A Walk Through the 20th Century With Bill Moyers; The Second American Revolution

<v Bill Moyers>These are the great documents of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. They are 200 years old, and we're still struggling to interpret them in our everyday lives. I'm Bill Moyers. From the very beginning these documents contained and ignoble contradiction that has been with us ever since. The Declaration of Independence did indeed claim that all men are created equal, endowed with the same basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But of course, all people were not treated equally and the Constitution was drawn so as to reflect that reality for the purpose of determining representation in Congress the Constitution counted a Black as only three fifths of a person, and it didn't even give him three fifths of the vote. Black people were brought here against their will as slaves assumed to be creatures unequal in nature and thus inferior, something less than human. That prejudice tragically informed the American experience for a long time to come. It wasn't until the 60s that we amended the Constitution to extend legal and political equality to blacks in principle. In fact, their rights were ignored for nearly another century or subverted by chicanery custom and force. How they stood the humiliation and anguish of that long subjugation is one of the great testimonies of all time to the irrepressible spirit of a people in bondage. They survived against great odds and in our century, breed the second wind into the American Revolution. <v Announcer>In keeping with Chevron's tradition of service throughout the 20th century, the people of Chevron bring you this program in support of public television.

<v Bill Moyers>It's remarkable when you think about it, most Blacks living at the turn of this century had been born slaves or were sons and daughters of slaves. They were still treated as second class citizens. Yet they refused to give up on the promise and the Declaration of Independence. Their struggle in our century to pursue the elusive dream is a story set aglow by the narratives of men and women who lived it. It's the story we want to tell in this broadcast and again next week. I say we because journalism alone cannot do this story justice. It is, in one respect an inside story. It has to have been part of you. So I've asked two of my favorite storytellers to share it with us. Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee are more than storytellers. They're artists and participants. This is their story. And they'll speak in their own words and in the words of their Black brothers and sisters of this century. They will call on collective and individual memories, which are the raw material of journalism and history, as well as the heart of the human experience. <v Ruby Dee>On January 1st, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation was signed into law. The words in the document were like those words in the Bible proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof for us. January 1st was more than the start of a new year. January 1st was emancipation there, he said. In all his marble magnificence, Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. At the end of the civil war and for 10 years during Reconstruction, it looked as if America was glad to be rid of slavery, that it really meant to keep Lincoln's promise. But in a few short years, America changed its mind. Things went from bad to worse. We weren't slaves anymore, but we weren't free either. This splendid monument to Lincoln was dedicated on Memorial Day 1922. At the festivities, white people could sit anywhere they wanted to, but Black people, many of them prominent lawyers, doctors, bankers, businessmen, were segregated, put around to the sides in the back. I wonder what the Great Emancipator would have said about that.

<v Ossie Davis>This is West Fifty Third Street in midtown Manhattan. The left hand behind me, Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, further along Broadway and the theatrical district, this block itself hasn't got much. Last granite tall buildings, traffic and a place you pass through going somewhere else, but on January 1st, 1991, this was the heart of Negro New York. This was the street west, the Marshall Hotel, the place to usher in the new year, right? The New Year, the new century, the joy of Emancipation Day, all celebrated at once with the finest food, the best French champagne and the latest and elegant attire. It was a time to be black and brag about it. Bob Cole, who lived at the Marshall, would surely have been there and feeling good, his play, A Trip to Guntown, the first non minstrel show produced by, directed by and starring blacks, had made him famous Scott Joplin at the piano, maybe trying out a brand new rag on the crowd while the couple strutted the latest dance craze that was sweeping the nation. The cakewalk. Surely the Johnson brothers, James Weldon and Jay Roseman would have been there just up from Florida with their new song, Lift Every Voice and Sing. George W. Chesnut autographing a copy of his new novel, The First Work of Black Fiction, published in America, starting perhaps with Paul Laurence Dunbar, who self published a book of poetry, had made his name a household word. And without a doubt, William and George Walker, who smash hit musical The Sons of Ham, had made them the first blacks to perform on Broadway. They would have been among the first to raise their glasses in a toast to old Abe Lincoln, the man who caused it all, and, of course, to the memory of Frederick Douglass, the man who caused only to cause it all Cicero Jones first black opera star Henry Wattana, the artist who just won the Medal of Honor at the Paris Exposition, perhaps even Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, the man who performed the first operation on the heart of a living patient in town to see the sights. And Ida Wells Barnett, the renowned journalist and newspaper publisher Jimmy Winkfield, who was to go to the Kentucky Derby later that year and ride His Eminence to an easy victory. Oh, there was much to be thankful for and proud of and high spirited about that New Year's Day.

<v Ruby Dee>But not always noisemakers and merriment this January 1st for Congressman George White of North Carolina, it must have been a time of quiet reflection as he gathered facts and figures in preparation for a speech he was to give before Congress in just a few days. It was to be his farewell address in the House of Representatives, where he was the last of all the black men elected during reconstruction. And despite the cruelties, intimidation, murder and so forth, his constituents had come to the polls in record numbers. But there was fraud and a mis counting of ballots on a massive scale. So come March, there would be no black faces in the halls of Congress.

<v Bill Moyers>Congressman who made that farewell address in January of nineteen oh one twenty eight years, passed before another black man, this time from the north, took a seat in Congress. That's how thoroughly blacks were kept out of the political process. They would have to find their heroes in circles that did not threaten white rule. One of those heroes, the most eloquent black man of his day, was invited to dine at the White House. He was an educator and a successful entrepreneur, and he had become the proverbial shining example to his people, a model of how, through grit and sweat, a black man could climb to the top as long as he knew his place. <v Ossie Davis>This is Booker T. Washington lifted the veil of ignorance from his people and pointed the way to progress through education and industry. At the beginning of the 20th century, Booker T. Washington was the most powerful and the best known black man, not only in the United States but in the world, or, as my daddy used to say, the biggest bear in the bushes. He wrote a book called Up from Slavery, which told the whole story, it became an immediate bestseller. The book told how he had been born a slave in a little shack on a plantation in Virginia, was seven years old at Emancipation, poor, illiterate, hungry, how he worked so hard and so long to get an education. And once he got it, how he dreamed and struggled to bring it to the rest of his people. The opportunity to do that came to Booker at Tuskegee, Alabama, where they needed someone to build a normal school that's a school for teaching teachers.

<v Unidentified>And he was just the man for the job.

<v Speaker 4>Starting with an old chapel <v Ossie Davis>and a handful of students, Booker T. Washington opened Tuskegee in 1881. He believed that the salvation of the Negro race was manual labor, things that a man or a woman could do with their hands farming, building, cooking, sewing, animal husbandry, shoe making and the like. And so Booker T. Washington and the students with their own hands, brick by brick, built the school. And over the next 20 years, it became one of the major educational institutions in the South. It's yet another world as it must have looked to Booker T. Washington while he was building this miracle called Tuskegee Institute, the civil war was over, reconstruction was dead, and political coalitions between blacks and whites trying to vote their common interest failed miserably at the ballot box. The 14th Amendment might just as well have never been written. Lynching, Paniccia, rape, pillage and even murder was commonplace. None of the crimes against black folks were ever punished. The black folks were getting impatient. The South was getting stubborn and the North was getting bored. Somebody had to do something quick before the situation between the races got completely out of hand while traveling all over the country to raise funds to build Tuskegee meant many rich and powerful men, industrialists, philanthropists, some of whom became his mentors, his idols and even his friends like Andrew Carnegie, for whom he named this building the founder of U.S. Steel, John D. Rockefeller, the father of Standard Oil for whom he had a building over there, John Henry Ford, Thomas Alva Edison. Now, all of these men had started out poor, like Booker, and by sheer pluck and grit, self determination and hard work, each have built an empire and in the process had become the richest, most powerful men in America. Booker listened and Booker learned. Business, the bigger, the better and not reform was America's new religion industry had to come first, not civil rights. If the South was ever to get back on its feet and that black people, as a natural pool of cheap and available labor, could provide the base for a new economic order in the South with wealth enough for everybody, especially for those who, like Booker T.. Washington, had already proved they knew exactly what to do with all that wealth. All that was needed was somebody big enough, powerful enough with grit and gumption enough and vision to pull the whole thing together. And Booker, after thinking long and hard, concluded that that somebody was him. Everything he accomplished at Tuskegee proved it, but how could he, a black man, prove to the rest of the nation that he had been sent into the world to redeem the south? His chance came in 1895 when Professor Booker T. Washington was invited to come to the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition and make one of the opening day speeches every day. Booker would come into his study and practice that speech. He had to be careful. It would be polite and the board of directors, this magnificent exposition he would begin, will do more to cement the friendship between the races than any occurrence since the dawn of our freedom. And then he would make sure they understood the black folks no longer dependent on the Congress or the courts around politics, ignorant and inexperienced, he would continue. It is not strange that in the early years of our new life, we began at the top instead of at the bottom, that a seat in Congress for the state legislature was more thought than real estate or industrial skill. But if politics was not to be the solution, <v Speaker 4>what was business? Bear in mind,

