Keyword Racial Segregation

When the United States of America was founded, the ideals of freedom and equality did not apply to all people. These are the stories of the brave Americans who fought to right the nation’s wrongs and enshrine the values we hold most dear into the Constitution — with liberty and justice for all.

Since its birth in 1865, in the wake of the American Civil War, the history of the Ku Klux Klan has been inseparable from that of the United States. The debates over slavery, the populism in the roaring twenties, the struggle for civil rights in the sixties, the rise of the far-right in the early 21st century; the Klan seems to have always embodied the dark side of the nation, with its gray areas and blind spots.

A landmark four-part series exploring segregation from the end of the civil war to the dawn of the modern civil rights movement. Lynchings and beatings by night. Demeaning treatment by day. And a life of crushing subordination for Southern blacks that was maintained by white supremacist laws and customs known as "Jim Crow." It was a brutal and oppressive era in American history, but during this time, large numbers of African Americans and a corps of influential black leaders bravely fought against the status quo, amazingly acquiring for African Americans the opportunities of education, business, land ownership, and a true spirit of community.

How Chicago and its suburbs helped devise the nation’s most sweeping system of racially segregated communities, and how these policies diminished the lives of generations of Black families, creating the vast racial wealth gap that persists to this day.

The adventures of a big offbeat bear and a mischievous mouse.