Civil Rights and Social Justice Overview

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 that continues. Tuesday was the first day I was tear gassed. It's not the last, but the first day I was tear gassed in the streets of Ferguson. You were in the middle of the protests 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. Go go go go shoot! The call that... What was happening on the streets was hands up, don't shoot. Because what we were being told was that Michael Brown had his hands up in the air when Darren Wilson shot him. What we see is a systemic injustice. You know, Dr. King told another newsman that riots are the language of the unheard. I'm tired of it. I'm fed up. Hands up! Don't shoot! Black lives matter! Black lives matter! We will take the protesting that is happening right now, that's 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 highway traffic. 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. 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. As late as the 1950s, every time Black Americans push and demand their rights under 14 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. So, how did we get here? Alright, 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. Of course, there is no such thing as separate and equal. There never was separate and equal. But 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. A lot of the good jobs were in the factories, but blacks couldn't work there. They were segregated out. Black people suffer through economic inequality, through limited opportunities to secure the jobs that will help them survive and thrive. Southerners are trying to restore the optics. 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, that the black chickens do better if they're kept in one yard to themselves, and the white chickens do better if they're kept in a separate yard to themselves. They each do better under those conditions. We know the signs of Jim Crow. The water fountains, the bathrooms, the pools, but the consequences could be seen everywhere. 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 the 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. A white America had no intention of handing over the key. The 14th Amendment had been shattered, destroyed. The idea that we were all citizens, that we were all equal in front of the law took a backseat to basically reflect the idea that African Americans have no right to expect equal treatment. Black Americans are disappointed with the failure of the promise of the 14th Amendment. The notion of equality, the notion of 14th Amendment rights, never really took shape. We needed to put some teeth in the 14th Amendment. 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. Marshall is bad, and he is confident, he's cocky. Extraordinary man. The 14th Amendment and its grand ideal of equality under the law. have met no more than succeeding generations were willing for them to meet. What is essential now is a new kind of activism, an activism in the pursuit of justice. 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. He's raised in West Baltimore, but he cannot apply to the University of Maryland Law School because it doesn't accept Black students. And 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. 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. 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. There were many who carried on this fiction that black people want to be with black people and we want to be with our own people and as long as it's equal what's the harm? What's the problem with us being segregated? Well segregation was and is a way in which the society tells group of human beings that they are inferior. 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 show children two identical dolls, except one is white and one is black. They ask a simple question, which doll is bad and 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 14th Amendment, you needed this evidence of the damaging effect of segregation. 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 14th 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? Segregation impacted the hearts and minds of black schoolchildren and undermined their ability to participate in a democracy. If Dred Scott It's one of the most monumental decisions in the history of the Supreme Court. The only one more monumental, perhaps, is Brown v. Board of Education. 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 believe... that inside the law is always the possibility to recapture what equal protection and citizenship actually meant. 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. 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 hard and inflexible core of resistance they must be reckoned with. 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. Now we've got this Supreme Court decision and we have jurisdictions that are defying the decision at every turn. 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? 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. And 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 Rose Parks. I live in Montgomery, Alabama. 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. 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? Well, I wouldn't be here if that was the whole story. 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 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. 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, where 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 moving to the back of the bus and no question leaves an everlasting impression to give back to us. She never asked us to follow her life. All she ever asked is that we uphold what is right. 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 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. I said a young man... 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. And he does. And in 1963, his devotion is put to the test, because now he has to change the mind of a president. Good evening, Senator John F. Kennedy. I'm not satisfied until every American enjoys his full constitutional rights. I think we can do better. When John Kennedy was running for president in 1960, Black people started flocking to him as their candidate because he had shown some compassion for the civil rights movement. And when the election came around, they turned out for him in huge numbers. But very quickly after he got into office, Kennedy started backpedaling. The Soviet Union made a breakthrough in outer space. But that... It made the people of the world begin to 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 and the next generation conquer or are the communists going to be successful? That's the great issue. Kennedy mostly campaigned on the Cold War. He saw the Civil Rights Movement as a sort of an impediment to the United States conducting the Cold War. And so for the first two years of the administration, very little happened. The blacks truly 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. More than 10 years after Brown was decided, most black schoolchildren 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. As the nation was approaching 1963, it occurred to many people that this is an entire century since Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. 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. He's playing that role that Frederick Douglass had 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. 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. In 1962, MLK delivers a draft of the second Emancipation Proclamation for the president's signature. JFK refuses to sign it. In many ways, that felt like a step too 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 sort of 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... In the social and even legal system of Jim Crow, one drop of black blood made a person black. What does that really 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. I mean, think about that. They'd rather throw in a real contaminant rather than coexist with the imaginary one. See, because that's what one drop means. At the heart of it, it means black. is a contaminant. Of course white folks resist integration. They're terrified of being infected. But see, 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. Governor Wallace, rising in salute. 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 staff was set upon... Father Vulture's carpet biker and federal troops so that the infamous illegal 14th Amendment might be passed. I think it's important to remember that, in general, the South took a certain approach toward the 14th Amendment, which I can summarize 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. 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. Every day, thousands of Negroes would queue to register to vote. King's organizers battled against continuous white hostility. What you're really trying to do is intimidate these people, and by making them stand in the raid, 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. Non-violent 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. I swear I'll get you. It's not on the record. The strength of nonviolence. comes from the confrontation with injustice. That heightens the contradiction. What you're doing is trying to make change, and what they're doing is trying to resist change. 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. 