<v Ossie Davis>Booker would continue whatever other things the South must bear. When it comes to business, pure and simple, it is in the South that the Negro is given a man's chance in the commercial world. And what was Booker prepared to sacrifice in exchange for this man's chance in the commercial world? The 14th Amendment. The wisest among my race understand that agitation of the question of social equality is the extremist folly and that all progress and the privileges which will come to us must be the result of constant and severe struggle and not of artificial forcing and all things that are purely social. We can be as simple as the fingers, yet one as the hand and all that is essential to mutual progress. And then as if to make absolutely certain they understood his good intentions, Booker would hand black labor over into the tender mercies of old master and the plantation economy. <v Speaker 4>As we have proved

<v Ossie Davis>our loyalty to you in the past and never seeing your children <v Speaker 4>and watching <v Ossie Davis>over the sick beds of your mothers and fathers <v Speaker 4>and often following <v Ossie Davis>them with tear dimmed eyes to their graves. <v Speaker 4>So in the future, <v Ossie Davis>in our own humble way, we will stand by you <v Speaker 4>with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay <v Ossie Davis>down our lives if need be in defense of your. Interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil and religious life with yours in a way that will make the interest of both races one. <v Ruby Dee>Bravo, bravo, hurray for white America, that speech was dynamite, a solid smash, but not for us. The interests of both races never did become one. It was Booker <v Ossie Davis>alone to blame for all of that, but any of his rich and powerful friends, the men he admired and respected so much, if any of them ever give Booker's plan a chance.

<v Ruby Dee>All rights are guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, not by Booker T.. Washington and his friends. <v Ossie Davis>But since when is America paying attention to the Constitution where black folks were concerned? Booker was a real as he was trying to make a deal. Yes. <v Ruby Dee>And a hell of a deal. It was doomed. It took us 60 years to get half way out from under it. <v Ossie Davis>Well, whatever you say, it certainly worked for Booker. Money poured into Tuskegee from all over, especially from Booker's northern white philanthropist friends like George Foster Peabody, William H. Baldwin and especially Andrew Carnegie. Invitations to speak came from all over the country, and he was not one to turn down the opportunity to spread the Tuskegee idea and speak. He did wherever a crowd would gather and rail yards at political rallies before groups of farmers because opinion was sought by whites and blacks, high and low, about every aspect of black life, especially in the South. Soon he had veto power over all the educational funds to all the institutions in the South, as well as over who should be appointed to political office without knowing it, without really seeking it. Booker T. Washington became one of the biggest power brokers in the Republican Party. <v Bill Moyers>It was in 1896 that the Supreme Court gave official constitutional blessing to Booker T. Washington deal. In a landmark decision, Plessy vs. Ferguson. Homer Plessy, a citizen of Louisiana who was just one eighth black, was ordered to move out of a streetcar seat reserved for whites. Only when he refused, he was arrested in court. He contended that segregated seating was a violation of his rights under the 14th Amendment. No, said the court, the state could separate the races so long as their accommodations were equal. The result was to leave the fate of black Americans to the states for each to decide as it saw fit. Their followed a flood of laws that carried an odd and ugly name, Jim Crow. Jim Crow was originally a comic character in a minstrel show, so then by extension, any black. And finally it was the label for a whole body of statutes and customs designed to put the Negro down and keep him down.

<v Ruby Dee>In short order, Jim Crow laws were rushed onto the books, making it illegal for blacks and whites to drink from the same water fountain,

<v Ossie Davis>go to the same toilet, <v Ruby Dee>sleep in the same hotel, <v Ossie Davis>eat at the same table, <v Ruby Dee>be sick and die at the same hospital and get buried in the same cemetery, <v Ossie Davis>live in the same neighborhood, <v Ruby Dee>use the same phone <v Ossie Davis>booth, or in some instances to look out of the same window. At the same time, <v Ruby Dee>if a black male looked at a white female from less than the prescribed distance, he could be jailed for aggravated assault. <v Ossie Davis>But perhaps the most devastating of all was what Jim Crow did to the minds of hundreds of thousands of black children seated in segregated classrooms <v Unidentified>for the next 60 years. <v Ruby Dee>One of the people who saw most clearly all of this was leading was William Edward Burghardt Dubois. <v Ossie Davis>He was born a free man in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to poor but free parents. Dubois was the only black student in his high school graduating class. The pastors and congregations of four white churches were so impressed with his scholarship and abilities that they raised the money to guarantee his tuition to all black Fisk University. It was while at Fisk that he met the first black people he had known outside of his own family. It was at Fisk he learned to love his people. <v Ruby Dee>If America had had an aristocracy, Dr. Dubois would certainly have qualified color notwithstanding, at least that's what my mother thought she was. One of the students in his classes of history and economics at Atlanta University was a matter of some pride to be allowed to attend one of Dr. Dubois's classes and no one dared be laid or be caught not paying attention out. He would insist. And you knew he meant business. He was a mother's eyes, the most educated man in the United States in the world. Ordered, precise, disciplined, but a sense of humor to. With a scholar. He was the first black man to receive a doctorate from Harvard and his brilliant research in the new science of sociology won him a gold medal at the Paris Exposition for his study of black American accomplishments. He truly believed that in science lay the answer to the question of race in America that science could prove the black Americans equality measure for measure. He believed in the life of the mind. The boys felt that bucatini solution was fine as far as it went, but Washington Identities Giggie Institute was nothing short of a miracle. But what about higher education? What about that special kind of training that was needed to build black leaders, schools like Tuskegee and Hampton that had the nod from Booker T. Washington, where heavily supported by rich white northerners, while schools that taught intellectual pursuits were dying on the vine. Like Fisk and Wilberforce and his very own Atlanta University, Dubois saw this as an insult, a crime against the aspirations and intellect of black America. He absolutely refused to accept a second class education or anything else for black people. He fought to the end to get them the very best that was available. And in so doing, he collided head on with Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee machine.

<v Ossie Davis>Well, it the boys was such an ardent opponent of Booker T. Washington. How do you explain the fact that immediately after the 1895 speech, one of the first people to write a book, a letter of congratulations, was that same WBB Dubois?

<v Ruby Dee>Why not? I mean, if America would build a black Harvard equal to the right one, I mean, first class hospitals and schools and theaters and banks and railroads, I mean, what would be so wrong with separate but equal. <v Ossie Davis>But it didn't work. It couldn't work because <v Ruby Dee>it wasn't meant to. But don't blame Dubois because he wanted to be away from white America as much as it wanted to be away from him. Separate as long as it was equal, was right up his alley. <v Bill Moyers>But the plain fact was, while the boys, his ear was cocked to hear separate and equal, white Americans wanted to hear only the sound of the one word separate Booker T. Washington found favor with them because he seemed willing to hear it that way, too. To honor him was an acceptable way for whites to acknowledge that blacks were capable of separate achievement, but not of true equality. He was also the way for a smart politician to woo the very small, brave and Republican black vote that had survived in the South. There was no politician of the day smarter or more genuinely inclined to risk a bold step than that progressive Republican in the White House, Theodore Roosevelt. <v Ossie Davis>Booker T. Washington had dined with some of the crowned heads of Europe high tea with a royal majesty, the Queen Victoria of England, but nothing compared with having an invitation to have dinner at the White House with President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, their daughter Alice, and one of their sons and two members of the cabinet. What a golden opportunity we felt for Booker and for us to tell the president about 130 lynchings that year about the Ku Klux Klan burnings, the beatings, the village and the rape. But how our votes were being stolen, about jobs, about a better education for our children. Besides, black soldiers had saved Teddy Roosevelt's hide at the battle of Alcalay and the Spanish American War. He owed us something. We can hardly wait for Booker to come back and tell us the news. Yes, it well, the dinner was excellent. Booker told us the truth was superb. The president insisted on calling himself. It is asked me to extend his warmest personal regards to the Negro people of America and his wish that they should remain staunch. Republicans know it at all about our major concerns. But what then about those political plums? The president usually gives out to other staunch Republicans. All Booker had was two jobs to minor political appointments and one of them to a white man. And even that through the south into an uproar. A Mississippi politician enraged that President Roosevelt should have dinner with a black man called Teddy Roosevelt a dole and then apologize to the dog. Roosevelt never made that mistake again. Yes, Booker T. Washington knew some of his friends did manage from time to time to eat high on the political hog. But for the rest of us, it was our usual a plate full of crow, Jim Crow, and we'd had just about a bellyful of that.

