BEFORE Juneteenth:

Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and its effect on the end of the Civil War, the Reconstruction era in the South, and the eventual Constitutional amendments passed to protect it.

Written and presented by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., director of W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, this six-hour series explores the evolution of the African-American people, as well as the multiplicity of cultural institutions, political strategies, and religious and social perspectives they developed -- forging their own history, culture and society against unimaginable odds.

This portion of the series talks about the causes of and start of the Civil War; the evolution of the drive to win on each side of the conflict and of President Lincoln's bold step towards freedom for all slaves in the United States.

JUNETEENTH:


In RALPH ELLISON: AN AMERICAN JOURNEY, Cornel West, Amiri Baraka, Stanley Crouch, Terrance Rafferty and other cultural critics, reconstruct the debates and discuss the roles and responsibilities of a "Negro writer."

Perhaps it was the difficulty of achieving such a synthesis that led to Ellison's famous struggle on his never completed second novel, Juneteenth, published only after his death.

A former beauty queen and single mom prepares her rebellious teenage daughter for the "Miss Juneteenth" pageant.

AFTER Juneteenth:


SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME, narrated by Laurence Fishburne, is a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans' most cherished assumptions: that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South after the Civil War, new systems of involuntary servitude took its place with shocking force and brutality. The film documents how for more than 80 years, thousands of African Americans, often guilty of no crime at all, were arrested, compelled to work without pay, repeatedly bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of white masters. Tolerated by both the North and South, forced labor lasted well into the 20th century.

EYES ON THE PRIZE recounts the fight to end decades of discrimination and segregation. It is the story of the people -- young and old, male and female, northern and southern -- who, compelled by a meeting of conscience and circumstance, worked to eradicate a world where whites and blacks could not go to the same school, ride the same bus, vote in the same election, or participate equally in society. It was a world in which peaceful demonstrators were met with resistance and brutality -- in short, a reality that is now nearly incomprehensible to many young Americans.

FREEDOM RIDERS is the powerful harrowing and ultimately inspirational story of six months in 1961 that changed America forever. From May until November 1961, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives--and many endured savage beatings and imprisonment--for simply traveling together on buses and trains as they journeyed through the Deep South. Deliberately violating Jim Crow laws, the Freedom Riders met with bitter racism and mob violence along the way, sorely testing their belief in nonviolent activism.

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