(Recorded at Carnegie Hall on June 19, 2019) Juneteenth marks the day in 1895 when slaves in Texas learned they were free. Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation two and a half years earlier, but many states ignored it, and it wasn’t until two months after the Civil War ended that Union troops arrived to enforce emancipation. The 19th of June became Juneteenth as every year growing numbers of African Americans recall with jubilation their ...

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.

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.

The Biden administration is reviving the legal and moral case for slavery reparations.

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.