<v Bill Moyers>Politics is always something of a poker game, but what put Booker T. Washington in an extraordinary predicament was that he had to play in two games at once at the table with the white power brokers. He had bought a pair of deuces. But with respect to black America, he held a full house. He controlled the pipeline. The white funds, no black officeholder, businessman, preacher, college president, or Ed could cost him what the boys called the Tuskegee machine, rolled right over any upstart who had different ideas that threw black intellectuals into turmoil. They not only had to contend with the white power structure, but rather wrong for them or critize paternalism was the only game in town.

<v Ruby Dee>More and more black colleges, the church and especially the black press, began to question the direction of Booker T.. Washington's leadership. The most vociferous of Washington's critics was Monroe Trotter, publisher of The Guardian, a newspaper founded solely for the purpose of attacking the Tuskegee machine, The Reluctant. <v Ossie Davis>At first, Dubois was finally persuaded by Monroe Trotter to join in the battle and together. In 1995, they issued a call that brought 29 black men to a meeting at Niagara Falls, New York. They had to meet on the Canadian side of the falls because hotels on the American side didn't cater to blacks.

<v Ruby Dee>No women were invited to this initial meeting because there was no guarantee of safety. But at the next meeting, one year later, women were in full attendance. <v Ossie Davis>The men and women of the Niagara movement met here at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the scene of John Brown's bloody prelude to the civil war. They walked barefoot down through the main street of the town to the riverside. And there they issued an address to the country. <v Ruby Dee>Our demands are clear and unequivocal. First, we should vote with the right to vote goes everything and manhood, the honor of our wives, the chastity of our daughters, the right to work and a chance to rise, and that no one listened to those who deny this <v Ossie Davis>movement full manhood suffrage. We want it now, henceforth and forever.

<v Ruby Dee>We want discrimination and public accommodation to cease. <v Ossie Davis>You claim the right of free men to walk, talk and be with those who want to be with them. <v Ruby Dee>We want the laws enforced against Rich as well as Poola against capitalists as well as Llodra, against white as well as black. We are not more lawless than the white race. We are more often arrested, convicted and mocked. <v Ossie Davis>We want justice even for criminals and our. We want the constitution in force. <v Ruby Dee>We want our children educated. <v Ossie Davis>You want our children trained as intelligent human beings should be. And we will fight for all time against any proposal to educate black boys and girls simply as servants and underlings are simply for the use of others. They have a right to know the thing, to aspire. And these are the cheap things which we want <v Ruby Dee>and how shall we get them by voting where we may vote

<v Ossie Davis>by persistent and unceasing agitation, <v Ruby Dee>by hammering at the truth, <v Ossie Davis>by sacrifice and <v Ruby Dee>work. We do not believe in violence either in the despised violence of the raid nor the violence of the soldier or the barbarous violence of the mob. <v Ossie Davis>But we do believe in John Brown and that incarnates spirit of justice, that hatred of a lie and that willingness to sacrifice money, reputation and life itself on the altar of right. <v Ruby Dee>And here on the scene of his martyrdom, <v Ossie Davis>we re consecrate. I felt myself on a. Our property or property to the final emancipation, to the <v Ruby Dee>final emancipation <v Unidentified>of the race, which John Brown. To make three. <v Bill Moyers>Those were demands, not a polite petition for conciliation. When I hear them, I hear the ringing spirit behind the Declaration of Independence. Many years earlier, the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass had said that power concedes nothing without demand. But how could people so economically and politically impoverished make their demands heard? Well, the Niagara movement brought the idea of open resistance back into currency, agitation, confrontation, protests. Weren't those the methods by which the white colonists had won their independence? Out of the Niagara movement grew the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP and the modern civil rights struggle. These leaders realized that the Constitution could be their ally, too, despite that narrow interpretation by the chief justices in Plessy vs. Ferguson, what the court had done, the court could undo. But the frustrations that lay ahead, whites would look back and label this era of American history as progressive. It wasn't for blacks. It was more hard times. Their hopes notwithstanding, even Broadway had closed its doors to black performers who moved uptown to the new capital of black New York, Harlem. There wouldn't be any victories for a while, except occasionally from unexpected quarters. In 1910, a pair of powerful black fists kept the dreams from fading altogether. <v Ruby Dee>It was in a gymnasium much like this one that Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion of the world, prepared to defend his title against Jim Jeffries, the Great White Hope. Lerone Bennett Junior describes that fight in his book, Wade in the Water. He says never before had so many people come together for an athletic or entertainment event. There were sports and big money men from America, England, Canada, Australia, India, China, Cuba, Brazil and Burma. There were hobos, miners, cowboys, cattle herders, businessmen, politicians, touts pickpockets and prostitutes, the population of the town and more than doubled. And special trains were arriving daily from the East Coast and the West Coast. The Main Street center street was virtually impassable, and the lobby of the Golden Hotel, where the big spenders were staying was a solid mass of wall to wall people. And by now, the last week in June, the saloons are crowded and people were standing four and five deep around the roulette and crap tables. The most celebrated crooks in America were already in attendance and others were expected. Cincinnati's Slim was there. The Sundance Kid, according to rumors, was on his way and they were still betting in Chicago and Galveston and New York and London and Berlin and in thousands of cities and hamlets all over this world. Now, the cause of all this excitement, all this passion was not a political crisis. It wasn't a natural catastrophe. It was a prize fight. The 1910 contest between Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, and Jim Jeffries, the great white hope of the Western world, the Johnson Jefferys fight was invested with a cosmic significance. This was no simple clash of two men. It was a clash of elemental forces. It was about sin and redemption. It was about the forces of evil and the avenging blind warrior. It was Gotterdammerung. It was revelations. It was Captain Ahab and the white whale bigger. And Mary Hemingway's The White Snows of Kilimanjaro, Rudyard Kipling's The Lesser Breeds Outside the Law. And it was real. On Monday, July 4th, 1910, in Reno, Nevada, a dusty little town in the Wild West, the avenging warrior and the black champion. We're going to climb into the ring and fight for forty five rounds until one of them was maimed or beaten into unconsciousness. This was a world,

<v Speaker 4>a

<v Ruby Dee>world of triumph and white supremacy in which the drama of the Johnson Jefferys fight unfolded. There was a role that whites were defending and blacks were attacking in and through the person of John Arthur Johnson. That night, Johnson punished Jim Jeffries. He taunted him and sent him crashing to the floor, beaten for the first time in his career. By midnight, at least 11 black people were reported killed and no one will ever know how many were actually killed on that July night because a black man whipped a white man in a prizefight in Nevada. It was hard to swallow those 11 deaths, but we did because we knew that Jack had beaten their hope and given us ours. <v Bill Moyers>In 1915, time in history, pull the rug out from under Booker T. Washington and as quickly as Flood's boll weevils and the Klan pushed blacks north northern factories shut them in as they rush to supply the allies at the onset of World War One. At first, it must have felt like freedom. Jobs were plentiful, pay was good, and their new neighbors seemed much too busy to pay them any undue attention. In 1917, America entered the war against the Kaiser to make the world safe for democracy and was immediately embarrassed by her own slogan. The problem was that the army didn't know what to do with the black Americans who wanted to fight for democracy. Web Dubois and the NAACP urged blacks to join, but only if they could be led into battle by black officers, officers like Colonel Charles Young, a distinguished veteran who served under Gen.. John Jay Pershing in the American Southwest. The Army wasn't sure it wanted black fighting men in Europe at all. And as for putting them under black command? Well, the authorities conveniently discovered that Colonel Young had a sudden case of high blood pressure and was ready for retirement, not combat. The colonel disagreed and rode all the way from Ohio to Washington, D.C., on horseback to prove his fitness to no avail.

<v Ossie Davis>Wanting to fight and being turned down was nothing new to us. As far back as 1911, black men had to organize our regiment of their own out of their own pockets, having no weapons. They drilled with broomsticks. It took a long, hard fight in the state legislature and the declaration of war before the fighting. Whuffie, as they were called, was finally admitted into the National Guard. They were sent to Spartanburg, South Carolina, where local citizens were violent in their outrage. The next stop was on Long Island, right next door to units from Alabama and Mississippi. There was trouble the night they arrived, and by the next evening, the fighting Tuffin was well on its way to Europe when they arrived. The American Expeditionary Force has refused to accept them into the Rainbow Division. Black, they say it was not a color of the rainbow. They would be allowed, however, to work as laborers. The French army, desperate for manpower, offered a solution. Let the blacks fight for France and fight. They did as the 316 Ninth Infantry Regiment. Their valor is a matter of public record. They endured 191 days in the trenches more than any other American soldiers. They were the first allied soldiers into Germany and won more medals for conspicuous bravery than any of their fellow Americans. The Distinguished Service Cross the together. But America did not see them as heroes. The War Department sent Major Robert our Moten, the new president of Tuskegee Institute, over to warn them. Don't expect to be treated as conquering heroes when you come home. America is not France and you are still Negroes. But the proud men of the three weeks tonight were not to be denied. On the afternoon of February 17th, 1919, New York gave them a welcome home that made it all seem worthwhile. One eyewitness account describes it this way.

