Original subtitles

[insects chirping]

[♪♪♪]

JOHN POWELL: You can't understand the United States history

without understanding the role that slavery played.

It was already a very formal institution

by the time United States became a nation.

It actually defined the nation.

IAN HANEY LOPEZ: Slavery didn't just end and go away.

We as a country were formed out of a compromise with slavery.

The southern colonies were not willing to be part of a union,

part of a national government

unless the institution of slavery was protected

and the price of protecting that institution

was disproportionate power to the South politically

and it carries through today.

JODY ALLEN: We possibly could have lightened some of the consequences

of slavery if there had not been such a concerted effort

to maintain the differences between blacks and whites.

It's kind of like an infection, I think. It may go away

but it always bubbles back up to the top eventually.

I think that's what's happening now.

[alarm blaring]

[explosions]

[indistinct shouting]

- What do we want? - Justice!

- When do we want it? - Now!

MAN: They're mad. I'm mad. We should all be mad, man.

We should all be angry because of what's going on right now.

NEWS ANCHOR: Law enforcement sources tell CNN, Roof admitted

that he shot worshippers in cold blood

as they gathered for a Bible study, Wednesday

at historic Emanuel AME Church.

He's chilling motive, one source tells CNN that the 21 year-old

wanted to start a race war.

FRANCES CAUSEY: God, nothing ever changes here.

Why does this keep happening over and over again?

I was born in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1963

into a world where white superiority

was rarely questioned.

As a child, the only black people I ever interacted with

in a meaningful way were the people who worked for us.

I loved them like family.

I felt a huge amount of sadness as a kid

seeing how they and other African-Americans

were treated in the South.

I didn't understand it.

I knew something was deeply wrong

but it was not okay to talk about it.

My longtime friend and producing partner, Sally Holst and I

shared a similar upbringing.

SALLY HOLST: You know, I felt it.

It was confusion. It was crazy-making and anger.

CAUSEY: Like Sally, the sorrow, anger and lingering questions

about the racist South of my childhood

shadowed me into adulthood.

I never understood how much my own uncomfortable journey

to talk about this

was connected to an untold history of our nation.

It's hard to be black in a world controlled by white folks.

Du Bois said, we always have the double consciousness.

We're trying to be black and meanwhile, you got a white ghost

hovering over your head that says,

"If you don't do this, you'll get killed.

If you don't do this, you won't get no money.

If you don't do this, nobody would think you're beautiful.

If you don't do this, nobody would think you're smart."

That's the ghost.

[♪♪♪]

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: The transatlantic slave trade took off

in the early 18th century and produced huge profits.

[♪♪♪]

GERALD HORNE: One of the reasons why the United States

is such an advanced country

is because of not only slavery but the slave trade.

We know that slavery was financed from places

like New York, Rhode Island, Newport and Boston.

CAUSEY: One of the reasons Wall Street was created in the first place

was to finance the slave industry.

Everything from buying slaves to even mortgaging them.

HORNE: What you see is not only the building of more ships

which employs workers.

You're seeing the building of insurance companies

because Africans are revolting

and you need to have insurance policies.

You see the construction of banking

because these voyages have to be financed

and therein, you begin to see the seeds, the kernels

of an advanced economic system

and the rise of capitalism is clearly on the backs of slavery

and the enslaved Africans.

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: It was astonishing to me that many of the first Africans

in the American colonies weren't slaves but indentured servants.

For a while, poor blacks and whites

worked alongside each other.

POWELL: The connection between Europeans and Africans

was actually quite robust.

A lot of marriages formally and informally.

A lot of children formally and informally.

Probably much greater integration

between people of African descent and European descent

than we have today.

CAUSEY: Indentured whites and blacks worked for their masters

for five to seven years.

Africans went from indentured servitude

to enslavement gradually.

One colony, one person and one law at a time.

PAUL KIVEL: It started with the dispossession

of Native Americans. So to the concept that

they didn't actually have title to the land or deserve the land

because they weren't Christians.

So all of U.S. law around land and the accumulation of land

by the English and French and Spanish was based upon that.

Europeans felt completely comfortable going into Africa

and enslaving people who are also heathens, non-Christians

and bringing them to the new world, to South and Central

and North America and so slavery was justified by this.

It allowed the conquerors to feel righteous that

they were in fact doing favors to whoever they encountered.

It was all redefined as a benevolent process.

POWELL: To most people's mind, America means white.

The country was founded by two groups, Anglos and Saxons,

Christian protestant, English-speaking.

So all these things get bound up together.

KIVEL: Just being Christian was not distinction enough

to separate who was entitled to civil rights

and respect and resources.

So Christianity became divided into white Christians --

really, white male Christians -- then everybody else.

There was a racial supremacy

and a religious supremacy intertwined.

[bell tolls]

CAUSEY: Yet 1,000 black and white Virginians rose up together

in rebellion against rich planters in 1676.

The rebels wanted more wealth and power in the new America.

Nathaniel Bacon led the uprising.

POWELL: The Bacon Rebellion was about the political movement

and economic movement.

It was people demanding democracy,

a chance to participate in running the colony,

Virginia colony and demanding land.

ALLEN: There are these people coming together

more along class lines than race lines.

And even though the colonial government

was eventually successful, I think that really scared them.

POWELL: The elite decided to split those groups

and start creating whiteness in the colonies

and part of their charge,

all the men was to be drafted into slave patrol

to manage the slaves for the elites

and they always had this role of allegiance to the elites

and managing those underneath for the elites.

ALLEN: This notion of divide and conquer

to keep poor whites always knowing

that they were not at the bottom.

No matter how degraded you may be as a white, you're white.

And there's one group below you.

That seems very simple enough but it was a very heavy curse.

CAUSEY: Virginia, where my ancestors originally settled,

was the first colony to pass harsher slave laws

that legally sealed this new alliance

between rich planters and poor whites.

The first kind of white privilege that we see

in this country is what was given to indentured servants

as they were freed up to have some land,

to have the ability to be in the militia,

in the slave patrols to get cloth and tools

and other things when they were released.