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. Bayard Rustin was a man of many parts. King is forming this coalition. He's connecting with other activists like Bayard Rustin. 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 into breach when everything else fails. So you probably never heard the name Bayard Rustin. Not only did Bayard Rustin work with MLK, he actually introduced the idea of non-violent 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. 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 is going too fast. And so that idea that he's pushing too far and going too fast, but it's a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, is kind of a disorienting juxtaposition for him. 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. 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. The dog will not stop until his duty and his command is finished. I was dragged off to jail in August. My dress was torn because they handled me so roughly. Birmingham was called the Johannesburg of America. You've got to... to keep the white and the black separate. Let the law enforcement agency, that's what you've got them hired for. 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. Birmingham is called Bombingham 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. Some of my very 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 would often get on the radio and make statements like Niggas have moved into a white neighborhood. We better expect some bloodshed tonight. And sure enough, there would be bloodshed. 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 hand. 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. 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. 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. So almost out of desperation, he makes the 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. 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... 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. 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. He began writing on pieces of toilet paper, on the edges of newspapers. The jailer didn't give him a piece of stationery to write his letter on. 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. It rings in the ear of every negro with piercing familiarity. When your first name becomes nigga, 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. It's almost always meant never. The Negro is not able to talk in any terms of less than complete integration. 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 shelled for the time. If 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 f***ed up. 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. We think that sometime this week, we should 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. 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. 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. 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. Children came out of the churches and marched onto the streets, and they were joyous. Bull Connor wasn't pleased. He saw the children as vermin. that he wanted to get rid of. Will Connor decided to call out the dogs and to call out the fire hoses. Teenagers, children, bodies bent, pushed down the street by the spray of a fire hose. Martin Luther King was a master of public relations and he knew that white violence coupled with black non-violence 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. It shocked the world. It just was a total embarrassment to the United States. This can't possibly be what the 14th Amendment was meant for. This can't possibly be the American dream. This 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, these images of police assaulting young people, children. It made the ideology of the Cold War look ridiculous. We claimed to be the nation of freedom against the Soviet Union, but here we had people who were demanding genuine freedom and they were being... Assaulted by the police. The person who holds in his hand the power to fulfill the American dream happens to be a person who is white. The Kennedy administration watched what was going on in the streets and realized that they hadn't been paying enough attention to the real racial division in America. There were people who got in touch with the president and the White House to say this is outrageous. Before those protests, only 5% of Americans believed that civil rights was the most important domestic issue in the United States. After those protests, 50% of people believed 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. 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. 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. The University of Sotosa tight security guard. The state police, he himself, to prevent the state university. 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. 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. Something's got to give. Just a minute. 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 the rights and sovereignty of this state and its peoples, to hereby denounce and forbid this illegal and unwarranted action by the central government. Wallace was denying everything that America stood for. 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. It was more than a hot day. It was a 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 were standing in the door, I had every right in the world to face him and go to that school. Kennedy still at this point had not really identified himself with the demands of the civil rights movement. 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. The National Guard troops arrive by mid-afternoon. President Kennedy calls on the Alabama National Guard to... forced Wallace to integrate the University of Alabama. Now, the general confronts the governor as a representative of the federal government. Wallace knew he was defeated. The federal government would prevail. This then is the moment when Governor George Wallace of Alabama walked away from the schoolhouse door. He gave up, walked away. And the two students were allowed to enroll. 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. Now on 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. 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's 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. 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 on folks with privilege to recognize the humanity and the citizenship of folks with darker skins. We have to treat them just like you wanna 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... 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. I think King must have been surprised when he heard the speech, because 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. And his civil rights bill would use... He used 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 love my mother... 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 simply the culmination. I was only 19 years old and just 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 there was more black people than I'd ever seen. I had a real sense that this was something really special. Most people who've heard about it, 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. 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. Like many people 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. 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. We've been waiting for the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation to be realized. We're waiting for the 14th Amendment to be realized. A hundred years of patience is quite enough. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. People will say, well why can't you wait? Or eventually things will change. You can't wait. It is the fierce urgency of now. Now is the time. Dr. King understood how we couldn't endure much longer. The time for being patient and quiet was over. Now is the time. Wait almost always means never. Almost always means never. That weight gets met with another weight and another weight and another weight until you've died before you can even actually see the rights that you have been fighting for. Now is the time! It was radical in its insistence on real change now. It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. 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 ass. This wasn't about a favor. This was about making good on the promise that is the foundation of the new American society. Dr. King, he 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. The newfound strength of the civil rights movement will not vanish or wither. We're 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 a 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. 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. Because when we refuse to wait When we combat complacency, look at what we can accomplish together. And look who else we can inspire to demand equality for themselves. Freedom and equality for everyone. And the 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 14th Amendment to apply to women. 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? So high, I'm so high, and I like it, hey I'm so high, I'm so high, and I like it, hey I am a be today. This now I cover dreams. Somehow I feel okay. Somehow I feel okay. Whoa. Yeah, whoa, whoa Yeah, whoa, whoa Yeah, whoa, whoa I'm your big brother I'm your big brother Let go, life does get tough No need to stress Hold you back too much Let's go Hurry, define the solution Where will you be For the revolution?