<v Ruby Dee>I was strolling up Fifth Avenue during my lunch time with a lot of my buddies from school when we heard the fanfare available and the booming drums of a marching band. But I can't remember the papers that said anything about a parade. There were lots of them before, during and after the war. But even before the troops appeared, the sidewalks from buildings to cards were jammed with spectators. But there was something off about this parade right from the start. You see, most of the other parades came down Fifth Avenue. This one was moving uptown. We saw. So why? Back from the ride to get the applause of this city and of Harlem with the troops known in France as the 369 U.S. infantry, but known to New York as the Harlem Hellfighters not too many years later. But I understand the reason for the great impression of steel helmeted power. Those of us on the sidelines saw that day. The 360 night was marching in a formation. If they had learned under the French command the dramatic Bemax shoulder to shoulder and curb to curb, they stretched in great mass squares 35 feet wide by 35 feet long of men, helmets and bayonets. They tramped far up the avenue and an endless mass of dark skin, grim faced, heavy booted veterans of many of French battlefield. Then we heard the music. Somewhere in the line of March was Jim and his band that the French had heard before we ever made a little claim. They played no jazz until they got to Harlem later that day. But if what we along the curbs heard was not jazz, it was the best substitute for it I've ever heard in my life. All I know is my school friends and I stepped out into the middle of the street with great hordes of other spectators, and we swung up 5th Avenue behind the three sixty nine and the fantastic sixty piece band. It was beating out those rhythms that could be heard all the way down at our end of the parade. As Major Little said later New York City on February 17, 1919, you know, color line

<v Ossie Davis>1990, a year of celebration, but also a year of tribulation, even of humiliation, 25 race riots, that one long, red hot summer. Whatever victories we may have racked up in France and America, the assault against black folks never stopped.

<v Ruby Dee>But we were not the only victims of the spirit of the Times. And then Henry Ford's newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, launched a scathing attack against American Jews <v Ossie Davis>and the Ku Klux Klan, claiming to defend Nordiques supremacy against blacks, Jews and Catholics to a solid membership of between three and six million people <v Ruby Dee>finding themselves unwelcome. American immigrants began to agitate Irish Americans for Irish independence, Jewish Americans for our homeland and Palestine on every side. Now, calls came to send the immigrants back where they came from. <v Ossie Davis>And that was one black man who didn't think the idea of going back where we came from was bad at all. <v Bill Moyers>This was the man, Marcus Aurelius Garvey, born in the West Indies. He came to Harlem in 1916 and founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association. His aim was to take black Americans whole home to the mother. Continent is rallying cry Africa for the Africans. In one way, he blended into that rich pageant of American promoters, utopians and tub thumpers who constantly thread their way through our history. In another way, he was unique. In ten incredible years of oratory and organizing, he whipped up a mass movement that gave a new twist to the word Afro-American. Only in Harlem could Marcus Garvey have happened at all.

<v Ruby Dee>At first, we were to deepen our misery, to even notice him <v Ossie Davis>being patient and polite, like Booker had suggested, hadn't were <v Ruby Dee>clamoring for our rights as American citizens, as Dubois demanded, hadn't worked <v Speaker 4>prayers, <v Ossie Davis>marches, petitions. Nothing had worked. We were down at the bottom and sinking fast. <v Ruby Dee>Then suddenly, this sort of Hamadoun man with a gold tooth that shone when he smiled came driving his parade right through our misery.

<v Ossie Davis>It started here in Bethel AME Church in 1919 when Marcus Garvey discovered he had the power. Column. He told us. Was the black man's new Jerusalem, the black man's capital of the world? But Harlem isn't anything. Compared to what we are going to build when we get back to Africa, <v Speaker 4>but <v Ossie Davis>you might raise that's what he called us, you can accomplish what you will. <v Ruby Dee>That was good news coming from a black man and God knows we needed it. Garvey was a showman. His technique was part carnival, part camp meeting, and he was a master at it. There was no television, no motion pictures, no radio. But he was a genius at communicating with the black masses. How with parades and marching bands, with uniforms and flowing robes, with swords and sashes, with spectacle and color. And yes, with the oldest, surest instrument in the world, the word <v Speaker 4>Rhinehart Flying, Rhythmical spoke,

<v Ossie Davis>repeated the message, clear and simple hope is deeper than reason. Faith is stronger than fact. The victory belongs to whoever can dream it, believe it, think it planet and build it. Ignore the white man's religion. We have our own God and he is black. Forget the white man's civilization. Ours is older and wiser and black. Let him keep his constitution. Let him have his Declaration of Independence. <v Speaker 4>We have our own <v Ossie Davis>documents and they are black America. Oh no, it's not for us. Our home is Africa, with four hundred million of her children scattered around the face of the globe. <v Speaker 4>But now the white man's days are numbered and we are going home.

<v Ruby Dee>There was a flag, red, black and green fighting men, <v Ossie Davis>a police force, the African <v Ruby Dee>Legion, the Nurses Corps, a motor <v Ossie Davis>called the Dukes of Uganda, the night commanders of the national <v Ruby Dee>newspapers in three languages, meeting halls all over the country, rallies conventions with delegates from all over the world, <v Ossie Davis>shops, restaurants, all kinds of businesses, and something more important than something so big. It was staggering, <v Ruby Dee>something that brought black people by the thousands, by the tens of thousands down along 123 Street to 12th Avenue through the heart of the Meatpacking District, shouting, laughing in all their Sunday best coming to see Marcus Garvey <v Ossie Davis>to this very spot, West 135 Street and 12th Avenue. And they they're sitting proudly at the dock was Marcus Garvey, his masterpiece, the Black Star Shipping Line, which consisted at that time of one ship, the Yamas. But that was soon going to be called the Booker T. Washington <v Ruby Dee>as the yard was the centerpiece. I mean, we've never seen anything like it before. It was the queen of the Black Star shipping line. It was to be the first of a vast and mighty fleet engaged in the African trade.

<v Ossie Davis>The flag on the staff was ours. <v Ruby Dee>The skipper at the helm was ours. <v Ossie Davis>And when the Yarmouth weighed anchor and steamed away from the pier 230 Fifth Street, her cargo was our dream. <v Ruby Dee>And we followed her with our hearts and our hopes. <v Ossie Davis>But less than a year later, the Yarmouth began to fall apart and two more ships were rushed into service before they were ready. <v Ruby Dee>Covid didn't know it, but the smiling white men from whom we had brought the ships had sold junk. They were little more than leaky tubs. <v Ossie Davis>Now, when it came to dreams, Garvey was his own best convert. But when it came to business, he was a sheep being led to the slaughter. <v Ruby Dee>In December 1921, less than two years after the peak of his power, Garveys black Starline collapsed one year and many thousands of dollars later, the balance in the bank was thirty one dollars and 22 cents. <v Ossie Davis>Bad luck seldom comes by itself. Covid was soon charged with using the mails to defraud all the investors of the black Starline. Out of 800000 dollars. He was tried, convicted and sent to the federal penitentiary at Atlantic. In 1927, he was pardoned and deported to Jamaica.

<v Ruby Dee>Garvey's legacy was double edged, exploded hopes another defeat, another end. But he left us something much more important than that. He left us a new dimension that was permanent. I was caught by the artists and poets, the novelists, the singers, the musicians, the dancers, the Harlem Renaissance, which was an explosion of black genius that took the world by storm. <v Ossie Davis>You left us with a better sense of who we are and where we came from, of a wider world and our place in it, and a solid sense of pride to help us deal with prejudice, bigotry and <v Ruby Dee>Jim Crow and left us a feel of a power and its possibilities in unity. There is strength, he said. He was backdrop and training ground for the mountains in the mountains and Americas, for the elders and the animals, and for The Wrap's in the Foremans and the stowaways from many, many others that were yet to come. <v Ossie Davis>It's gone now, all that mighty dream. Marcus himself wouldn't recognize this place, what was once a pier for the ships of the mighty black Starline. Is now a place for dumping garbage. What happens to a dream deferred?

