[crickets chirping] [frogs croaking] - Frederick Douglas, born about 1817 died 1895.

He wrote, "I suppose, myself to have been born in 1870.

"Masters allowed no questions concerning their ages "to be put to them by their slaves.

"They regarded all such questions as evidence "of an impudent curiosity."

- You're doing with the Negro as been their greatest misfortune.

The Negros should have been let alone in Africa, let alone by the pirates and robbers who offered them for sale in our Christian slave markets.

Let alone by the courts, and the politicians, and the legislators, and the slave drivers.

Let him alone.

[crickets chirping] [frogs croaking] - Booker T. Washington born about 1858, in slavery, died 1915.

He was the first Negro to have dinner at the White House, that is without serving it.

[crickets chirping] [frogs croaking] - In 1901, I dined at the White House with President Theodore Roosevelt.

[chuckles] And sometime after, I met a poor White Southerner, "Say," said the White man.

"You know, you are the greatest man in the country."

[chuckles] I began to protest.

And said that in my opinion the president was the greatest man in the country.

"Ha!"

Said the White man.

"Roosevelt.

I used to believe that Roosevelt was a great man "until he ate dinner with you."

[chuckles] [crickets chirping] [frogs croaking] [host chuckles] - William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, born in Massachusetts 1868, died in Ghana, 1963, at the age of 95.

He said he was a descendant of Negros, Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and thank God, no, Anglo-Saxon.

- It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, in the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others.

Of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt, or pity.

- Marcus Garvey, Jamaican.

Born in 1887, died 1940.

In 1923 at the height of his career, his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, had 4 million members.

- It is the duty of the virtuous and morally pure of the White and Black races to vigorously oppose the vial effluence of the miscegenationist of the White race and their associates, the hybrids of the Negro race.

I believe in a pure Black race.

♪ Free at last ♪ ♪ Yes, free at last ♪ ♪ Free at last ♪ ♪ Thank God Almighty ♪ ♪ God Almighty ♪ ♪ I'm free at last ♪ ♪ Free at last ♪ ♪ Last ♪ ♪ Free at last ♪ ♪ Thank God Almighty ♪ ♪ Almighty ♪ ♪ I'm free at last ♪ ♪ One day, one day ♪ [woman humming] ♪ I'm walking along ♪ ♪ Thank God Almighty ♪ ♪ I'm free at last ♪ ♪ I'm free ♪ ♪ Amen, see that I'm on my way ♪ [woman humming] ♪ Thank God Almighty ♪ ♪ I'm free at last ♪ ♪ Well, you're never gonna see it ♪ ♪ I'm seconding ♪ - Frederick Douglas, Booker T. Washington William EB Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, four men whose life and work seem to have been excluded almost totally from the history of our country.

Sometimes they star us faintly as a half remembered dream, snatches of a song of the dead.

Almost as if they'd never lived, or loved, or rejected, or died for the American dream.

[somber music] Yet in the years from the time the Negro was set free, up to and including World War Two, these four men, and others even more obscure, wrote not only the history of the Negro people, but in a large sense the history of our country.

♪ Many thousand gone ♪ ♪ No more faithful song for me ♪ ♪ No more ♪ ♪ No more ♪ ♪ No more faithful song for me ♪ ♪ Many thousands gone ♪ - Freedom 1865, the year the war ended.

Earlier that year, General Robert E. Lee had said, "It is not only expedient but necessary "that the Confederate Army "should use Negro slaves as soldiers."

Of course, Mr. Lincoln and the Union Army had already beat him to it.

Two years earlier, the president had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all the slaves in the Confederacy.

Frederick Douglas, a former slave, and now a leading abolitionist was in Boston at the time.

[bell ringing] - You can't imagine how it was.

We were all waiting and listening as if for a boat from the sky.

[bell ringing] A boat that would rend the shadows of four millions of slaves.

Eight, nine, 10 o'clock came and went, and still no word.

At last, when the suspense was becoming an agony a man exclaimed, "It's coming, it's coming, "it's on the wire."

[people cheering] Oh, the effect of that announcement was starkling beyond description.

- Hooray!

[people cheering] - And it was wild and it was grand!

[people cheering] [people whistling] ♪ Way down in Dixie Land ♪ ♪ Hello, Jeff Davis let my people go ♪ ♪ Seven-year-old Booker T. Washington ♪ ♪ was a slave in Virginia.

♪ How was it with you when you heard the news?

- Oh, well for us it was different.

We were still slaves.

My mother leaned over and kissed her children with tears running down her cheeks.

And for some minutes there was great rejoicing and Thanksgiving, and some wild scenes of ecstasy.