It's not the last, but the first day I was tear gassed in the streets of Ferguson. You were in the middle of the protests 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.

Go go go go shoot! The call that... What was happening on the streets was hands up, don't shoot. Because what we were being told was that Michael Brown had his hands up in the air when Darren Wilson shot him. What we see is a systemic injustice.

You know, Dr. King told another newsman that riots are the language of the unheard. I'm tired of it. I'm fed up. Hands up! Don't shoot!

Black lives matter! Black lives matter! We will take the protesting that is happening right now, that's 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 highway traffic. 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. 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. As late as the 1950s, every time Black Americans push and demand their rights under 14 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.

So, how did we get here? Alright, 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. Of course, there is no such thing as separate and equal.

There never was separate and equal. But 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.

A lot of the good jobs were in the factories, but blacks couldn't work there. They were segregated out. Black people suffer through economic inequality, through limited opportunities to secure the jobs that will help them survive and thrive.

Southerners are trying to restore the optics. 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, that the black chickens do better if they're kept in one yard to themselves, and the white chickens do better if they're kept in a separate yard to themselves.

They each do better under those conditions. We know the signs of Jim Crow. The water fountains, the bathrooms, the pools, but the consequences could be seen everywhere.

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 the 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.

A white America had no intention of handing over the key. The 14th Amendment had been shattered, destroyed. The idea that we were all citizens, that we were all equal in front of the law took a backseat to basically reflect the idea that African Americans have no right to expect equal treatment. Black Americans are disappointed with the failure of the promise of the 14th Amendment.

The notion of equality, the notion of 14th Amendment rights, never really took shape. We needed to put some teeth in the 14th Amendment. 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. Marshall is bad, and he is confident, he's cocky. Extraordinary man.

The 14th Amendment and its grand ideal of equality under the law. have met no more than succeeding generations were willing for them to meet. What is essential now is a new kind of activism, an activism in the pursuit of justice. 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. He's raised in West Baltimore, but he cannot apply to the University of Maryland Law School because it doesn't accept Black students. And 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. 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. 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. There were many who carried on this fiction that black people want to be with black people and we want to be with our own people and as long as it's equal what's the harm? What's the problem with us being segregated?