<v Ruby Dee>Does it dry up like A Raisin in the Sun? Or fester like a sore and then run. What happens to a dream deferred? <v Ossie Davis>Does it stink like rotten meat or crust and sugar over? Like a syrupy sweet. What happens to a dream deferred? <v Ruby Dee>Maybe it just sags like a heavy load <v Ossie Davis>or does it explode? <v Bill Moyers>As the dream was deferred generation to generation, each black leader in his way struggled to keep it alive. The struggle would pass to other leadership long after Booker T. Washington was dead. Marcus Garvey had vanished into obscurity. And Web Dubois, though still uncompromising, had passed from young firebrand to tribal elder. New leaders would carry the struggle to mid century and beyond. And we'll meet those leaders when the story continues next week on Bill Moyers. And. This program has been brought to you by the people of Chevron who have been helping to supply America's energy needs throughout the 20th century. I'm Bill Moyers. There are certain years that can be seen with hindsight to have turned the course of events on its head years that divide whole eras, one from the other, although we didn't know it at the time. Such a year was 1954. Think about the straws in the wind. The French were beaten by Ho Chi Minh and the United States moved in to take over the leading role in supporting his enemies in Vietnam. The Shah of Iran settled on the throne in Tehran, restored after a short exile by U.S. efforts at home television demonstrated its power. It had helped to make Senator Joe McCarthy's career. Now it helped to destroy him when he took on the U.S. Army before the cameras and lost a once innocent habit, lost its badge of nonchalance forever. When cigaret smoking was linked to cancer, a once impregnable barrier fell when Roger Bannister ran a mile in under four minutes and other barriers fell, too, especially for American blacks. Charles H. Mahoney became the first of his race to serve as a permanent member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations. And Willie Mays hit three forty five, starred in the World Series and was MVP in the National League. Marian Anderson appeared with the Metropolitan Opera Company, an obscure and youthful preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. was called to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. And there was, above all, that ultimate landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court ruling unanimously that segregation in public education was unconstitutional. The decision carried the name of Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, with it, the highest court completely reversed its own decision of fifty eight years earlier and gave a powerful new thrust to the second American Revolution. In keeping with Chevron's tradition of service throughout the 20th century, the people of Chevron bring you this program in support of public television. The second American Revolution, the struggle of black people to secure for themselves the rights ostensibly proclaimed for all Americans in the Declaration of Independence, but the Constitution of the new nation then denied for the moment, a very long moment what the declaration had offered. Blacks were slaves and it would take a bloody civil war to free them. Years would pass before the Constitution would be amended and interpreted so as to render justice colourblind. Blacks faced continued anguish in that long period between 1896, when the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson endorsed the doctrine of separate but equal in 1954, when Brown vs. the Board of Education upset it. There's plenty of anguish still, but if it's true, as Thomas Hobbs thought it to be, that the law mirrors the public conscience, well, by the middle of this century, the American conscience was stirring and the law was feeling the pressure. So we pick up our story of this revolution with the husband and wife team of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. They are, as I said last week, artists who are also participant witnesses to those events where public and private dramas are transformed into history. <v Ruby Dee>Often when I think about America and the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, I ask myself, do these words really apply to black people? Yes, they are some of humanity's best expressed aspirations meant to guide and to protect us. Yet for black Americans, the Constitution has been little more than a leaky umbrella under which we've huddled.

<v Ossie Davis>I've done a lot of thinking about America to my country, tis of thee and my place in it, and about that phrase, separate but equal, trying to explain it to myself, to make it make some kind of sense. But how can you make sense of something that means Jim Crow riding at the back of the bus the rest of your life? What it really meant was putting black people down at the very bottom and keeping them there. But it did have a certain kind of crazy logic. I mean, suppose the great white fathers had really meant it when they said separate but equal. <v Ruby Dee>You mean like General Motors for them and a Chrysler and a full corporation for us, a Harvard university for them, a Yale and a Princeton for us and for every white bank, a separate but equal black bank with white dollars. One bank bank that was in the

<v Ossie Davis>Congress for them, a Congress for US, Supreme Court for them, Supreme Court for a just across the street from the White House, a separate but equal Black House. That's what it said in the law. <v Ruby Dee>What it really meant was lynching and robbing no right to vote. The race and the color of our skin disqualified us from citizenship in a country where we tell the soil, shed blood and paid taxes, <v Ossie Davis>separate but equal. It was mean. It was vicious. It was ridiculous and it was impossible. <v Ruby Dee>But when the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education, separate but equal was dead, or so we thought. <v Ossie Davis>Some said it was a second emancipation. It had been a long time coming, and many people, black and white, had fought long and hard to make it happen. But I think it was the Second World War that set the stage for the 1954 decision.

<v Ruby Dee>Ever since Crispus Attucks, a black sailor from Framingham, Massachusetts, was killed by British troops in the Boston massacre. Black Americans have never hesitated to fight and die for this country, <v Ossie Davis>and World War Two was no different. In fact, it was almost personal. This war to us was about Mussolini with his highly mechanized army bombers and tanks against Ethiopians with outdated equipment that amounted to little more than Spears driving the beloved Haile Selassie from out of his country. <v Ruby Dee>It was about anti-Semitism and the master race we knew with the master race was all about. We'd heard it before. <v Speaker 4>We don't hate the Negro. God made him black and he made us white. And you will find this laid out in the chapter of Genesis in which he segregated the race. And we know that for five thousand years the white man has been the supreme race with the Knights of the Peace Plan. Intend to keep the white race? <v Ruby Dee>Oh, yes, we'd heard it before Adolf Hitler and his jack booted goosestepping bully boys were making it perfectly clear that open naked racism was at the heart of this war.

<v Ossie Davis>Racism was something we knew about first hand. It was people being dragged from their homes in the middle of the night. It was beatings and burnings and concentration camps. <v Ruby Dee>We knew that if Hitler won, we'd be next. <v Ossie Davis>So when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, I didn't wait for my draft board to call me, I volunteered. And in June 1942, I landed in Liberia, West Africa, a soldier, an Uncle Sam's segregated army, some of them that I served with Liberia overseas and some lie buried here in Arlington and all that on a blurry black and white side by side finally integrated. I've often wondered if the unknown soldier was a black man, why not the same army, the same war we fought, we bled with died together here at the army in which I served, was split into two separate but equal parts. And only the whites were supposed to provide the heroes. The only hero I knew in the service would not be buried here at Arlington. I was a surgical technician in charge of a ward in the 25th station hospital. Our job was to evacuate the wounded coming down from General Eisenhower's North African campaign against Rommel. We were a crack outfit with first class medical officers all the way up, except for the very two top positions. We were pioneers trained to within an inch of our life and proud as hell, except for one thing, segregation. And no white guy on the post could be housed in any ward with any of the black guys. We had to put them in with the officers and treat them like officers. Separate but better villages reserved. Whites were off limits to us. They got the first and best of everything. According to U.S. Army regulations, they were even forbidden to fraternize with us as if we were the enemy. All this in Africa, the continent and in front of all the Africans who worked around the post. How does this differ from Hitler? They ask us. It wasn't funny and we didn't laugh. One Sunday afternoon, Big John Williams from Baltimore, a sergeant who was a patient on my ward, was feeling well enough to get a pass and go into the village. There was some kind of altercation there, and Big John was beaten by two white employees and thrown into the stockade until he could cool down. They let him out. Then he went on a rampage and he killed five people. Including his commanding officer and finally himself. Less than a week integration came to the half station hospital, but for the longest time, all through the night and the barracks, we would argue about Big John and the violence and the bloodshed. And how much was one man supposed to take before he cracked, right or wrong? It was one hell of a price to have to pay for piddling measure of manhood and self-respect. No Big John. He paid it and he paid it in full. Thanks, man. <v Ruby Dee>When Hitler was finally dead and the bomb was dropped, Japan surrendered and we thought the war was finally over, that justice had finally triumphed, the forces of goodness, fair play and brotherhood met in San Francisco to form the United Nations. Swearing that it would never happen again, but then the Negro troops came marching home. I remember Nazi prisoners of war being ferried through the south on the railroads. They rode first class in the section reserved for whites only, while black guys, many of them with hero's medals strung across their chests, rode Jim Crow.

<v Bill Moyers>The war had the effect of a bulldozer on American life, knocking some things down, tearing others up, changing boundaries and expectations everywhere, black veterans came home more impatient than ever with racism. If the Nazis could see them sufficiently to shoot at them, they weren't going to come back and be the invisible man anymore. Hurting but unheard. Surprisingly, they found someone in the White House who seemed prepared to listen when an NAACP delegation visited the White House to report numerous recent incidents of anti black violence and brutality. President Harry Truman was reportedly appalled. He said he wanted to do something and would ask why he would risk his political neck for black people. This border state politician recalled happening upon a coupe Klux Klan rally in Independence, Missouri, just after World War One. It scared the hell out of me, Truman said. And I'm still scared. In June 1947, in a speech before the 30th annual conference of the NAACP, Truman made it crystal clear that he intended to do something about civil rights. <v Speaker 4>Our immediate task is to remove the last remnants of the barriers which stand between millions of our citizens and their birthright. There is no justifiable reason for discrimination because of ancestry or religion or race. Color. Many of our people still suffer the indignity of the harrowing fear of intimidation, and I regret to say the threat of physical injury and violence, there is much that state and local governments can do in providing positive safeguards for civil rights. But we cannot any longer await the growth of a world of action in the slowest state or the most backward community. Our national government must show the way

<v Bill Moyers>the next year he issued an executive order outlawing segregation in the armed forces and later at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, his insistence on a strong, uncompromising plank on civil rights so offended and outraged Southern sentiment that 38 delegates walked out of the convention and formed the States Rights Party. They nominated Strom Thurmond as their candidate for president.