But by the time we returned to the cabins our feeling had changed.

The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of ourselves, and our children, seemed to take possession of us.

There was the question of home, a living, the rearing of children, education, citizenship.

Some of the slaves were 70 or 80 years old, their best days were gone.

They had no strength in which to earn a living in a strange place and among strange people.

- But Negroes had their freedom and the vote.

Suddenly overnight, there was Blanche Kelso Bruce, senator from Mississippi, Robert H. Wood, mayor of Natchez, and many others, Negros passed laws, abolishing imprisonment for that, authorizing universal male suffrage, and free public education.

Negroes and Whites were eating together, going to school together, riding together on the same street car.

A northern reporter James S. Pike went into the South Carolina House of Representatives.

- The secretary is Black.

The clerk is Black, the doorkeepers are Black.

The Chairman of Ways and Means is Black.

[laughs] - [Ossie] Robert Smalls was the Negro representative from South Carolina.

He was worshiped by his constituents.

- [Man] You know, that Smalls is a genius.

- [Man] No, they ain't so hot.

He ain't God.

- [Man] Yeah, that's true, but give him time.

He's a young man yet.

- [Ossie] Du Bois called it "The mystic years."

There was the promise that the dream would be fulfilled but it is also recorded, there were other promises.

- [Man] The child is already born.

Who will behold the last Negro in the State of Mississippi.

- [Ossie] General Carl Schurz went South to make a special investigation for the administration.

- Senators, a reign of terror prevails in many parts of the South.

Some planters hold back their former slaves by brute force armed bands of White men patrol the country roads to force back the Negroes wandering about.

The bodies of murdered Negroes have been found on and near the highways.

Gruesome reports of colored men and women whose ears have been cut off.

Skulls have been broken by blows, whose bodies have been slashed by knives, or lacerated with scourges.

- Does any sane man believe that the Negro is capable of comprehending the 10 Commandments, The miraculous conception and birth of our Savior?

Every effort inculcate these great truths but tends to best utilize his nature.

And by obfuscating he's little brain unfits him for the duties assigned to him as a Euro would and the carrier of water.

The effort makes him a demon of wild, fanatical destruction, and consigns him to the fetal shot of the White man.

- And so he was consigned, the North as well as the South grew tired of the eternal Nigger.

- [Man] We must render this White man's government or convert the land into a Negro man cemetery.

- By 1874, it seemed that both these dreams would come true.

Hundreds of Negroes who started out for the voting booth wound up in the cemetery.

By 1877, it was a White man government again.

President Hayes appointed Frederick Douglas Marshall of the District of Columbia.

And he wrote, "I have no protection at home, "no resting place abroad.

"I'm an outcast from a society of my childhood, "and an outlaw in the land of my birth.

"I am a stranger with the.

"A sojourner is all my fathers were."

[upbeat harmonica music] Why, step aside there boy.

Look out there now.

You can't go in there.

You ain't looking for trouble are you son?

No, sing and dance, sir, and sing boy.

- Go ahead boy, go ahead.

- [Ossie] Sing and dance.

Dance Frederick Douglas, - We want Joyce too.

- [Ossie] 72 years old.

Council General of the Republic of Haiti.

Dance Booker T. Washington, 33 years old.

Founder of Tuskegee Institute, and advisor to presidents, dance boy.

♪ Your loving ♪ - Dance.

Dance!

- [Person] Whoo!

[upbeat harmonica music] By the end of the 19th century Jim Crow was a part of the marrow of America.

Negro and Whites could no longer eat together, could no longer sleep together.

- Whenever the constitution comes between me and the White women and the virtue of the White women of the South, I say to hell with the constitution.

- So freedom was denied, both Negroes and Whites.

White nurses were forbidden to treat Negro males.

White teachers couldn't teach Negro students South Carolina fo bad White and Black workers to look out of the same window.

Florida required Negro and White textbooks to be segregated in warehouses.

New Orleans segregated White and Black prostitutes.

Atlanta provided Jim Crow Bibles for White and Black Witnesses.

W.E.B.

Du Bois, who was the descendant of aristocrats, a graduate of Fisk and Harvard University.

In 1904 organized the Niagara Movement, which was later absorbed into the NAACP.

He described the adventures of a Negro in the 20th century.

- It was one o'clock and I was hungry.

I walked into a restaurant, seated myself, and reached for the bill of fare.

- Sir, do you wish to force yourself upon those who did not want you?

- No, I wish to eat.

- Are you aware, sir, that this is social equality?

- It's nothing of the song.

It is hunger.

And I ate.

