And in 1968, 350 years after the introduction of the first enslaved Africans into the colonies —archived recording (lyndon b. johnson)This Civil Rights Act is a challenge to all of us.nikole hannah-jones— Congress passes the last of the great civil rights legislation.archived recording (lyndon b. johnson)— to go work in our communities and our states, in our homes and in our hearts —nikole hannah-jonesIt ends legal discrimination on the basis of race from all aspects of American life.

Don’t blame a cracker in Georgia for your injustices. The government is responsible for the injustices. The government can bring these injustices to halt.

The second sustained movement of black people trying to secure equal rights before the law and an equal place in this democracy.

He was beaten so severely by that police officer that he would never see again.So Woodard’s beating was not at all unusual. World War II had done exactly what many white people had feared, that once black people were allowed to fight in the military, and when they traveled abroad and they experienced what it was like not to live under a system of racial apartheid, that it would be much harder to control them when they came back. Black men in their uniforms were seen as being unduly proud. So these men who had served their country, who had come home proudly wearing the uniform to show their service for their country, would find that this actually made them a target of some of the most severe violence. But what was unusual was what happened after. Woodard’s case was picked up by the N.A.A.C.P., and they take him on a bit of a tour. They take photographs of him. Those photographs are sent out to newspapers and to fundraising efforts, where they’re saying, look what happened to this man who served his country. It’s that spark that finally determines among millions of black people that enough is enough.And that’s largely seen as one of the sparks of the modern civil rights movement.

Woodard is still wearing his crisp Army uniform. He’s been discharged just a few hours earlier. When he comes to, he’s in a jail.archived recording (orson welles)I woke up next morning and could not see.

by my left arm and twisted it behind my back. I figured he was trying to make me resist. I did not resist against him. He asked me, was I discharged, and I told him yes. When I said yes, that is when he started beating me with a billy, hitting me across the top of the head. After that, I grabbed his billy and wrung it out of his hand. Another policeman came up and threw his gun on me and told me to drop the billy or he’d drop me, so I dropped the billy. After I dropped the billy, the second policeman held his gun on me while the other one was beating me.

When the bus got to Aiken, he got off and went and got the police. They didn’t give me a chance to explain. The policeman struck me with a billy across my head and told me to shut up.

I don’t know how I’m living. I’m the oldest one that I know that’s living. But still, I’m thankful to the Lord. Colored people is free. We ought to be awful thankful. If I thought that I’d ever be a slave again, I’d take a gun and just end it all right away, because you’re nothing but a dog. You’re not a thing but a dog.

nd remember, back then it was Republicans who were the progressive party, and they were the party of Lincoln that was working to pass all of this progressive legislation. But Rutherford B. Hayes really wants to win this election, and so he makes a deal with the Democrats in Congress that if they give him their electoral votes, he will withdraw the federal troops from the South and end Reconstruction. So he makes the deal, and the troops leave, and we immediately see white Southerners implement a campaign to force black people back into the position that they had been in before Reconstruction.The suppression of black life over the next five decades would be so devastating that it would come to be known as the Great Nadir, the second slavery.

The only reason we saw all of these gains in the South was because there were federal troops there, and those federal troops were holding back the violence of white Southerners who were not interested in seeing these gains.

And, finally, they pass the 15th Amendment, which probably is the most important amendment when we’re considering what a democracy is supposed to be. The 15th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote no matter what your race is. Now, it didn’t include women at that time, but it certainly set the stage, and it, for the first time, guaranteed that whether you were born a person who was enslaved, whether you were white or you were black, you had the right to exercise your vote in this democracy.

So, of course, the very first amendment that they have to pass is the 13th Amendment, which abolishes the institution of slavery. And what’s interesting about that is this is actually the first time that the word slavery is mentioned in the Constitution, is in the amendment that finally abolishes it. They pass the 14th Amendment, and the 14th Amendment guarantees that all of the enslaved people will finally be citizens of the country of their birth. It also ensures for the first time that the laws cannot treat people differently based on their race. This is called the equal protection clause, and this clause will be used again and again, really all the way up until now, to guarantee that all Americans are treated as equal citizens.

You see the formerly enslaved pushing their white allies in Congress to start to change our founding documents and to actually resolve those contradictions that were baked in. They do this through getting amendments passed. And, of course, amendments are the way that we change our Constitution.

By choosing to stay, black people were saying, this is our country. We are American, and we’re actually going to work to make these founding ideals a reality.And in the years that followed, after the Civil War ends, a very short period called Reconstruction began.

So Lincoln ends the meeting, and one of the men tells him that they will go back and consider his proposal. Lincoln then tells them, “Take your full time. No hurry at all.” After that meeting, those men made it clear that they were not interested in taking Lincoln up on his offer to leave the country of their birth. There’s a quote by a different group of black abolitionists that really sums up the way that most black Americans felt, and that quote said, “This is our home, and this is our country. Beneath its side lie the bones of our fathers. Here we were born, and here we will die.”

As those five black men stood in the White House, I wonder what it must have felt like. These men had been fighting for the liberation of millions and had waited for this moment, only to be told that once they were granted their freedom, they were going to be asked to leave the country of their birth. And to make it even worse, Lincoln then tells them that it’s their fault that the country is fighting a civil war at all. He says, “Although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other ... without the institution of slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence.” That’s why, the president said, “it is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”

We are taught to think of Abraham Lincoln as the great emancipator, and he was. But the truth is, like many white Americans, he was opposed to slavery because it was a cruel and unjust institution in opposition to this nation’s ideals, but he was also opposed to black political and social equality. As he said in a speech that he gave in 1853, he considered black people a, quote, “troublesome presence,” and that they were incompatible with a democracy that was designed for white people. As he said in that speech, “Free them and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we well know that those of a great mass of white people will not.”