<v Speaker 4>Well, ladies and gentlemen, if we are to Southerners, if we stand for the principles of our forefathers and if we place principle of our party, I respect you, then we will forget our political futures and we won't fight these things to the left. And we will defeat any man that has attempted to stab this house in the back and has Harry S. Truman. <v Bill Moyers>There were other splits in the party that year, and the Progressive Party nominated Henry Wallace. But despite these defections and the dire predictions of even the optimists, Harry S. Truman won that election in a stunning upset. It was a close call, but the president's victory over the Dixiecrats was a signal to a particular group of black Americans now armed with statute books and court reports who are hungry to win some victories themselves. <v Ruby Dee>When Mordecai Johnson became the first black president of Howard University in Washington, D.C., he sought advice from the experts on how to make the university all that. It could be.

<v Ossie Davis>One of the people with whom he conferred was Louis Brandeis, associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. The justice was appalled. I can always tell when I get a brief from a Negro attorney, Brandeis told him, You've got to get yourself a real faculty out. There are. Your law school will always be fifth rate. <v Ruby Dee>Johnson called on Charles Houston, a graduate of Harvard, to come and organize the law school. And when he was through what it started out as a night school in a little brownstone in northwest Washington with a spare time faculty that became a fully accredited, respected school of law. <v Ossie Davis>It was at the Howard University Law School under that same Charles Houston, Thurgood Marshall, William Hastey, James neighbored, Walter White of the NAACP, Constance Baker, Motley, to name only a few. It was there that civil rights law was said to have been invented <v Ruby Dee>with a grand strategy was mapped, the legal research done and all the groundwork laid to launch the final campaign,

<v Ossie Davis>a campaign with one simple single aim to overturn the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision of 1896 decision, which, with its phony doctrine of separate but equal, that made life a segregated hell on earth for black people. <v Ruby Dee>They used to meet in places like this, sitting around shooting the breeze, being judge and jury, trying their cases before each other, searching the transcripts, citing the <v Ossie Davis>precedent, quoting the documents over and <v Ruby Dee>over. Yes. And grilling the witnesses over and over. Sleeping too little, smoking too much decisions, decisions and still more decisions on whether <v Ossie Davis>or not in the light of Truman's big election victory, the time has finally come to force the issue to go flat out whole hog or none. <v Ruby Dee>Some argued, no, no, no, it's too soon that it's too late. Others said, no, no, we need more time, more cases, more victories under our belts. <v Ossie Davis>And everybody turned to Thurgood Marshall, the big man who had the final say, my dear, and learned colleagues, we got these jokers exactly where we want them. Let's go for broke. The strategy was not to attack Iran, but rather to pick those cases where segregation could easily be shown to be ridiculous, expensive and burdensome to the states. And the Peking's were easy. <v Bill Moyers>If there had ever been any remote intention to make separate accommodations truly equal, it had been eroded by time and custom and by outright sabotage. Black schools and colleges everywhere were blatantly inferior. For years, the gap between what the law required for equality and what was actually provided was so vast that the time had come for the NAACP attorneys to fire a fusillade of arguments against that status quo. Three cases in particular made history. Heman Sweat, a black postal worker, applied to the University of Texas Law School rather than admitting the Texas legislature appropriated two million six hundred thousand dollars to build a law school just for Negroes. The courts ruled against the state, saying that equal treatment meant more than mere duplication of physical facilities. Mr. Sweat could not be refused admission solely because he was black. And yet another case, GW MacLaurin applied to the University of Oklahoma's Graduate School of Education and was accepted. But once inside, he was forced to sit in a special seat cut off from the rest of the class by Mark. Reserved for colored. The courts ruled that his right to an equal education had been violated. A third case was that of Elmer Henderson, a black employee of the federal government who had to ride a southern train from Washington, D.C. to Georgia, according to railroad regulations, they grow. Passengers had to eat at a table at the end of the diner, separated from the rest of the car by curtains. The courts held that such regulations were unconstitutional. These three cases were all decided on the same day, and now the NAACP was encouraged to go for broke. The time had come to ask the Supreme Court to reverse the decision of their earlier brethren and, in effect, to declare Plessy vs. Ferguson unconstitutional.

<v Ruby Dee>It wasn't just one case that gave the NAACP the chance it wanted. There were five, and those five could easily have been 5000. Linda Brown had to walk across a dangerous rail yard every morning on her way to school. There was a white school near her home. But when her father, Reverend Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her there, he ran head on into separate but equal. The NAACP took Linda's case and four others and laid it in the lap of the United States Supreme Court.

<v Ossie Davis>Reverend Oliver Brown wasn't the only parent who tried to protect his children from the effects of racism in American education. I remember once our eldest daughter came racing home, waving her examination paper and I enthusiasm. She was a French honor student and the assignment had been to read and report on a novel in the original French. And she had chosen Alexander Dumas, The Three Musketeers. And we were so proud, doubly proud, because the author she had chosen, Domar, was a black man. And I can remember the astonishment on her face when we told her that. You mean Alexander Domar was a black man? And we said yes and told her about how his family had come over to France from Martinique. We thought you'd be happy, but she wasn't. Why didn't my teacher tell me that? Why wasn't it in the books? We tried to laugh it off to explain to her that racism wasn't only about lynching and beating people. You know, sometimes it was quite subtle and could even happen between friends. And she'd always thought of her teacher as a friend. But not so much after that. It's not easy trying to explain segregation to your children. And I wondered how the nine men and the Supreme Court were going to explain it to the nation. <v Bill Moyers>What the NAACP set out to prove was simple and straightforward, that forcing children to attend schools restricted to their own race was not only unfair, but damaged them psychologically. And two of the witnesses for that position were unusual, to say the least. Can you imagine what some historian in the faraway future would think to find two dolls like these packed away in an archive along with the records of the Brown case, small, silent witnesses, but in the hands of doctors Mamie and Kenneth Clark, husband and wife and both psychologists, the dolls help the lawyers to demonstrate how segregation adversely affected the self-esteem of black children.

<v Speaker 4>We put them on a table to write in two brown dolls, exactly the same in every respect except color. We put no clothes on them except a diaper, and we ask the children a number of very simple questions starting out with Show me the white doll, show me the colored doll, show me the Negro doll. And after getting the answer to those questions, which would tell us whether they perceived the difference in these dolls, we then asked them preference questions such as show me the doll you'd like to play with. Show me or give me the doll. That's a nice car. Show me the doll. That's a bad. These were questions designed to determine whether the children had some differential differentiating responses and attitudes to these dolls, which were identical in every respect except color. And we found that the majority of black children at that time did in fact ascribe the positive characteristics to the light doll and the negative characteristics to the brown. And I'll never forget because Mamie had to be home with our first child. But I did feel very good that the last disturbing question after they had indicated their preferences, which in a sense were a rejection of the. I didn't answer the question. Now show me the doll that's like you. Some of those children look at me as if I were the devil himself for putting them in that predicament. I remember in the north this happened not in the south. Interestingly, on northern black children, some of them would run out of the room when I asked them that last question. The difference in the South is that I remember that the black children in the South, for the most part, would look up at me and some of them would smile. And I remember one young boy, about six or seven years old, when I asked him if he had indicated that the white doll and all the good characteristics and the brown bear all had all the bad characteristics. And when I said to him, I show me the ones like you, he looked up at me, put a curious smile and broke into a laugh. And that's a [Unrecognized]. I'm a [Unrecognized]. And he that's the way he handled the joke self-esteem by accepting the definition of himself as a [Unrecognized] with all of the characteristics. So we wrote that up. You can see why we were reluctant to publish it and had to be forced to publish it. But it was the beginning of psychologists understanding of the terrible damage it's done to human beings by racial rejection. <v Bill Moyers>The clerk's testimony was accepted as evidence by the Supreme Court in its findings about the harmful effects of segregation in public education. The court ask, does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other tangible factors may be equal? Deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities. And the court answered, We believe it does.