Well segregation was and is a way in which the society tells group of human beings that they are inferior. 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 show children two identical dolls, except one is white and one is black. They ask a simple question, which doll is bad and 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 14th Amendment, you needed this evidence of the damaging effect of segregation.

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 14th 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? Segregation impacted the hearts and minds of black schoolchildren and undermined their ability to participate in a democracy. If Dred Scott It's one of the most monumental decisions in the history of the Supreme Court.

The only one more monumental, perhaps, is Brown v. Board of Education. 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 believe... that inside the law is always the possibility to recapture what equal protection and citizenship actually meant. 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. 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 hard and inflexible core of resistance they must be reckoned with. 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. Now we've got this Supreme Court decision and we have jurisdictions that are defying the decision at every turn.

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? 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. And 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 Rose Parks. I live in Montgomery, Alabama. 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. 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?

Well, I wouldn't be here if that was the whole story. 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 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. 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, where 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 moving to the back of the bus and no question leaves an everlasting impression to give back to us. She never asked us to follow her life. All she ever asked is that we uphold what is right. 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 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. I said a young man... 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. And he does.

And in 1963, his devotion is put to the test, because now he has to change the mind of a president. Good evening, Senator John F. Kennedy. I'm not satisfied until every American enjoys his full constitutional rights.

I think we can do better. When John Kennedy was running for president in 1960, Black people started flocking to him as their candidate because he had shown some compassion for the civil rights movement. And when the election came around, they turned out for him in huge numbers.

But very quickly after he got into office, Kennedy started backpedaling. The Soviet Union made a breakthrough in outer space. But that... It made the people of the world begin to 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 and the next generation conquer or are the communists going to be successful?

That's the great issue. Kennedy mostly campaigned on the Cold War. He saw the Civil Rights Movement as a sort of an impediment to the United States conducting the Cold War.

And so for the first two years of the administration, very little happened. The blacks truly 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. More than 10 years after Brown was decided, most black schoolchildren 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. As the nation was approaching 1963, it occurred to many people that this is an entire century since Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. 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. He's playing that role that Frederick Douglass had 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. 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. In 1962, MLK delivers a draft of the second Emancipation Proclamation for the president's signature.

JFK refuses to sign it. In many ways, that felt like a step too 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 sort of 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... In the social and even legal system of Jim Crow, one drop of black blood made a person black. What does that really 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.

I mean, think about that. They'd rather throw in a real contaminant rather than coexist with the imaginary one. See, because that's what one drop means. At the heart of it, it means black. is a contaminant.

Of course white folks resist integration. They're terrified of being infected. But see, 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. Governor Wallace, rising in salute.

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 staff was set upon... Father Vulture's carpet biker and federal troops so that the infamous illegal 14th Amendment might be passed. I think it's important to remember that, in general, the South took a certain approach toward the 14th Amendment, which I can summarize 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. 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.

Every day, thousands of Negroes would queue to register to vote. King's organizers battled against continuous white hostility. What you're really trying to do is intimidate these people, and by making them stand in the raid, 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. Non-violent 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. I swear I'll get you. It's not on the record.

The strength of nonviolence. comes from the confrontation with injustice. That heightens the contradiction.

What you're doing is trying to make change, and what they're doing is trying to resist change. 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.

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.

Bayard Rustin was a man of many parts. King is forming this coalition. He's connecting with other activists like Bayard Rustin.

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 into breach when everything else fails. So you probably never heard the name Bayard Rustin.

Not only did Bayard Rustin work with MLK, he actually introduced the idea of non-violent 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. 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 is going too fast. And so that idea that he's pushing too far and going too fast, but it's a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, is kind of a disorienting juxtaposition for him. 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. 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. The dog will not stop until his duty and his command is finished. I was dragged off to jail in August.

My dress was torn because they handled me so roughly. Birmingham was called the Johannesburg of America. You've got to... to keep the white and the black separate. Let the law enforcement agency, that's what you've got them hired for.

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.

Birmingham is called Bombingham 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. Some of my very 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 would often get on the radio and make statements like Niggas have moved into a white neighborhood. We better expect some bloodshed tonight. And sure enough, there would be bloodshed.

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 hand.

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.

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. 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.

So almost out of desperation, he makes the 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.

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...

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. 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.

He began writing on pieces of toilet paper, on the edges of newspapers. The jailer didn't give him a piece of stationery to write his letter on. 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.