They just still didn't have economic power

but they had benefits as white people

and at the same time, enslaved Africans had nothing.

They had no rights, no property. Nothing in their name at all.

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: Growing up, I knew both sides of my family owned slaves

but there was never much of a conversation about it.

Our family history haunted me enough to make this film.

My most famous ancestor was a guy named Edmund Pendleton

who was a judge, planter and slave owner.

Pendleton was my uncle six times removed.

I had known a bit about Pendleton's life

but in my research for this film,

I discovered more details than I ever bargained for.

ANNE CONKLING: Pendleton was tall, handsome.

He was charming.

He was a brilliant man.

He was an arch-conservative,

what we would today call right-wing extremist.

He went from being an arch-conservative

to being a spokesman for the revolution.

[♪♪♪]

[gunfire]

CAUSEY: Pendleton became the first governor of the Virginia Colony.

And I was kind of proud to learn that he played a major role

in helping to establish the new nation.

CONKLING: Pendleton drafts the Virginia Resolution for Independence

and that says that the delegation be instructed

to propose to declare the united colonies free

and independent states absolved from all allegiance

or dependence upon the crown or parliament of Great Britain.

He wrote all those words which were then given

to a Pony Express rider who carried them to Philadelphia.

When they got to Philadelphia, they said,

Virginia says independence

and all the other colonies fell into place.

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: But I was really disturbed to learn that Pendleton

was also asked to write a controversial line

in the Virginia Declaration of Rights.

Words that would institutionalize white supremacy

and reverberate throughout U.S. history.

I have written a little bit about

Virginia founder, Edmund Pendleton

and there's not a lot of people that know very much

about Edmund Pendleton and Frances is related to Edmund.

As I understand the history, they said, "Wait a minute.

We can't have these principles of liberty applying to slaves."

And so he comes up with the line basically that signals

in kind of coded language to the other slave owners

that they're going to exclude the slaves from liberty.

That all men by nature are equally free and independent

and have certain rights.

And he came up with the line,

"When they enter into a state of society"

which everyone understood to mean

that the slaves would be excluded.

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: Slaves weren't even considered human.

So how would they ever be accepted into civil society?

But still, slavery was controversial.

I wondered, did Pendleton and the other founding fathers

have a more pressing reason to break from Great Britain?

HORNE: London had moved in Somerset's Case in 1772

to abolish slavery within England.

There was a lot of fear and suspicion

on this side of the Atlantic

that that particular decision would have legs.

CAUSEY: I was always taught the Revolutionary War

was about things like freedom

and taxation without representation.

So was independence from Great Britain

really much more about preserving slavery?

KIVEL: Almost every founding father was a slave owner.

Slavery was an integral part not just of the Southern economy

but the entire Northern economy.

So it was just completely integrated into the thinking

of the wealthy men that wrote the Constitution.

MIKE CHURCH: So the fact that the constitution is a perfect

instrument is just bogus from the start if you admit

and this is the only truth that you can arrive at

and because it did not ban the slavery

and it left it in there

and it left it as an open-ended question.

Slavery is definitely one of the root causes

of the current political melees that we have today.

CAUSEY: My uncle led Virginia's ratification

of the U.S. Constitution in 1788

which included the Three-Fifths Compromise.

Slaves were counted as three-fifths of a voter.

Those slaves couldn't vote.

Because the South had more slaves than the North,

this gave the South one third more congressional seats

and electoral votes for the next 73 years.

Slaveholding interest would dominate the government

until the outbreak of the Civil War.

Not surprisingly, five of the first seven U.S. presidents

were from the South and were slave owners.

HORNE: The stories have done a disservice

because you would think that there are all these genteel men

with wigs and bringing ideas

or coming up with all of these projects and plans.

Yes, they get their hands dirty fighting the redcoats

but then it's back to dreaming up Bill of Rights

and constitutions and other brilliant ideas

and without the sort of muck and the grime and the dirt

and the blood that's being shed to build this society.

CAUSEY: But many more slaves than is commonly acknowledged

resisted the brutality or tried to escape.

Others organized and rebelled against their treatment.

A successful and bloody revolution led by slaves

in nearby Haiti established the first black-led Republic

in the world.

This revolt terrified American slave owners like my ancestors

who feared slave rebellions would spread to the U.S.

I imagine that's why we never learned much

about the Haitian revolution in school.

HORNE: The Haitian Revolution puts the fear of God,

if I may use that phrase into the brains of slave owners.

It's a major factor in shedding light on this Negrophobia,

this fear and hatred of Africans.

You not only have to think about the classic slave revolts.

Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser.

This free labor comes with a price.

It comes with a price of having your throat slit

in the middle of the night.

It comes with the price of eating your scrambled eggs

in the morning and then keeling over and dying from the poison.

It comes with a price of your house going up in flames

and your barn going up in flames

and all the crops going up in flames by rebellious Africans.

The kind of tumult that is gripping North America.

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: In the midst of this national nightmare,

there were white people who opposed slavery.

There was a growing unease that this might actually be wrong.

That morally, it was hard to justify.

CAUSEY: Five Northern states had started to either eliminate

or gradually abolish slavery

and in Virginia of all places,

I discovered a powerful and unusual story from that era

which had been lost to history.

TOM DUCKENFIELD: We're in Nomini Hall Estate in Westmoreland County, Virginia.

This is an estate that was owned by Robert Carter III.

A man who manumitted, freed my ancestors

with a deed of manumission in 1791.

So all around here are the land where my ancestors lived

and worked as slaves

and were eventually freed gradually over 20 years.

KIVEL: Carter is a very good example of one of the richest landowners

in the country who saw that slavery was wrong

and did something about it.

CAUSEY: Though he was widely condemned by other slave owners

and even his own family,

Carter gradually freed all 452 of his slaves.

LA TONYA LAWSON-JONES: You can see it in the actual verbiage of the deed of gift.

He talks about the fact that he felt

that it was against the principles of religious justice.

He literally believed that it was not God's will

to have slaves.

Several of my ancestors were on that original first 15

that he freed.

One, specifically, Chris Newman.

She was born in 1742 here in America

and she lived here at Nomini Hall.

