Are We About To Fight a Third American Revolution?

Some of you may be watching the Henry Lewis Gates' PBS series on Africa. It’s a story that is in many ways the start of the civil rights struggle. A struggle that continues to this very day.

Several themes have emerge recently in our national dialogue about race. One looks at the importance of art to both tell a political story and to act as a forum for political action. The other is the role and importance of understanding the broad scope of history, in looking at where we are and where we are headed as a nation.

In 1987, the fourteen part documentary Eyes on the Prize captured the essence of those two ideas.

It begins by reminding us that “in a ten year period, in the 1950's and 1960's, America fought a second revolution. In the south, in the streets, in churches and in schools...to make America be America for all it's citizens. These were America's civil rights years.”

These are the opening words of Eyes on the Prize. The documentary, directed by Henry Hampton, had its television premiere on PBS thirty years ago. Jon Else was the series producer and cinematographer and now, in his book True South: Henry Hampton and "Eyes on the Prize," the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement, he takes us back to a time whose legacy is so important today.

My conversation with Jon Else:

Congress then and now....Lyndon Johnson and the Battle for the Great Socieity

American political history is a complex and dynamic process. In that process, there have been periods of entropy and period of great progress and imagination. Both have been a function of a political system designed by our founders.

But also, the temper and tenor of the times and the degree to which individual leaders have known how to work those levers of power has also shaped our political destiny.

The period of the Johnson Presidency, post 1964, is one of those periods. The Great Society, The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and medicare, are all just a part of an agenda that reshaped America

Today as we face congressional gridlock, as we mark the 50th anniversary of the apogee of the civil rights movement and as the President goes before Congress tonight, we reassess our politics and institutions. In doing so, it's well worth the time to look at that unique and politically bountiful period of the Johnson Presidency.

That is what historian Julian Zelizer does in his new book The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society.

My conversation with Julian Zelizer:

Looking at Feguson through the eyes of the South in 1964

Fifty years ago this summer, Americans, both black and white, gave their last full measure of devotion in an effort to register African American voters in Mississippi.

The violence that resulted, the death of three civil rights workers, the beatings, the church bombings, and effort to prevent Americans from voting is a stain that shall forever be remembered.

For those that have forgotten, or were not alive in that period, A new work by Matt Herron is a powerful reminder. Matt was the progenitor of an effort to chronicle those events and in so doing captured a pivotal moment in American history.  The result, is Mississippi Eyes: The Story and Photography of the Southern Documentary Project

My conversation with Matt Herron:

Black Power

Donald Sterling and Cliven Bundy notwithstanding, the past year has seen us engaged in a celebration of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the March on Washington and Freedom Summer. All seminal events in the amazing history of the Civil Rights movement.

But what we sometimes forget is that the movement itself, mostly because of its scope and inclusiveness, started a bigger revolution. One that took up opposition to Vietnam, the fight for social and economic justice and the movement beyond nonviolence, for more than just public accommodation, but the struggle for real political, social and economic power.

Present at the creation of that effort was Stokely Carmichael. He was a bridge between the nonviolence of Dr. King, the anger of Malcolm X and the urban struggle for civil rights led by the Black Panthers.

Carmichael has been somewhat forgotten in the pantheon of leaders from the period, that is until Peniel Joseph's new biography, Stokely: A Life

My conversation with Peniel Joseph:

James Meredith, Civil Rights and the rise of Black Power

The recent debate and court challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reminds us of what was the once and future fragility of registering black voters in the south. Back in 1966, a year after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, James Meredith, who became the first African American student at the University of Mississippi, set out on an almost solitary march from Memphis to Jackson Mississippi to register black voters.

At the end of that march, which started on June 5 1966, the civil rights movement would be forever transformed. The movement's twin goals of the dream of integration and of nonviolence, would be replaced by black power and impatience.

It's a story that's not as famous as the Selma to Montgomery march a year earlier, but its impact was everlasting and its tensions still relevant today. This is the story that Aram Goudsouzian tells in Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear.

My conversation with Aram Goudsouzian: