American Experience - Season 37

While many consider the birth of the civil rights movement to be 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus, the stage had been set decades before by activists of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Some of the NAACP leaders are familiar, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall, but Walter White, head of the NAACP from 1929 to 1955, has been all but forgotten. With his blond hair and blue eyes, Walter White looked white; he described himself as "an enigma, a Black man occupying a white body."  Like virtually all light-skinned African Americans of his day, White was descended from enslaved Black women and powerful white men. But he was Black — by law, identity, and conviction and spent his entire life fighting for Black civil rights. Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP traces the life of this neglected civil rights hero and seeks to explain his disappearance from our history.

Change, Not Charity: The Americans with Disabilities Act tells the emotional and dramatic story of the decades-long push for equality and accessibility that culminated in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. While curb cuts, ramps at building entrances, and braille on elevator buttons seem commonplace today, they were once the subject of a pitched battle that landed on the steps of Congress. Told through the voices of key participants and witnesses, the film highlights the determined people who literally put their bodies on the line to achieve their goals and change the lives of all Americans. A story of courage and perseverance, the film brings to life one of the great civil rights movements in American history, where ordinary people made their voices heard, and Congress responded. A testament to the power of coalition building and bipartisan compromise, the passage of the ADA is a shining example of democracy in action.

Meet Edwin Land, the visionary scientist and inventor of the Polaroid camera. When it was introduced in 1948, the Polaroid revolutionized amateur photography with a camera that provided pictures instantly – by the 1970s, people across the globe were shooting over a billion Polaroids a year. The camera not only revolutionized how we take pictures and capture memories, but it also helped earn Land a reputation as one of the most visionary and prolific inventors and entrepreneurs of the 20th century. His invention of a new product and a new and creative corporate culture would inspire the leaders of the 1990s tech boom, including Steve Jobs, who saw Land as both a guru and godfather. 

In July 1943, dark, smoky clouds suddenly descended over Los Angeles, causing residents to complain of burning eyes, nausea, and difficulty breathing. People couldn't see across the street and visibility was so bad that cars crashed. With World War II raging, many feared a chemical attack by the Japanese, but it soon became evident that no foreign enemy was to blame. The waves of pollution called "smog" — a combination of "smoke" and "fog" —  continued and the cause remained a mystery. It was the beginning of an epic struggle for clean air involving years of scientific investigation and civic pressure, bringing together people across ideological divides in a remarkable example of bipartisanship. Their work would lead to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act, which have had an enduring effect on the quality of air Americans breathe.

On May 8, 1970, "the Hard Hat Riot" erupted in lower Manhattan. At midday, construction workers, including those building the World Trade Center, violently clashed with students demonstrating against the Vietnam War. It was soon clear that something larger was happening — the workmen, who came to be known as "hardhats," were at the cutting edge of a new kind of class war. With the war in Vietnam raging on, it was the sons of the working class who were doing most of the fighting. Workmen saw the protesting students as privileged "draft dodgers" disparaging the country and those who fought for it. On the other side, many student activists saw the workers as pawns, unwilling to see the changes that America needed. 

Hard Hat Riot tells the story of a struggling metropolis, a flailing president, a divided people, and a bloody juncture when the nation violently diverged ― culminating in a new political and cultural landscape that radically redefined American politics and foreshadowed the future.

Kissinger begins with the devastating childhood experiences that helped forge Henry Kissinger's political philosophy. In August 1938, after Hitler's government had embarked on a campaign to destroy Germany's Jews, Kissinger's family fled to the United States. Their escape came two months before Kristallnacht and the outbreak of violence that would culminate in the murder of six million Jews (and millions of others), including 13 members of Kissinger's extended family, implanting in Kissinger the durable conviction that power was the prerequisite for liberty.  

As a refugee in New York City, Kissinger worked his way up from a job at a shaving brush factory to a stint as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army ferreting out Nazis in post-war Germany. He returned to earn an advanced degree and professorship at Harvard in government, marking the start of a dazzling career. He became an expert on nuclear weapons policy, eventually securing a position as National Security Advisor for President Richard Nixon at the height of the Cold War. He was an unlikely pick — an awkward academic with a thick accent who hired a staff of ideologically diverse young men, including film interviewees Anthony Lake, Winston Lord, Roger Morris, and Morton Halperin. 

Bedeviled by how to end the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, the Nixon administration turned to increasingly audacious interventions to force Hanoi to the bargaining table, first secretly bombing, then invading neighboring Cambodia. Pundits debated whether these escalations were brilliant strokes of tactical genius or unconstitutional attacks on a neutral nation. Several Kissinger staffers resigned, and protests erupted across America. Public morale reached a bloody nadir on May 4, 1970, with the shooting of antiwar demonstrators at Kent State.

Nixon's secret plan to end the Vietnam War had shown itself to be a mirage, and body counts kept rising. Only a brave, secret gambit to visit Mao Zedong's China shifted the political conversation. In 1971, Kissinger secretly entered China via Pakistan, clandestinely organizing a summit for President Nixon and stunning the American public.  

The opening to China remade the global chessboard, sidelining the Soviet Union and deep-freezing the Cold War in a new "triangular diplomacy." But Kissinger's policies were often concerned with global stability rather than with human rights. When a genocide erupted in East Pakistan, perpetuated by the same leader who helped Nixon reach China, Kissinger looked the other way. His eyes were on Moscow, where Nixon would soon meet Brezhnev for a series of consequential weapons negotiations. 

Kissinger's policies continued to have far-reaching human implications across the globe. When Chileans democratically elected the socialist Salvador Allende, Kissinger funded an effort to prevent him from reaching office, then directed the CIA to destabilize his government. Allende was deposed in a coup that led to his death; Kissinger embraced the subsequent dictator, Pinochet, reassuring Nixon that America's "hand doesn't show." 

Kissinger managed a final act before leaving the Nixon administration, seizing the opportunity of the Yom Kippur War to push the Soviet Union out of the Middle East and negotiating peace deals between Israel, Egypt, and Syria. On the cover of Newsweek, Kissinger was heralded as "Super-K," the peacemaking celebrity in an administration collapsing beneath Watergate.  

It was the zenith of Kissinger's fame, and his 50 following years out of office were rife with debate. Today, his legacy is still being written.