When she was freed, she was 49 years old.

She was a weaver.

DUCKENFIELD: As freed African Americans, we had certain advantages.

We had the liberty to go where we wanted to go.

We had the liberty to work as much as we wanted to,

to thrive, to provide for our families.

So we see John Thompson Sr. owning land

shortly after he was manumitted.

Before that, he owned personal property items

like horses, pigs, implements, farm tools, that sort of thing,

but he actually began to own land about 1820.

CAUSEY: Tom and La Tonya's ancestors had a very different experience

than most Africans in America.

Not until President Abraham Lincoln's

Emancipation Proclamation 70 years later

were so many slaves freed.

What would our country look like today

if others had followed in Carter's footsteps?

But we didn't.

Instead, we deepened our commitment to slavery

with even harsher laws.

Sadly, one of the main architects of those laws

was my uncle, Edmund Pendleton.

DUCKENFIELD: If you were freed, you would have to register

with the county, put down your height

and any distinguishing features.

This was to make sure that you restricted what they did.

You knew where they were.

LAWSON-JONES: The laws were so convoluted.

If you went into debt, you could become a slave again.

If someone brought a case against you,

you could become a slave again.

CAUSEY: International pressure and the successful revolution in Haiti

forced the U.S. Congress to ban the importation of new slaves.

So what did Southern slave owners do

to maintain and grow their profits?

They bred more and more slaves.

If you travel in Virginia today -- I think it's Charles City

which is not that far from Richmond --

you'll find evidences today of Virginia

as this great breeding colony where you're breeding Africans

like you're breeding cattle.

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: The demand for slaves exploded

because of Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin.

Cotton became the most profitable commodity

in the world.

In this era, one million out of the two million slaves

in the U.S. were brutally separated from their families

and forcibly marched to the Deep South to plant and pick cotton.

This site that blends into the bustling city landscape

of New Orleans

was one of the nation's busiest slave auction blocks.

Yet there was not even a plaque or a marker

that acknowledged the suffering that took place here.

This denial bothered me deeply.

It felt like a whitewashing of history

but this was very familiar.

This version of history was peddled to me in school books

throughout my childhood.

I felt haunted by the spirits of the slaves

who had been so terrorized here.

[♪♪♪]

[♪♪♪]

The frenzy for profits produced by cotton

and the sale of slaves in the new states

also increased the physical violence against them.

More productivity came through extreme punishment

with overseers even calculating how many lashes on the back

of a slave might generate one more pound of cotton.

This cruelty and the forced separation from their families

led more slaves to try to escape.

[♪♪♪]

POWELL: The United States Supreme Court sanctioned a law,

The Fugitive Slave Law that requires the country

to hunt slaves no matter where they are.

There's no provision for that in the constitution.

So we had this extremely broad reading

of the rights of slave owners which basically says,

the state can deputize every citizen in the United States

to hunt down slavery

whether you're in a slave state or not.

The country is going to all this length to protect slavery.

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: By now, I was seeing a deeply troubling pattern

in our history.

White people, whether they owned slaves are not,

clearly had a stake in making sure

that the majority of blacks were maintained as slaves.

♪ Run, run run

♪ You better run [Better run, better run]

CAUSEY: But what Sally and I discovered was that just one step

over the border in Canada,

they were offering Africans from the U.S.

the possibility of a radically different life.

♪ You better run

JOHN ADAMS: Canada was originally a British Colony.

So we had to abide by the laws of England.

Automatically, by the 1830s,

there was no slavery allowed in what is now Canada.

♪ Steal away

♪ Steal away

♪ Steal away

♪ To Jesus

- Now, this is Sylvia? - This is Sylvia.

Okay. So she's your great grandmother, right?

She's my great grandmother.

And she was the mother of my mother's mother

and she never talked to us about being free.

We just knew she was happy.

CAUSEY: We met up with the great granddaughter of Sylvia Stark,

a former slave who lived to be 105.

Sylvia was the youngest child of Howard and Hannah Estes

who were born into slavery in Missouri.

- And this is Howard. - Yes.

The patriarch of the family, Howard Estes.

ADAMS: The Estes and Stark family's history

is a rather complicated one.

It starts in Missouri.

Howard's master wanted to send a herd of cattle

over the mountains to California during the big Gold Rush

after 1849 and Howard was asked to accompany the master's son

and he could stay there and earn some money

and purchase his freedom

which was going to be a thousand dollars.

CAUSEY: Howard Estes managed to buy his family's freedom

receiving in return their freedom papers.

These are the papers that freed them

and this is all written here.

- And to have this. - Yes. Yes.

Wow.

SIMS: So these papers were written up

so that they'd have proof that they were freed slaves.

It says, "Know all men by these present that I Howard Estes

of the County of Clay in the State of Missouri have..."

KAREN ALEXANDER: They arrived in time to find some gold

but the blacks that were in California

were now getting fearful that California

which was admitted to the United States nine years earlier

was now in danger of becoming a slave state.

So the blacks were quite afraid.

CAUSEY: At the same time a slave named Dred Scott

who had been taken by his owner to non-slave states

claimed that he was there for free

and entitled to US citizenship.

Scott sued but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him.

POWELL: Chief Justice Taney said, "No blacks free or otherwise

could ever be a citizen of United States."

And it was the first time the Supreme Court

dealt with citizenship and went to great length to say that

blacks were never meant to be part of the political community.

ADAMS: The situation in California where they were ostensibly free

was beginning to heat up.

So the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott decision

and then individual decisions in places like San Francisco

that banned black children from attending school

made it apparently very, very difficult for some of them.

So they wrote a letter. Can you imagine that?

Wrote a letter to Governor James Douglas

and told them what they were going through

and that they needed a place to live.

CAUSEY: The first governor of British Columbia, James Douglas,

was born in Africa.

His mother was mixed race and his father was Scottish.

Douglas frequently identified as black.

He wrote him back and said, "Bring all of them.

If you want to come, come to Canada."

He said, "We have a big country

and we're trying to make it grow."

CAUSEY: By 1860, Sylvia Estes had married farmer Lewis Stark

in California and they had two children.