<v Ruby Dee>The Supreme Court decision of 1954 was a victory. We felt it in our bones vs. Ferguson was dead. <v Ossie Davis>But we didn't dance in the streets. We didn't shout out loud. Instead, we waited. We held our breath. We kept our fingers crossed, holding our hallelujahs down to a bare minimum. <v Bill Moyers>The Brown decision hit the South like the earlier sound of shots at Fort Sumter, or a few governors spoke favorably and some school boards made plans to integrate with all deliberate speed. As the court had instructed for a moment, it seemed that the moderates might even prevail while the extremists fumed in disarray. They, the moderates, kept hoping that President Dwight David Eisenhower would speak out in support of the court's decision. He was a popular figure, the hero of World War Two, and had even carried four Southern states for the Republicans in 1952. His authority, they said, might have made the difference, might have stirred the center to hold. But no affirming word came from the president to the contrary. He did not conceal his private opposition to government intervention in such affairs. Soon, the first White Citizen's Council came to life in Mississippi to foster open resistance to the court's decision, and ninety six Southern congressmen signed a ringing manifesto to preserve the segregated status quo. It wasn't Fort Sumter, but the South had, for all intents and purposes, declared war on Brown vs. the Board of Education. There would be no equal opportunities or integrated schools without a fight. But who would lead it? <v Ossie Davis>Residents may fail, us, Congress may organize against us, the courts may raise our hopes only to back them again. There's always been one institution to which we could turn and what may our refuge, our rock of ages,

<v Speaker 4>our shelter and the time of a storm, the black church. <v Ruby Dee>And here at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, December nineteen fifty five, the winter of our discontent, we found Martin Luther King Junior. <v Speaker 4>We are involved in a movement which causes us to sing over and over again that we are not afraid. <v Unidentified>We are not <v Speaker 4>afraid of the threat of arrest. We are not afraid of police, though, we are not afraid of being not the party of the states rights party, because as we mourn, we know that we do not march alone. Now, let me say to you finally that undergirding our whole struggle is a philosophy. Deeply embedded in our religious tradition. And with that philosophy, go. And articulate, meaningful, eloquent, never. That is the philosophy and method of nonviolent resistance. Let us be willing to turn the other cheek with the realization that it is better to go through life with Escada body than with a start up. <v Ruby Dee>So he was young, strong, eager and dedicated, a veritable Moses. But it took the tired feet of Rosa Parks and the righteous indignation of E.D. Nixon to show our Moses the burning Bush.

<v Speaker 4>December 1st, 1955, on a Thursday. I was in or out of the downtown at that time, and I had left off for some reason when I came back on a note on my telephone to the urge to call home. And once I called home and last night telephone after what happened, she said, arrest me for what she said. I don't know. Go get it. It's like I could go on and get in and cause I call on and find out what the charge was. I guess she was charged with violating Alabama's segregation law as well. I'm going on and make a bond for it. And I made a phone. And after we got her out, I came back to Mrs. Parks on my way over there, I think about this thing I said when I said so glad you called and drop what I wanted in my lap. So I came home. And when I got here by 11:00 at night and I told my wife, I said, well, I believe I got what we believe. She she's like, when I was Miss Polski, I said, I think the best thing to do is boycott the Montgomery estate. And I see what you mean by boycott. And I still have to keep people off. And then and she said, man, don't you know that they're imputing all colors in here? Well, one thing, if we can keep more of that cool war out of trouble, getting them all getting hot, she looked at me and she said my husband my husband said if he takes a dollar done, you this will be the guy to walk into a drugstore and say, give me a dollar and headaches. And so, you know, I had a tape recorder and I record a number of people names on tape recorder. And then I got up next morning and started calling these people for his place. I called them Raft you have now. And I told them what had happened to he and Hillary. And I said, I'm calling you because I'm an asshole border to stay off the bus until the people decide to treat people right on the bus. He said, I'll go along with you. Then I called the Reverend 82 second man and called that he'd go along with me cause he's pastor the church where I attended church services. I knew he was going on with me. And at that point I called around King. He said. Let me think about it while he called me back, when I called him back, you were number 19. I told him he agrees to you agree to go along with me? Well, I'm glad he said it, OK, because I called 18 other people that told me that your church is even downtown. I said, look, kind of bad if you weren't there. <v Ossie Davis>The Montgomery bus boycott, seventeen thousand five hundred black people simply refusing to ride Jim Crow. No more dockett jokes by white, arrogant bus drivers, no more being insulted and pushed around and then smiling as if it really didn't matter. Nobody was ever again going to tell us to go to the back of the bus. We said it, we meant it. And 381 days later, the Supreme Court backed us up. The Constitution was alive and well. We have put the documents to the test and they had worked. And we had learned an important lesson about the struggle

<v Ruby Dee>that nobody was going to hand us freedom on a silver platter, that we had to fight for it and keep on fighting, just like the people here in Montgomery, not only in the courts and the churches in the schools, but also out in the streets, if we had to. Taxicabs were pressed into service, people with cars shoved over and made room for their neighbors. The busses were all but empty. What the black vote had not been able to do, the black dollar did. And we took our struggle to the streets. <v Ossie Davis>And so it began the relentless hammering away at Jim Crow, the absolute determination to take the Constitution and make it work for us and for everybody

<v Ruby Dee>else, not only the people themselves and their hundreds and tens of thousands, but sometimes just one or two heroes, heroines and in some cases martyrs putting their safety on the line again and again and again. <v Ossie Davis>In 1957, we integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Nine teenagers led by Daisy Bates, field secretary of the NAACP, tried to enroll in the all white school. There was a swift and violent reaction to President Eisenhower, who sworn duty it was to uphold and defend the Constitution was forced finally to send in federal troops to escort the youngsters to and from their classes. <v Ruby Dee>In 1960, the sit ins were born at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, started by four black students from a nearby college campus. <v Ossie Davis>And in less than a year, the movement had spread to almost every black college campus in the south. <v Ruby Dee>One of the key people behind the scenes was Ella Baker, who taught the students about the courage, the discipline and the history of nonviolent resistance.

<v Ossie Davis>In 1961, we sent Freedom Riders deep into the South to test segregation in interstate transport. The Freedom Rides brought allies in from the North. They were met by burnings and beatings, bullets and bombs. Our purpose was to prod the Justice Department into enforcing the law of the land. The strategy worked. <v Ruby Dee>In 1962, we integrated the University of Mississippi. James Meredith, a veteran of the United States Air Force, did not hesitate to walk the gantlet. <v Ossie Davis>In 1963, it was the University of Alabama, and George Wallace's infamous stand in the doorway <v Speaker 4>is blah blah. I am the highest constitutional officer of the state of Alabama. I embody the sovereignty of <v Bill Moyers>this state and I will be present to bar the entrance of <v Speaker 4>any Negro who attempts to enroll at the University of Alabama. <v Ossie Davis>Wallace's adamant stand made, he said, in the name of the Constitution of Alabama, was seen by many as an open invitation to violence. But violence, under any circumstance is always a threat to law and order. In the end, the Alabama police had to intervene on our side, something we had very seldom seen before in the South. <v Ruby Dee>The situation threatened to get out of hand, and that could call for federal intervention, something George Wallace did not want to happen to him.

<v Speaker 4>My friend, we cannot win this fight if we resort to violence, every resort to bombing, every resort to harm the hair on a single person's head <v Ossie Davis>in this state. I ask you to <v Bill Moyers>join me in keeping the peace in this day. If you want to stand with me in my <v Speaker 4>fight, I know that you will do just that. There are people, they are communists, they are left wingers. <v Bill Moyers>They are people who despise all the people of this country. There are people who have pledged their allegiance to a foreign government who would like to exploit <v Speaker 4>and use this situation. But if you are an Alabama and or a Southerner or an American who stands with your governor, then I can tell you that the resorting to violence in any form will only help defeat our cause in the long run. <v Ossie Davis>On June 11th, 600 Alabama National Guard were called in to keep the peace to black students would attempt to register at the University of Alabama and the federal government stood behind them. <v Ruby Dee>Alabamians were urged to stay away 825. Troopers, game wardens and revenue agents were standing by.