Today's work being done, I sought for theater.

Good day, Gordon.

- Do you enjoy being where you're not wanted?

- Oh, no.

- Well, you're not wanted here.

- I feel you're mistaken.

I certainly want the music unless you'd like to think of the music wants me to listen to it.

- This is social equality.

- Oh, no, it's the second movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

After the theater, I sought the hotel where I had sent my luggage.

- What do you want?

- Rest?

[page flipping] - This is a White hotel.

- Such a color scheme demands a great deal of cleaning but I'm sure, I don't object.

- We object, we don't keep Niggers.

We don't want social equality.

Neither do I. I went to bed.

I left.

Walking I met a traveler who crossed to the other side of the road where it was muddy.

I asked his reasons.

- Niggers are dirty.

- But so is mud.

Moreover, I'm not as dirty as you.

That is not yet.

- But you're a Nigger ain't you?

- My grandfather was so called.

- Well then.

- Do you live in the South.

- Yeah, I starve there.

- Well, it seems to me, you and the Negros might get together and vote out starvation.

- We don't let them vote.

Niggers is too ignorant to vote.

- But I am less ignorant than you.

- But you're a Nigger!

Ain't you?

- I certainly am what you mean by that?

- Yeah, well, then.

Moreover, I don't want my sister to marry a Nigger.

[scoffs] - If a Negro should ask her, suppose she would just say, no?

- Look, she ain't going to marry you, even if she says yes.

- But I don't want to marry her.

- Why not?

- Because I'm already married, and I'd rather like my wife.

- But she's a Nigger!

- Well, her grandmother was called that.

- Well then!

- In 1895 Booker T. Washington went to Atlanta.

As the guest of honor at the Cotton States exposition.

He was 39, President of Tuskegee Institute.

- This was the first time in the entire history of the Negro that a member of my race had been asked to speak from the same platform with White Southern men and women on any important national occasion.

I was equally determined to be true to the North, as well as to the best element of the White South, in what I had to say.

[audience applauding] Mr. President, gentlemen of the Board of Directors, and the citizens.

The Negros greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us ought to live by the production of our hands.

No race can prosper until it learned that there is as much dignity in tilling the field as in writing a poem.

It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.

[audience applauding] - Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T Washington.

One hesitates therefore to criticize a life, which beginning with so little has done so much.

And yet the time has come when one may speak in all sincerity and with utter courtesy.

Oh the mistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington's career.

Whereas Frederick Douglas, in his old age, still bravely stood by the ideals of early manhood, ultimate assimilation through tougher session, and on no other terms, Booker T. Washington arose as essentially the leader of not one race, but of two.

They compromise that between the North, the South, and the Negro.

Mr. Washington represents in Negro thought the old attitudes of adjustment and submission.

- And to the White race where I permitted, I would repeat what I say to my own people.

Cast your bucket down among the eight millions of Negros whose habits you know.

Whose fidelity and love you have tested in days, When to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your fireside.

And while doing this, you can be sure in the future, as you have been in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding and unresentful people the world has seen.

As we have proven our loyalty to you in the past in nursing your children, waiting by the sick beds of your mothers and fathers.

And often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their grave.

So in the future, in our humble way, we will stand by you with a devotion, no foreigner can approach.

And it all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet, one as the hand in things essential to our mutual progress.

[audience applauding] - And Mr. Washington program practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro race.

And we did not expect that the pre-write to vote, to enjoy his civic rights, and to be educated should come at once, and nor do we expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet, but we are absolutely certain that the way of a people rather the way for people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves.

On the other hand, forgive me on the contrary, the Negro must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is essential to modern manhood.

That color discrimination is barbarism.

And that Black boys need education, as well as White boys.

♪ THirty days in jail ♪ ♪ With my back turned to the wall ♪ ♪ Turned to the wall ♪ ♪ Thirty days in jail ♪ - 1919 Bessie Smith was singing the blues.

♪ To the wall ♪ - Her blues it was said to be funny, and boisterous, and gentle, and angry and bleak, but underneath them all around the raw bitterness of being a human being who had to think twice about which toilet she could use.

You cannot hear Bessie without hearing why Luther King doesn't want to wait anymore.

- Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation.

We fought their battles.

Shared their sorrow.

Mingled our blood with theirs.

And generation after generation, we have pleaded with a headstrong careless people to despise not justice, mercy, and truth.

Less the nation be smitten with a curse.

Our sound, our toil, our cheer, and our warning have been given to this nation in blood brotherhood.

Are not these gifts worth forgiving?

Is not this work, this striving?

Would America have been America without her Negro people.