They were among 800 free blacks

who accepted the invitation from Governor Douglas.

[♪♪♪]

SIMS: He rode over here and he saw this island,

this beautiful island and there was nobody on it.

And she says, "That's where I want to go."

And they preempted land in three spots on Salt Spring.

This is the one she loved the most

and this is where she made her life.

CAUSEY: I was inspired by Sylvia's grit and inner strength.

SIMS: Granny made her own soap.

She made her own butter

but she had a machine where she could cord

and do her own weaving.

She did all of that herself.

ALEXANDER: When they arrived, they were offered land.

They were told they could live here free.

There was no slavery in this part of the world.

And most of them stayed here and farmed

and raised their families and had a fairly good life.

[♪♪♪]

ADAMS: Many of them opened businesses

and very quickly, many of them became citizens

and they voted and one quickly became elected to city council.

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: The stories of these courageous black pioneers in Canada

contradicted every stereotype I was exposed to

growing up in the South.

A culture that insisted that blacks were lazy, unintelligent

and incapable of managing their own lives.

The new black Canadians made obvious

just how much of a lie this was.

♪ I got religion

♪ Oh, I got religion

♪ Oh, I got religion

ALEXANDER: This church was built by Charles Alexander from his design

with the farmers of the neighborhood.

So all farmers, no matter who you were, what you were,

were able to attend this church.

ADAMS: The integration was very real.

But in fact, there was discrimination,

personal discrimination.

Some blacks were not allowed to go into certain theaters

or drink in certain bars.

CAUSEY: Just as the California Gold Rush was ending,

a major gold vein was discovered in British Columbia.

It brought a familiar foe to the black community:

U.S. Southerners.

Were free blacks safe anywhere?

LORNE HAMMOND: There were whites with views from the American South

who came up and they were not open to sharing the land

or their businesses or their theaters or their saloons

or what have you with the African,

now, African-Canadian community.

CAUSEY: Canada had become a haven for Southern Civil War criminals

now on the run from that crushing American conflict

which began in 1861.

Hanging in the balance were the lives of four million

enslaved human beings in the U.S. whose monetary value

now exceeded that of all manufacturing

and commercial enterprises combined.

[♪♪♪]

Seven slave states had broken away from the U.S.

forming the Confederacy.

[cannon fires]

America's Civil War was fought for four horrific years

to save the Union.

When I was young, I heard stories about how bravely

my ancestors fought

and how much the family lost in the war of Northern aggression.

To win the war, President Abraham Lincoln

issued his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

Freeing Southern slaves so they could fight for the union.

Only with the war's end were Northern slaves finally freed.

LEON LITWACK: What happened at the moment, black men and women are told,

you're no longer slaves.

You're free. You can do whatever you want to do.

It's a great moment. Great moment in our history.

This is called sometimes The Day of Jubilee.

Well, there's no real jubilee because everybody was uncertain.

Blacks were uncertain and they did say, how free is free?

How free is free?

ALLEN: The idea that these four million people were set free

without any kind of reparation.

They had worked, their ancestors had worked.

They helped to build all of the institutions that we think about

in the South and in the North before the Revolution

and they received nothing.

CAUSEY: Northern General, William Sherman

understood the desperate plight of the freed slaves.

He gave 40,000 of them 40 acres of land and a mule.

But even today, many people don't know

that President Andrew Johnson, a former slave holder

who had succeeded the assassinated Abraham Lincoln

quickly revoked that.

Evicting blacks from their land.

White settlers were getting cheap land in the West

under the Homestead Act.

Understandably, freed blacks wanted land in the South

where most of them still lived but instead,

the federal government abandoned the freed slaves

and sold confiscated Southern land to Northern whites

and the railroads.

ALLEN: There is a fear and I think rightly so that Southerners

were not going to necessarily treat slaves as equal citizens

regardless of the laws that were passed.

They were going to need some support behind that.

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: Pressured by abolitionists, the federal government amended

the Constitution by passing the Reconstruction Amendments

which officially ended slavery

and gave U.S. citizenship to ex-slaves.

The amendments were supposed to protect freed slaves against

future discrimination.

POWELL: The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendment was designed to try

to interrupt the institution of slavery which requires

a re-articulation of the entire country

and the entire country identity.

Not just for the South but for the entire country.

[♪♪♪]

What happened in the Reconstruction,

more important than anything else,

that black men, women to some extent

but black men learned to use his political power.

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: By 1870, black males could now vote

and vote they did in record numbers.

Three blacks were even elected to the U.S. Senate.

Not until 1967 was another black elected as a U.S. Senator.

[♪♪♪]

Blacks organized themselves into a political force

through meetings at their churches.

Black churches like the African Methodist Episcopal Church

would continue the fight for equal rights.

LITWACK: Then to succeed in this aspiration,

what the whites feared more than anything else that

Reconstruction might succeed in reordering Southern society.

Whites had an intense hatred for blacks who wanted to get ahead.

A successful black was a dangerous black.

An incompetent and illiterate black posed no threat.

His labor was valuable but the black who got out of his place,

who aspired to anything above the place to which

he had been assigned, that is the kind of black

that whites could not tolerate.

[♪♪♪]

POWELL: So the country started in that road and then they reneged.

And they decided to basically to create another expression

of racial dominance.

ALLEN: The Southerners wanted to control

these four million people that have been freed.

They still needed them to do the work.

They also needed them to understand

and to know their place

and this was something that even Northerners

would come to understand and agree with

that the states were really free to do whatever they wanted to do

in terms of controlling this inferior people

as they continued to see them.

CAUSEY: Without federal enforcement

of the new civil rights legislation,

the states enacted the Black Codes.

These punitive laws restricted the movement of blacks,

rigged the labor economy against them

and doomed them to low wages and debt.

The laws also open the door to the widespread use

of convict leasing which was just another form of slavery.

So if you broke these laws, then you could be in prison for it.

And so then that starts the cycle of people going to prison

for really trivial reasons but getting caught up in the system

because then if a white landholder or businessperson

paid their fine, then they had to work off that fine.