It rings in the ear of every negro with piercing familiarity. When your first name becomes nigga, 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. It's almost always meant never.

The Negro is not able to talk in any terms of less than complete integration. 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 shelled for the time. If 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 f***ed up. 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.

We think that sometime this week, we should 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. 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.

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. 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. Children came out of the churches and marched onto the streets, and they were joyous. Bull Connor wasn't pleased.

He saw the children as vermin. that he wanted to get rid of. Will Connor decided to call out the dogs and to call out the fire hoses. Teenagers, children, bodies bent, pushed down the street by the spray of a fire hose.

Martin Luther King was a master of public relations and he knew that white violence coupled with black non-violence 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. It shocked the world.

It just was a total embarrassment to the United States. This can't possibly be what the 14th Amendment was meant for. This can't possibly be the American dream.

This 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, these images of police assaulting young people, children.

It made the ideology of the Cold War look ridiculous. We claimed to be the nation of freedom against the Soviet Union, but here we had people who were demanding genuine freedom and they were being... Assaulted by the police. The person who holds in his hand the power to fulfill the American dream happens to be a person who is white.

The Kennedy administration watched what was going on in the streets and realized that they hadn't been paying enough attention to the real racial division in America. There were people who got in touch with the president and the White House to say this is outrageous. Before those protests, only 5% of Americans believed that civil rights was the most important domestic issue in the United States.

After those protests, 50% of people believed 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. 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. 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. The University of Sotosa tight security guard.

The state police, he himself, to prevent the state university. 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.

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. Something's got to give. Just a minute. 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 the rights and sovereignty of this state and its peoples, to hereby denounce and forbid this illegal and unwarranted action by the central government. Wallace was denying everything that America stood for. 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. It was more than a hot day.

It was a 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 were standing in the door, I had every right in the world to face him and go to that school. Kennedy still at this point had not really identified himself with the demands of the civil rights movement.

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. The National Guard troops arrive by mid-afternoon.

President Kennedy calls on the Alabama National Guard to... forced Wallace to integrate the University of Alabama. Now, the general confronts the governor as a representative of the federal government. Wallace knew he was defeated. The federal government would prevail.

This then is the moment when Governor George Wallace of Alabama walked away from the schoolhouse door. He gave up, walked away. And the two students were allowed to enroll.

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. Now on 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. 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's 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.

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 on folks with privilege to recognize the humanity and the citizenship of folks with darker skins. We have to treat them just like you wanna 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... 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. I think King must have been surprised when he heard the speech, because 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. And his civil rights bill would use...

He used 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 love my mother... 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 simply the culmination. I was only 19 years old and just 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 there was more black people than I'd ever seen. I had a real sense that this was something really special. Most people who've heard about it, 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.

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.

Like many people 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. 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. We've been waiting for the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation to be realized. We're waiting for the 14th Amendment to be realized.

A hundred years of patience is quite enough. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. People will say, well why can't you wait?

Or eventually things will change. You can't wait. It is the fierce urgency of now.

Now is the time. Dr. King understood how we couldn't endure much longer. The time for being patient and quiet was over.

Now is the time. Wait almost always means never. Almost always means never.

That weight gets met with another weight and another weight and another weight until you've died before you can even actually see the rights that you have been fighting for. Now is the time! It was radical in its insistence on real change now. It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. 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 ass. This wasn't about a favor. This was about making good on the promise that is the foundation of the new American society.

Dr. King, he 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.

The newfound strength of the civil rights movement will not vanish or wither. We're 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 a 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. 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.

Because when we refuse to wait When we combat complacency, look at what we can accomplish together. And look who else we can inspire to demand equality for themselves. Freedom and equality for everyone. And the 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 14th Amendment to apply to women. 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? So high, I'm so high, and I like it, hey I'm so high, I'm so high, and I like it, hey I am a be today. This now I cover dreams. Somehow I feel okay. Somehow I feel okay.

Whoa. Yeah, whoa, whoa Yeah, whoa, whoa Yeah, whoa, whoa I'm your big brother I'm your big brother Let go, life does get tough No need to stress Hold you back too much Let's go Hurry, define the solution Where will you be For the revolution?

Transcript for:Civil Rights and Social Justice Overview

Transcript for:
Civil Rights and Social Justice Overview