[people cheering] [audience applauding] - And next year, Marcus Garvey addressed 25,000 of his followers in Madison Square Garden, in New York.

His message to the Negro people was a simple one.

"Back to Africa."

- While others are raising the cry of White America, of White Canada, of White Australia.

We without reservations raise the cry of a Black Africa.

Where is his king and his kingdom?

Where is his president, his country, his men of big affairs?

And where is his army, his navy, and his ambassadors?

When Europe was inhabited by a race of savages, naked men, heathens and pagans, Africa was peopled by a race of cultured Black men who were masters in arts, science, and literature.

Men who were cultured and refined.

Men, who, it is said were like the gods.

Why then should we lose hope?

Black men were once great.

You shall be great again.

[audience cheering] [audience applauding] - In 1923 at the height of his power, at the height of his career, Marcus Garvey claimed 4 million followers.

America had seen nothing like this.

Everywhere there was the blossoming pride in being Black.

Negro girls had White dolls snatched from their arms and replaced with Black dolls.

Little Negro boys studied the history of Black heroes.

Marcus Garvey even had secret meetings with the leaders of the KU Klux Klan.

And when this was discovered, he made no apologies.

- Lynchings and the race riots all worked to our advantage.

By teaching the Negro he must build a civilization of his own, or forever remain the White man's victim.

The KU Klux Klan clan is going to make this a White man's country.

They are perfectly honest and frank about it.

Fighting them will get you nowhere.

I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs, the White American societies as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical Whites put together.

I like honest and fair play.

You may call me a Klansman if you will.

But every White man is a Klansman, and there's no use lying about it.

- Marcus Garvey is without doubt the most dangerous enemy of the Negro people.

He is either a lunatic or a traitor.

He is yelling to life from the Black side, a race consciousness, which if it blazes into a real flame means eternal war and bloodshed.

- The Black and White race are now facing the crucial time of their existence.

The Whites are rightfully and properly crying out for a pure White race.

And the proud and self-respecting Black are crying out for a moral and pure and healthy Negro race.

Between both we have unused school of thought.

Advanced by the near-White or Colored man, Dr. W.E.B.

Du Bois, who advocates racial amalgamation, or general miscegenation with the hope of creating a new Colored race by wiping out both Black and White.

[upbeat piano music] - 1925 Garvey's bubble burst.

His Back to Africa Movement collapsed.

[upbeat piano music] Marcus Garvey was the product of an extraordinary era.

The fabulous '20s.

During those years, Negro artists poured out a stream of plays, and poems, and musical composition.

That era has gone down in history as the Negro Renaissance.

"It was a period," wrote Langston Hughes, "when local and visiting royalty "were not at all uncommon in Harlem."

It was a period when every year there was at least one hit play on Broadway with a Negro cast.

It was a period, and God help us, when Ethel Barrymore appeared in blackface Scarlet Sister Mary.

It was the period when the Negro was in Vogue.

And then the stock market collapsed.

During the Great Depression Negro America, and the wood Of Lester Granger, almost fell apart.

There's a bitter bit of poetry.

Negroes, last hired, first fired.

Then came the war, and Negroes marched off again to fight for democracy.

And came home again to for Whites only.

At the end of the era, in 1945, some changes had been made, but mostly it was the same old story.

The first fair employment practices act was passed in New York.

But in Gary, Indiana, 1000 White students walked out of three schools, protesting school integration.

♪ And when you wake up each morning ♪ ♪ Aren't you glad that you were born ♪ ♪ Think what you got the whole day through ♪ ♪ Aren't you glad you're you ♪ [upbeat instrumental music] - A hit song of the times, "Aren't you glad you are you.

"And when you wake up each morning, "aren't you glad that you were born?

"Think what you've got the whole day through.

"Aren't you glad you're you?"

[upbeat instrumental music] ♪ When a metal lock appears ♪ ♪ Aren't you glad you've got two ears ♪ ♪ And if your heart is singing through ♪ ♪ Aren't you glad you're you ♪ ♪ You can see a summer sky ♪ ♪ Or touch a friendly hand ♪ ♪ Or taste an apple pie ♪ ♪ Pardon my grammar, but ain't life grand ♪ ♪ And when you wake up each morn ♪ ♪ Aren't you glad that you were born ♪ ♪ Think what you've got the whole day through ♪ ♪ Aren't you glad you're you ♪ [upbeat instrumental music] ♪ And when you wake up each morn ♪ ♪ Aren't you glad that you were born ♪ [upbeat jingling music] [move to upbeat instrumental music] - [Narrator] This is NET, the National Educational Television Network.