And so you could be years, maybe for the rest of your life

in these situations because these people

were not an investment like they had been during slavery

so you can work them to death, get them replaced and move on.

CAUSEY: The Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision in 1896

created separate but equal,

the legal separation between black and white.

It's always been hard for me to believe that these so-called

Jim Crow Laws that blatantly discriminated

against African-Americans remained in place until 1964.

Jim Crow created America's own system of apartheid.

ALLEN: Jim Crow was really born in the South.

Although it would go north certainly

but in the South, it would become legal.

It would become part of state laws, local laws.

Everything from separate Bibles for people to swear on in court.

I interviewed a lady once.

She told me she worked in a shirt factory

and they had separate coat hooks.

They had separate bathrooms.

They had separate cemeteries.

Everything that you can imagine.

Intermarrying was illegal to do

and these were codified in the South.

In the North, they became kind of part of the custom

but not necessarily part of the law.

[♪♪♪]

HORNE: I think it's fair to say that Dixie,

the so-called White South

has left a very deep imprint on the political culture

of the United States.

It was defeated militarily doing the Civil War

but not defeated politically

because its white supremacist ideas were not defeated

and in fact, it seems as if the part of the reconciliation

between Dixie and the rest of the country

is to give Dixie a pass.

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: The South had lost nearly everything in the war

but we refused to surrender.

Instead, we united around a strange myth

known as The Lost Cause.

I grew up surrounded by it.

It was always the Yankees or the War of Northern Aggression.

Life before the war was romanticized

as one of content slaves and idyllic plantation life.

Monuments to Confederate battlefields and generals

were everywhere.

We were a separate people who are superior, distinct and noble

but I always felt that beneath this mask of Southern gentility

and outward politeness

was a culture that was deeply flawed at its core.

♪ To Southern boys

♪ Who are here today

♪ Our little Southern town

♪ Has blood on the way

♪ It's a way of life

♪ And a lie

If you investigated these lynchings in a great extent

which I have,

you can't believe that it really happened in your country,

in this country.

And the country still stands in great denial.

CAUSEY: More lynchings were recorded in the United States

from 1890 to the 1920s than at any other time in our history.

These tactics were used with terrifying effect

particularly at night by the notorious

white supremacist group, the Ku Klux Klan.

The Klan's primary goal was to keep African-Americans

in their place by any means necessary.

As a child, the images of these white robed terrorists

really frightened me

just knowing that they were among us.

Hollywood's first feature film,Birth of a Nation

which romanticized the Ku Klux Klan was released in 1915.

[♪♪♪]

To protest the film, large numbers of African-Americans

assembled publicly for the first time in the 20th century

in Boston and other places.

It was the Southern Klan's violence and a labor shortage

after World War I that drove 1.6 million African-Americans

from the South to the North and Midwest.

There, they worked in the steel mills, railroads,

meatpacking plants and automobile industry

but poll taxes, literacy tests and the Klan's intimidation

in the North kept blacks from voting there.

LITWACK: You expect nothing from the federal government.

There are no "good presidents" during this entire period.

Probably the worst of them all is Woodrow Wilson

when the nation's capital assumes the mantle of Jim Crow.

And it's because Wilson, a deep Virginian

can't stand to see successful blacks around him.

He makes a point of demoting them.

Sending them from the offices to the kitchens

and takes great pride in this.

POWELL: The South is neither Democrat nor Republican.

The South has always been a party organized

around racial domination and white supremacy

and it was one of the things that made the South so strong

because they had a single-party state.

ALLEN: You also had Northern politicians

who pandered to the South because the South,

as they called it, the Solid South was such a voting bloc.

If you were a Northern politician and even if you had

ideas of fairness, that's not even say equality

but just fairness and that black people were human beings

but at the same time, you wanted to win the South

or you needed to win the South to be elected,

you had to step lightly around the Southerners.

CAUSEY: The South put this restored national power to work

maintaining the nation's racial hierarchy with its veto power.

Southern politicians tarnished the creation

of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal.

Roosevelt himself is a very good example of this,

that he has to make certain compromises.

He has to tell Walter White of the NAACP, "I'm sorry.

I can't sign this anti-lynching bill."

The bill is to make lynching a federal crime.

That would be a big step.

And the opposition to that is so intense.

So Roosevelt himself says,

"Look, if I do this then forget about the New Deal."

CAUSEY: Roosevelt's New Deal created relief programs

to put people back to work during the Great Depression

but Southern politicians made sure

the new federal job benefits programs --

social security, the minimum wage,

unemployment insurance and union organizing --

did not apply to the two primary black vocations of the era,

agricultural and domestic service.

[♪♪♪]

The jackpot that followed the American victory in World War II

which gave birth to the American dream, good housing, education

and employment was off-limits to most African-Americans.

Nowhere was systemic racism more on display

than in our national housing policy,

also created by the New Deal.

RICHARD ROTHSTEIN: It was the government leading the way in creating

a segregated landscape in every metropolitan area

in this country.

You had many neighborhoods with European immigrants,

African-Americans, whites who came from rural areas

to work in factories in the same neighborhood

but in fact, what the Public Works Administration did

with its housing program was create segregation

when none had existed before.

They built public housing in those neighborhoods,

demolishing the integrated neighborhood

to create land for the public housing

and built segregated public housing instead.

Returning black World War II veterans were forced to live

in the segregated housing

because Dixiecrats vetoed an amendment

in the 1949 Housing Act that would have reintegrated housing.

[♪♪♪]

LITWACK: This is crazy. We are fighting a war

supposedly to make this world safe for democracy.

We're fighting a war in which the enemy

is a racist Nazi Germany that's exterminating Jews

and we're being treated as second-class citizens

here in the United States.

It makes no sense.

CAUSEY: Even historically oppressed European ethnic groups

like Italians, Jews and Irish Americans

were allowed to buy into the new suburban housing

built for returning white war veterans.

ROTHSTEIN: Throughout the country, mass production builders

got bank loans guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration

on condition that no homes be sold to blacks.

Perhaps the best example is Levittown in New York.

In Levittown, the builder, Levitt Company

built 17,000 homes in Nassau County, east of New York City.