<v Speaker 4>All was quiet. <v Ossie Davis>Governor Wallace was ready to carry out his pledge to stand in the schoolhouse door. A member of the faculty said this is just like the late, Late Show. You know how it ends, but you can't go to bed. <v Ruby Dee>George Wallace, representing the state, took his place in the door of the last totally segregated state university system in the country. <v Ossie Davis>Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, representing the federal government, served Alabama in the person of George Wallace with an order to integrate the university system forthwith. Wallace refused. <v Ruby Dee>President Kennedy, within moments, federalized the Alabama National Guard and ordered Brigadier General Henry Graham Birmingham to remove George Wallace from the schoolhouse door so that Vivian Horner and James Hood could enroll. <v Ossie Davis>General Graham Sadler said that it was his duty under the order of the president and of the Constitution of the United States to ask the governor to step aside. The battle between states' rights and the authority of the Constitution can only have one ending. Governor Wallace, realizing the futility of his gesture, finally <v Speaker 4>agreed

<v Ruby Dee>there were no cheers, but also there were no jeers. Some Alabamians seemed ready to accept the change. <v Speaker 4>I think I prepared for. I think that's right. But I'm glad that it's over with. I think it should have been done a long time ago. I don't see a reason why they should keep in California. And I really don't mind going to school with them here. But I think our legislators have to take all this much trouble to enroll, to go to school. <v Ruby Dee>In May of that same year, we marched against Jim Crow through growling dogs and cattle prods through water hoses in Birmingham. <v Ossie Davis>To this day of the sacrifices, the dedication, the endless courage of boys and girls, men and women, people of many races who gave themselves to this great chapter of our history that has never been told. <v Ruby Dee>1963 was the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation that called for something special. <v Ossie Davis>In August of that year, we held our biggest protest demonstration ever, the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs. It was a masterpiece of logistics, organized, planned and rehearsed down to the last detail. Bayard Rustin, who had masterminded the Montgomery bus boycott, was in charge of operations, and he asked Ruby and me to emcee part of the program

<v Ruby Dee>that called us all together the night before the March four meeting in a small hotel conference room. <v Ossie Davis>This march was supposed to be the biggest and most important thing for black Americans since Marcus Garvey talked about going back to Africa. All the civil rights leaders with the Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Jim Palmer was still in jail down in Panama and Louisiana. We didn't know if he'd meet with John Henry Lewis. Was there a Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr. while out in the hall? Who should we pass talking to a television reporter? But Malcolm X, that was a surprise <v Ruby Dee>to many people, white and black, Malcolm X, foul trouble, even believe in the march. He didn't believe in integration and he didn't trust white America.

<v Speaker 4>We didn't bring him to be a leader, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the human being on this earth. And this day when we intended to bring him to work by any means, <v Ossie Davis>this kind of passionate declaration made him a perfect target for the oppressed in the black Muslims represented dangers that America was not prepared to tolerate. His doctrine of love was certainly different from that of Martin Luther King. We are <v Speaker 4>peaceful people. We are loving people. We love everybody who loves us, but we don't love anybody who doesn't love us. We're nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us, but we are not nonviolent with anyone who is with us. <v Ossie Davis>The first time I heard Malcolm, he scared me to not all of us knew that he was brave and all of us from time to time and felt exactly what Malcolm had felt and thought exactly what Malcolm had thought. But Malcolm was saying it out loud. What was he trying to do? This brilliant young black fireball get us all killed. <v Ruby Dee>So I said I invited Malcolm over to the house to sit down with a few friends and talk.

<v Ossie Davis>We tried to pull his coattail. Hey, brother, do you really believe that all white folks are blue eyed devils and that most civil rights leaders are Uncle Tom's? <v Ruby Dee>I remember Malcolm laughing, putting us at our ease. His strategy is, he explained, it was to shake up white America, to scare them so much with his talk of. Martin Luther King and that principle of nonviolence that I would gladly give the civil rights leaders whatever they asked for, <v Ossie Davis>we never met a more gentle, courteous, witty, humane individual than Malcolm X. In spite of all his anger. Not much of Malcolm was the rhetoric, but none of them was bluff and nobody was ever more serious. America could settle the differences with black folks by one of two methods with balance, with bullets and whichever way they jump. Malcolm planned to be ready, <v Ruby Dee>so when we saw him that night in Washington, we understood the passion and the twinkle in his blazing eyes. We understood the game plan, so we went into the meeting to do our part.

<v Bill Moyers>The march made history, it made headlines, and it made the evening news that was significant. Suddenly, the whole of America was involved in the struggle that appeared on the great National Looking-Glass of television. Two hundred and fifty thousand Americans gathered in all their massive glory at the Lincoln Memorial. Washington, D.C., had a way to the day and nervous apprehension. Monuments and landmarks were closely guarded. The entire police force was on alert. The bars were closed in. The sale of liquor was forbidden. They needn't have gone to the trouble. It was one of the most orderly and peaceful demonstrations Washington has ever seen. It became apparent that day that this was no longer just a movement of black people. It was an American movement. Americans of all colors and classes, all denominations from labor to campuses, from every walk of life, were now in motion. <v Speaker 4>I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. I have a dream that one day on the radio from the farm of slaves and the sons of former slave owners, will they be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood? I have a dream. My four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

<v Unidentified>I have a dream. That would be the day would <v Speaker 4>all have got to be able to sing with new meaning, my country, tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of PRC land. Grab my father's side, man for the pilgrim's pride from every mountainside. Let freedom ring. When we let it ring from every village that ever Hamlet, from every state and city, we will be able to speed up that day with all the children, black and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual. Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty.

<v Ruby Dee>We came from slavery with the strength of true believers in our God and our country and our great documents, and we've tried to get get get a toehold to heal the old wounds and be made whole again. But America has met us with a false face, with a racism that has made Wrage the basic rhythm of our lives, a racism that has trampled self-esteem and numbed hope. Racism, that cancer on the bosom of our nation that gnaws at the psyche of black America and keeps us screaming and shaking for relief, it hands us upward mobility and rung with ladders, backdoor trap shoots to disillusionment and oblivion. Be patient, the country tells us, be clean, be thrifty, be industrious, be and be and be and be. So we keep struggling for definitions, organizing, snatching at possibilities in the country and the city, in the courts, on the streets, everywhere. But those who try to overcome, in spite of all link as to survival, to hope to ourselves, and so we must keep on telling the stories of our heroes and heroines, sung and unsung as best we can, because it is they who urge us to hang on, to join hands, to move relentlessly toward greater understanding among all people, to move toward justice. And Todd Love.

<v Ossie Davis>Jackie Robinson was a great American hero, much beloved by blacks and whites alike, and yet when he came to the end of his days, he was a bitter and disillusioned man, finding it impossible. He confessed to say the words, I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And I have seen my own children stand and stare straight ahead for as long as it took the rest of us to sing The Star-Spangled Banner and never open their mouths. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Words the young folks say only words as if words alone no longer mattered. And I understand I, too, have been embarrassed by those words. And yet words

<v Speaker 4>live <v Ossie Davis>not only because they are written in documents, hung on walls or carved in stone words live in the living hearts of men and women only as we, by our actions, make them live. And so it is. In the darkest hours, it's still good to know that the words are there and that those times when I find it impossible to understand or to accept the contradictions in my country, I still can't find it in my heart to be a cynic. I hear the words. I still believe. <v Bill Moyers>This brings to a close our two broadcasts on the second American Revolution we began at the turn of the century. America today is radically different. Jim Crow is dead. Blacks vote and hold public office. Many have entered the middle class. None of this would have happened without a struggle. Only when African-Americans themselves took up the fight was their progress, even then, grudgingly and at a cost. I don't know how we will ever reckon for all this. The struggle has not resulted in racial equality. The law may no longer discriminate against color, but people do. We remain a deeply divided society poisoned by segregation, prejudice and poverty. If civil rights are to be followed by economic justice, they will have to be a third American Revolution, but someone else will have to tell that story in a century to come. I'm Bill Moyers for Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. Good night. Now, here are some scenes from future edition

<v Speaker 4>of a walk through the 20th century. I think the main thing of propaganda is what Goebbels repeated at all times, so secret of propaganda is to simplify complex or complicated things. Do you ever

<v Bill Moyers>wonder if Hitler and his propaganda chief, Goebbels and Hitler, realized they were giving Frank Capra the rope to hang them with? <v Speaker 4>I don't think so. I think they I. I never I never heard that they get caught. But that's exactly what they did. They hung themselves. A week later, who should appear at the press conference, but Winston Churchill? And that was the that was the great moment when you had Franklin Roosevelt sitting sitting there and Churchill, the other great leader of the English speaking world with him. And we had a we must have had about 200 people in the room just back to back. And we shouted out, we can't see you, we can't see you. I think with that said, Winnie, I don't know what we said. We can't see you. So he got up on a chair and Churchill Churchill did. And there was this man, not particularly formidable, rather dumpy with a cherubic face. And I'm sure a lot <v Ruby Dee>of others just instantly had that feeling. Can this be the man? Can this be the man who is leading the world?

<v Speaker 4>And then he began to talk and he used this one word, Nazis, the Nazis. And he got more vituperation into that. One word than I have ever heard is John came out, went down onto his chest, and there was there was Winston Churchill. <v Bill Moyers>This program has been brought to you by the people of Chevron who have been helping to supply America's energy needs throughout the 20th century. Schools, colleges and other educational organizations may obtain video cassettes of a walk through the 20th century with Bill Moyers by calling 800 four to four seven nine six three or by writing PBS video post office box eight 09 to Washington, D.C.. Two or two for a teacher <v Ossie Davis>viewer guide for this series has been

<v Bill Moyers>developed by Primetime School Television, a nonprofit educational organization. The guide is available upon request from Chevron by writing a walk through the 20th century with Bill Moyers, 74, to Bancroft Way Berkeley, California nine four seven one El.