling legacy
of bigotry and injustice,
and we shall overcome.
(people applauding)
♪ We shall overcome some day ♪
(melancholic music)
- So Johnson did it, and he gave the big speeches.
We got the civil rights and voting rights acts done,
and he also lost the South for the Democratic Party.
Dick Russell wasn't wrong.
- But Lyndon Johnson was right that there was nowhere
for the country to go but forward.
- So it's striking.
Here, we have this moment.
The president is signing off on this comprehensive piece
of civil rights legislation.
It's a moment of celebration.
However, few days later, what happens?
America is going up in flames.
- [Reporter] Six days of rioting in a negro section
of Los Angeles left behind scenes
reminiscent of war-torn cities.
(dramatic music)
- [Bill] President Johnson has just signed the single
most important piece of civil rights legislation,
the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
but what should have been a celebration
is quickly overshadowed by the violence that erupts
in the Watts section of Los Angeles and soon spreads
to other cities throughout the country.
The riots reflect what Dr. King calls
the language of the unheard and raised the question
of whether the country is really willing to embrace
the cause of the equality and take the steps
necessary to achieve it.
(ominous music)
- President Johnson, he was surprised, perplexed by the fact
that these tremendous legislative accomplishments
in 1964 and 1965 were not enough.
- You know, he had a disconnect with the larger idea
of what systematic racism was.
He simply was trying to get a law that would
make things better, and it did,
and he deserves credit for that,
but he also was somebody slow to understand
the times, they're a-changing.
It's an era where you have a black power movement starting.
(camera shutter clicking)
The fight against systemic racism had many components,
and now, the streets were filled with anger and rage.
- This suggests, in many ways, the limitations on
these tremendous legislative accomplishments
which were so focused on overcoming
segregation in the South.
There were a whole host of other problems
that beset black communities around the country.
So in 1967, Lyndon Johnson appoints a small committee
called the Kerner Commission after its chairman,
Otto Kerner from Illinois.
- And the Kerner commission embarks on a one-year
investigation into the root causes of
racial rebellion and riot in America's cities.
- Problems of economic opportunity,
of access to education, of police brutality,
of participation in the democratic process
and elections and so forth,
and it was the persistence of these problems
that explain why racial unrest escalates across the years
following the '64 and '65 bills.
- They conclude that America is moving towards
two societies: one white, one black, separate and unequal.
And from there they say,
"The United States must take decisive action,
"or these rebellions and these riots will continue
"for the foreseeable future."
- It goes on to say that white society created
these problems, accepts these problems,
and until white society decides to do something about it,
the problem will continue to exist.
It was a stinging indictment on American society
and the American body politic.
What's striking to me today is that so much of what
they said in 1968 still holds true today.
- We've had 46 presidents.
Those presidents have all governed either in
a slave-holding era, an era of civil war,
or an era of state-sanctioned white supremacy after slavery.
I do believe that fundamentally,
the story of the country is one of imperfect
and temporary victories for the forces of light,
but nothing's inevitable about it.
Presidents are people, people are people,
lawmakers are people.
And so, our whole history is the story of trying to do
the best we can and resist our worst impulses.
- More than 50 years after the release of the Kerner Report,
it's painfully clear that the color of a person's skin
still determines far too much about how they'll be treated
in nearly every aspect of American life,
but the millions of Americans across all races
and backgrounds who continue to stand up
for justice and equality,
they give a new hope to a very old fight.
We're now living through a historic
and long overdue reckoning about systemic racism in America,
about our past, our present,
and how we can move forward into the future together.
I believe Martin Luther King, Jr. was right when he said
that the arc of the moral universe is long,
but it bends towards justice,
but he might've said, a little less poetically,
that actually it zigs and zags toward justice,
and only when people are pulling on it with all their might
to bend in the right direction.
That means we've all got to keep pulling.
(chamber music)
(rifles firing) (chamber music)