Black veterans were not permitted to live there.

White veterans were.

CAUSEY: Good paying industry jobs followed whites

to the new suburbs.

The white families like mine who owned their homes

gained several hundred thousand dollars' worth of equity

over decades.

The white middle class was born.

The Federal Housing Authority made it illegal for lenders

to loan money to blacks who wanted to buy houses

in white neighborhoods.

Redlining by banks denied mortgages to black people

even in their own communities.

ALLEN: If you have a family member who can pass on to you

a certain amount of money,

then you can start off buying a home

as opposed to renting or going to college

as opposed to not going to college.

So that ability to pass on wealth quite often is stymied

in the black community because it hasn't been built

and I think a lot of whites don't understand

that a lot of blacks weren't able to make wealth

that they could pass down.

Everyone is starting over from day one.

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: About this time, Sally and I were born into a land of plenty

and privilege where the line between black and white

was very clear.

Slavery has cast a long shadow

in Sally's hometown of Meridian, Mississippi.

Being here prompts memories of her beloved housekeeper

and friend, Anneice.

SALLY: And I remember going to the soda fountain and

then I would sit at the soda fountain

and Anneice would be standing behind me

and I'd go, "Why aren't you sitting with me?"

And she said, "It's okay, honey. I'll just stay back here."

She had to go into the bathroom that said coloreds,

sit at the back of the bus,

go to the backdoors of restaurants.

It made no sense to me

that here was the most wonderful woman in my life

and she was being mistreated.

I never understood that.

She took care of us.

She did the laundry.

She cleaned the house and she cooked.

She did everything from sunup to sundown five days a week

and she left her six children at home,

had to make arrangements for them.

CAUSEY: I don't know how she did it.

This was our cloistered world

but all around us, big changes were happening.

Not far from Sally's home, three civil rights workers

were savagely murdered in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan.

Meridian became a flashpoint for the Civil Rights struggle.

MARTIN LUTHER KING: We are determined to be free.

We've gone too far to turn back.

Let us be calm. We are together.

We are not afraid and we shall overcome.

NEWS ANCHOR: This girl here was the first negro

apparently of high school age

to show up at Central High School

the day that the federal court ordered it integrated.

These changes are coming faster than I expected.

It's difficult for me. It's difficult for all Southerners.

And Supreme Court or no Supreme Court,

we are going to maintain segregated schools

down in Dixie.

ALLEN: There was an understanding that Southerners were not going

to easily give up their control, their power,

this idea of ending the inequality between the races.

[spirited singing]

[spirited singing]

ALLEN: There was always this understanding

that there was going to need to be this federal intervention

on the level of a Civil Rights Act,

the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in this case.

LITWACK: Lyndon Johnson said, when the Civil Rights bill had passed,

he said, "I wanted this. I supported it.

But I'm telling you, I think we probably lost the South."

But Johnson thought it was worth it.

[fast paced chanting]

JOHNSON: 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.

[applause]

CAUSEY: The legal discrimination against African-Americans

that began in the 1600s would officially end in 1964

with the enactment of the Civil Rights Act.

ALLEN: It finally gave some teeth to the 14th Amendment.

Title 6 of the Civil Rights Act of '64 was very, very important

because it said that if you were receiving federal monies,

then you could not discriminate based on race, gender, religion.

ROTHSTEIN: The Civil Rights Movement began to push back against

some of these policies.

Finally in 1968, a Fair Housing Act was passed

which said that you couldn't discriminate

in the sale or rental of most housing in the country.

So for example, Levittown could no longer bar African-Americans

from moving in.

LOPEZ: The Civil Rights Movement succeeds in making

the expressed language of racism unacceptable publicly.

It's unacceptable to say publicly,

"I stand for the white man.

I believe in white supremacy."

Now, there are people saying that

but they are increasingly on the fringe of American society,

the Klan members, the sort of redneck racists.

CAUSEY: All across the country, not just in the South,

expressions of open racism instead went underground

in the form of coded language or secret political messaging

meant to appeal to segregationists.

I shall help make it possible for you and your families

to walk the streets of our cities in safety.

NIXON: I'm against busing.

I do not believe that it serves education

to pick up children that are two or three yearsbehind

children in another school district

and haul them for a half hour across town to another district.

CAUSEY: After a short stint in a public elementary school,

I began attending one of the many white segregated academies

that were created in the 1960s after desegregation.

Race relations in the South were stuck in time.

All around me, there was resistance to the changes

brought by the Civil Rights Act.

White privilege was finding a way to maintain itself.

The national pushback against the Civil Rights Movement

and the laws it helped enact began right away.

This resistant eerily mirrored

what happened after Reconstruction.

Political assassinations and the overturning of policies and laws

gradually destroyed the gains made by African-Americans.

From the beginning of our administration,

we've taken strong steps to do something about this horror.

WOMAN: They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators.

[♪♪♪]

WOMAN: I think that Mississippi has a long way to go.

There's still such segregation.

It should have changed by leaps and bounds

and maybe it has by a skip.

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: Back here in Meridian, we found an incident that took place

in 2003 that struck us as an enduring example

of the terrible consequences of not confronting racism directly.

NEWS ANCHOR: The funerals for three Lockheed employee shot to death

earlier this week were held today

in both Mississippi and Alabama.

Thomas Willis, the father of three, a Vietnam War vet

who was honored with the Purple Heart...

CAUSEY: I was immediately drawn to Thomas Willis.

To me, his life seemed to personify

the progress that has been made by African-Americans

in the U.S. since the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

[indistinct conversation]

- Did you know Thomas Willis? - PETE THREATT: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: Played softball with Thomas, friends with Thomas.

Can you tell me about Thomas? What kind of guy he was?

What impressed me the most was he had a good work ethic.

He seemed to be a very stable individual.

ERICA TANKS: Family-oriented, loving,

strict, firm, fair.

CAUSEY: Thomas Willis was a father and a grandfather.

For an African-American in the South, he was making good money

in a union job assembling aircraft wings

for Lockheed Martin,

the largest military contractor in the world.

He took a lot of pride in what he did

and was very appreciative of it.

