This is the story of the civil rights movement, from 1952-1965. Interviews and archival footage tell the story of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that declared school segregation unconstitutional and the Montgomery bus boycott that forced the South to begin to allow equal access in public accommodations. As momentous as those events were, they were even more significant in what came next — decades of social, legal, and cultural upheavals that would lead to the Civil Rights Act, the 1967 Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia abolishing the laws that prohibited inter-marriage, and, a generation later, the country’s first African-American President. The bigotry is shocking to us today, which is all the more reason we need this documentation. And the heroes are here: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall, and more.

The PBS series, its sequel, and the companion volumes by Juan Williams are an indispensable reminder of our past and inspiration for our future. The struggle continues.

I’m not where I want to be.
I’m not where I’m going to be.
But thank God, I’m not where I was.