Slavery is our nation’s original sin; the treatment of people of color a blot on the history of a country “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Here, a variety of Moyers conversations with Michelle Alexander, Bryan Stevenson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Maya Angelou, David Simon, and others offer a useful primer on the history of racism in the United States and its continuing impact.
- March 29, 2021
Today, Republicans talk about “election integrity,” but their end game is the same as that of the former Confederates after the war: to keep Black and Brown Americans away from the polls to make sure the government does not spend tax dollars on public services.
- March 27, 2021Georgia's new voter suppression law has deep roots.
- February 26, 2021
The Biden administration is reviving the legal and moral case for slavery reparations.
- January 28, 2021The post-Civil War years teach us the perils of heeding calls for reconciliation while ignoring those for justice.
- November 15, 2020
Men like Abraham Lincoln organized to overturn the idea that they were mindless workers, doomed to menial labor for life. In 1859, Lincoln articulated a new vision for the nation, putting ordinary men, rather than elite slaveholders, at the heart of national development.
- August 14, 2020Donald Trump rode to power on the wings of a dark lie — one of the most malignant and ugly lies in American history. Bill Moyers and four historians on Donald Trump and white supremacy.
- July 2, 2020
In 1852 Frederick Douglass was invited by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society to give a speech commemorating the Fourth of July. On July 5, the crowds filling Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, did not get what they expected.