CAUSEY: As a U.S. Government contractor,

Lockheed is barred from discriminating against people

based on their race, color or national origin

by Title 6 of the Civil Rights Act.

In 2001, Mr. Willis courageously reported to Lockheed management

that he and his African-American co-workers

were being intimidated by a white employee, Doug Williams.

Williams work the assembly line alongside Mr. Willis.

INTERVIEWER: I'm not going to pull any punches with you.

I'm going to ask you, do you believe that Doug Williams

was a racist?

THREATT: Check the form.

He had a problem with blacks in general

and some black specifically.

INTERVIEWER: Did he ever tell you why he thought a race war was coming?

He told me on one occasion that he thought that the society

got to the point where the blacks were given everything

and the white males no longer had anybody representing us

and he thought that that was the answer.

Violence was the answer.

They called in an investigator to determine if there was

any type of racial threats being made

and Mr. Willis told him exactly what was going on.

Thomas' comment to me was that he felt like the company

ought to do something

and that he wasn't going to quit until something was done.

He gave them at least three examples of death threats

that were racially motivated

and they were directed at blacks working in the plant.

CAUSEY: Doug Williams was ordered to attend diversity

and anger management classes but repeatedly refused to go.

According to his African-American co-workers,

he continued his racial taunts.

One day, Williams put a white work booty on his head.

I'm from the South.

Everybody that I know, know what that signify.

CAUSEY: Some African-American employees assumed he was imitating

the Ku Klux Klan

and reported the incident to their supervisors.

BLAIR: He wore that not for a little while. He wore that all day.

Finally, the assistant plant manager comes back down

and says, "Doug, Mr. Williams,

you've got to take that booty off your head."

Their conversation was quite escalated.

Jack insisting that he pull the cap off, Doug refusing.

And he wanted to know not why he had to take it off.

He wanted to know who had reported him.

He wanted the names.

He did not want to give in because he thought that

he had been falsely accused in this situation,

that his intent was not racial.

It was merely the hazing of the new employee

or a practical joke.

CAUSEY: Without approval from Lockheed, Williams took a week off.

When he did return to work, he wasn't punished.

Lockheed again ordered him to diversity class

and again, he refused to go.

BLAIR: He was having a lot of anger

about what Lockheed Martin was doing to him.

Went out to his truck, got his guns and came back

and that's when the shooting started.

[gunshots]

He had shotgun in his hand, rifle on his back,

bullets draped around both sides of him.

And I got a good look at his eyes

and I'm not going to say per se he snapped

but there was something there that was out there.

[gunshots]

THREATT: Storms in the room, he goes by numerous white employees,

doesn't shoot anybody and Mickey Fitzgerald, a brave man,

he was a white guy stood up and said,

"Doug, you don't want to do this." Doug kills him.

Just pointblank shot him in the head.

CAUSEY: Williams then shot Sam Cockrell whom Williams believed

had complained to management about him.

THREATT: And he goes straight to the area where the black co-workers

that he had been intimidating worked.

He went around and shot us how he wanted to shoot us,

where he wanted to shoot us.

THREATT: He stood over Lynette McCall and she begged for her life.

He shot Thomas Willis in the back as he was running away.

We stepped over there to see what Shirley was saying

and she was saying, "He's killed himself. He's killed himself."

[♪♪♪]

I remember regrouping emotionally

and it seemed like I was in a daze.

It was devastating because we just buried my mother

and I was like, "This can't be happening."

And, um...

BLAIR: The police found Thomas.

We got his wallet back

and found the Lockheed Martin investigator's card in there.

The card was crinkled and sweaty.

It had been in his pocket of him working hours.

A lot of events that occurred in the 18 months,

a lot of water under the bridge of bad things.

Nothing was happening.

It's like his voice was unheard

and that's what I'm kind of confused about.

Why did it go unheard?

LAVIRA WILLIS: Listening to the investigations,

listening to the things my Dad brought to the table

for Lockheed and any real person,

any sane person would know that something's not right.

Why didn't you do more?

BLAIR: We filed suit for wrongful death

under the Mississippi Wrongful Death Statute

seeking damages for Mr. Willis being murdered

in an intentional act.

It went to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals

which threw the case out based on the fact

that it was a workplace accident.

When they ruled it as accidental,

I know what that word means.

Things happen.

You leave a cord out, you trip. That's an accident.

You didn't mean for that to happen.

I understand that.

But this was intentional.

CAUSEY: At the time of the massacre,

Lockheed held federal military contracts

worth billions of dollars.

If Lockheed had been found guilty

of violating Thomas Willis and his colleagues' civil rights,

it would have lost its lucrative government contracts.

Today, Lockheed is still the largest employer in the area.

BLAIR: I do think there was a fairly significant effort

to make sure it didn't become too public.

CAUSEY: Vietnam veteran and law-abiding citizen, Thomas Willis

played by all the rules

and he was still struck down by a racist.

If Mr. Willis' circumstances couldn't protect

his civil rights, then who or what could?

TANKS: I just wanted to see justice done.

I needed somebody to say,

"Hey, we will not allow this to happen again."

♪ Another man done gone

♪ Another man done gone From the county farm ♪

♪ Another man done gone

How much damage has this done to communities of color

and the answer is, enormous, enormous damage.

POWELL: The country is becoming increasingly diverse.

So the way race plays out today not just in the South

but the whole country is this profound anxiety

that a lot of people have,

especially white people have about growing diversity.

They're quite scared because they feel like they're about

to lose not simply their neighborhood

but their sense of self. Who they are.

So when they talk about taking America back,

they're not talking about taking it back from corporations.

They're talking about taking it back from

the black Muslim foreigner in the White House.

They're talking about taking it back from the other.

LITWACK: You see a presidency almost brought to ruin

by the mere fact of hating him that intensely.

The Majority Leader of the Senate,

"We won't do anything to make it possible

for this person to succeed." To succeed.

HORNE: We're still suffering the after-effects

of those two powerful regimes that comprise

the bulk of U.S. history: slavery and Jim Crow.

You see it in terms of the population of our prisons.