Lincoln doesn’t waste any time, according to documents that recount what happened that day. He tells the men that he had gotten funds from Congress to ship black people, once they had been freed, to some other country. And then Lincoln said, “You and we are different races. ... Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word,” he said, “we suffer on each side.”

The Civil War has been going on for about a year, and Abraham Lincoln is worried because the war is not going well. And because it’s not going well, he’s feeling like he might have to do something drastic. He’s considering taking this very radical step of liberating all of the enslaved people who are in the Confederate states, and he’s thinking about doing this as a war tactic, understanding that if he takes away the South’s labor force, that might cripple them, or at least the threat of it would force them to remain in the Union. But he’s also concerned about what it might mean to suddenly free four million enslaved people and what the consequences of that might be.

On August 14, 1862, Abraham Lincoln invites five free black men to the White House for a meeting. They are part of the black elite in Washington, D.C., and he wants to have a conversation with them.

And so the colonists have a choice to make. Are they going to be the country of their ideals, the ideals that they were putting to paper, a country based on the idea that all men were created equal? And if they were going to be that country, then they were going to have to abolish the institution of slavery. Or were they going to be wedded to the institution of slavery because they depended so heavily on the wealth that was being generated from it? And in that case, they can’t really write the document that they want to write. And so what they do is they decide that they are going to try to have it both ways, and they bake that contradiction right into the Constitution, both codifying and protecting the institution of slavery but never actually mentioning the word. And so they have written what is perhaps the most radical constitution in the world, and from the beginning, they knew they were going to violate its most essential principles.

They were trying to leave behind an old country that they believed was antithetical to freedom and create a new one that they believe will be defined by freedom. This was a country that was going to be based on individual rights, on a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, but this was also a place that, at this time, was still practicing the institution of slavery.

these 13 scrappy colonies managed to defeat one of the most powerful empires in the world, and we become a new nation. And so the colonists gather, and they try to figure out the language that they are going to create in the founding document that we, of course, come to know as the Constitution. But now they have a problem.

the 13 colonies sign the declaration, and the declaration goes out into the world without mentioning slavery at all, and we start the Revolutionary War.

Thomas Jefferson, of course, is deeply aware of the hypocrisy and aware of the criticism of the hypocrisy. So as he’s drafting the declaration, he includes a passage in there where he actually blames the king of England for introducing slavery into the colonies. He calls slavery a crime, and he says that the king of England committed this crime, but that’s not our fault. It was not our doing. This is just one more thing that the king of England did to wrong us.

It has grown from a conditional institution where some of those first 20 were able to become free after a term of time to one where black people are born into it. They die into it. And they pass that status on to their children. You now have generations of black people who have never known a day of freedom and who will never know a day of freedom.

So 150 years have passed since those first Africans were sold into Virginia, and slavery in America looks very different than the slavery that they experienced. The enslaved population has grown from 20 to now 500,000 people. Fully one-fifth of the population is now enslaved.

Now that enslaved person was a teenager, and that teenager was the half-brother of Thomas Jefferson’s wife. What that means is Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law had children with one of the women that he enslaved. So actually, he was Thomas Jefferson’s brother-in-law. And so as he’s writing these ideals, he knows that they will not apply even to his own family members.

Life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that’s what makes us unique. That’s what makes us strong, the shared values that we all hold so dear.

I now understand for the first time why my dad was so proud to fly that flag

Now in my boy days, we were slaves. We belonged to people. They’d sell us like they sell horses and cows and hogs and all like that, have an auction bench. Put you up on the bench and bid on you the same as you’re bidding on cattle, you know.

But the military didn’t end up being a way out for my dad for long. He was passed up for opportunities, and the only jobs my dad ever worked were service jobs. He worked as a convenience store clerk or a bus driver. And because of that, this big, pristine American flag flying in the front of our yard was deeply embarrassing to me. And I didn’t understand why he would feel that much love for a country that clearly did not love him.

And at a young age, my father joined the military so that he could get his way out of poverty, but also for the reasons that so many black people join the military, which is he hoped that if he served his country, his country might finally see him as an American.

My dad’s mom fled the South like millions of other black people during the Great Migration and came north to Waterloo and found many of the same barriers that she had sought to escape. She was forced to buy a house on the black side of town. Most jobs were unavailable to her, so she cleaned white people’s houses. My father went to segregated schools.

That county, Leflore County in Mississippi, lynched more black people than any other county in Mississippi, and Mississippi lynched more black people than any other state in the country.

I didn’t know other black kids whose parents were flying a flag in their front yard. I know lots of white people who flew flags — lots of white people who flew flags.

As soon as it started to show even the slightest tatter, my dad would replace the flag with a fresh new flag. He would never allow a tattered flag to fly.

A pirate ship by the name of White Lion sails into the bay here, and they needed to trade something of value so that they could get supplies to make the rest of their journey. And what they traded were 20 to 30 Africans, and this would be at this place kind of ironically called Point Comfort, where slavery in the British North American colonies that would go on to become the United States begins.

They had been made black by those who believed themselves to be white.And where they were headed, black equaled ‘slave.’ So these were their people now

They had been forged in trauma.

They say our people were born on the water.