The United States imprisons more people probably

than any other nation on planet Earth, a disproportionate

percentage of whom are of African descent.

You see it in healthcare outcomes

in terms of life expectancy.

You see it in terms of per capita income on a racial basis.

You see it even where you don't want to see it in terms of

black preschoolers being suspended at higher rates

than other preschoolers, for example.

I think that this culture has been created

that is still in some ways punishing and penalizing

Africans with as noted, no interrogation

of the lingering impact, no attempt to connect the dots

between slavery, Jim Crow and the present

and it's criminal

because people are suffering and people are dying.

♪ Is there anyone Who can explain to me ♪

♪ About the chains On fallen men ♪

♪ A king was born

♪ And they put him down

♪ These are the days When they rise again ♪

♪ These are the days Of dangerous men ♪

♪ Stand tall

♪ Walk free

♪ Stay with me

♪ Brothers and sisters Stand tall ♪

♪ Walk free

[♪♪♪]

POWELL: There are many people who don't believe in equality.

There are many people who believe there's a natural order

of things and that whites are at the top.

And to some extent, I would argue that we're still fighting

the Civil War and the South is winning.

ALLEN: I absolutely think this country missed the opportunity

to make a real difference in how we treat each other,

how we think about each other and I guess quite honestly,

I'm not sure how it can be fixed.

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: Could she be right?

Is there really no way out of this?

MEGAPHONE: When Eric Garner...

CROWD: When Eric Garner...

MEGAPHONE: Was placed in an illegal chokehold...

CROWD: Was placed in an illegal chokehold...

- And murdered. - And murdered.

CAUSEY: One thing I know for sure is that oppression

against African-Americans has been relentless

throughout our history.

This history is not just in the past.

It's still very much alive today.

JUDY SIMS: The pain is constant whether you're looking at something

that happened on television

or if you went to the grocery store.

Mom and I both have been to two of the popular stores here

on the island and have felt, as Lynn had talked about

her experience at the pizza parlor.

So it's not that we cannot forgive.

It's not easy to forgive.

If someone's standing on your foot

and they're still standing on it

and every time, again, that wound gets opened

when we, Ferguson...

We all know what's in the news

and so it's just a constant reopening of an old wound

that we are still just incredibly impacted.

The yellow and purple?

I miss him.

TANKS: I've lost a father through this.

Someone that I can't see anymore.

INTERVIEWER: Has the shooting affected you?

TREATT: Yes, it has.

I had to go through a lot of counseling

to finally feel like that I turned the corner.

TANKS: Thirty years, I'm getting better and I think we all are

but it helps by us being so close knit.

[indistinct conversation]

I'm going to fight to the end to try to make

everybody see what's going on.

The silence need to be broken.

We can't embed hate into one another.

I'm not going to embed hate into my child.

We need to have an honest conversation.

LAWSON-JONES: We need to sit down and put all of the issues on the table.

Not just the things that are fuzzy and feel good.

We need to address the systematic racism

that happens in this country.

We need to dismantle the institutions that continue

to keep not just African-Americans

but people of color in general subjugated

and it's difficult but it's something that needs to happen.

HORNE: We need an official government commission

to investigate and interrogate

the lingering impact of both slavery and Jim Crow.

Perhaps we need also some way to repair the damage.

LITWACK: I would think that the reparations that would be

a practical achievement would take the form of refurbishing

the black community in terms of

the quality of schools and quality of housing.

There's a significant economic change.

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: Leveling the playing field for African-Americans

seems to be one big answer.

We tried this with reconstruction

and with the Civil Rights Movement.

We saw what happened with the pioneering black Canadians

and the freed slaves of Robert Carter

who made the most of their opportunities.

Today, their descendants continue to pursue their dreams

in whatever ways they choose.

LAWSON-JONES: What I found in my research and dealing with these families

that come from this manumission,

all of them have this sense of pride in their family,

the sense of pride in themselves

and their work and what they do.

DUCKENFIELD: We obtained certain advantages from being free people.

If you look at our family structure,

it stayed pretty intact.

We had two heads of the household.

LAWSON-JONES: It did in some ways give us a head start

in that we had to be self-reliant

far long before other people of color were free.

That gets instilled into your family.

It becomes a part of who you are.

You pass it on to your children to their children,

their children and so on and so forth.

[♪♪♪]

POWELL: The hard nut of it is really whites.

So we had it exactly backwards in terms of the Negro problem.

We have a white problem in the United States

and I don't mean this as a blame and whatever

but I think people won't get this on their own.

It really takes a lot of work.

This is so deeply in our DNA and it's reflected in our politics,

the way we do politics, the way we do our economy

and the way we think about ourselves.

But we actually need to give birth to a new white identity,

a white identity that doesn't need to dominate,

a white identity that's not totally angst

about being in connection and relationship with the other,

a white identity that recognizes that it is the other.

[♪♪♪]

CAUSEY: But to do this, we have to recognize

that we as white people have benefited enormously

from our privilege at the expense of other people.

The cost of this prejudice and inequality

has come at far too high a price.

Why are we so afraid to face the possibility

that we might actually gain something with true equality?

[♪♪♪]

♪ Oh Lord

♪ I'm strivin'

♪ Tryin' to make it

♪ Through this barren land

♪ Yes, sir

♪ But as I go from day to day

♪ I can hear my Savior say

♪ "Trust me child

♪ Come on And I'll hold your hand" ♪

♪ I'm comin' up

♪ On the rough side

♪ Of the mountain

♪ I must hold to God

♪ His powerful hand

♪ I'm comin' up

♪ On the rough side

♪ Of the mountain

♪ I'm doin' my best

♪ To make it in

[♪♪♪]

♪ My hopes and my dreams They are foolish things ♪

♪ In the arms of another man

♪ Civil code It was built to hold ♪

♪ But it grows cold So we rise again ♪

♪ These are the days Of dangerous men ♪

♪ Stand tall

♪ Walk free

♪ Don't let them Take that away ♪

♪ Stand tall

♪ Walk free

[♪♪♪]

♪ Stand tall

♪ We cannot wait another day

♪ Stand tall

♪ Stand tall

♪ Walk free