pritchett is the police chief of albany, georgia, and he set about doing things differently. >> king used the students' method of direct confrontation in albany, georgia, however, a. however, police chief prit chet countered the nonviolent demonstrations with non-violent arrests. >> dr. king thinks he's going to the television cameras. >> a ban on demonstrations has brought more than 1,500 arrests of desegregationists so far. >> they refused to do so. >> you're under arrest. >> he jails dr. king and a lot of other demonstrators. but his goal is not to let them have their way and stay in jail long enough to generate a lot of press and a lot of publicity. >> this is one time that i'm out

of jail and i am not happy to be out. >> out of jail and out of the headlines, king seen momentarily out of options. and the national press corp. new it. >> reporters present albany as a big defeat. it's viewed as a series, political setback for dr. king and in part because there had been absolutely no white violence whatsoever against black demonstrators in albany. >> as long as civil rights activists were just being quietly and respectfully jailed, the media didn't really care about that story. >> king knew he had to get the movement back on track. and to really make this notion of non-violence work, he had to find a place where there would be resistance, where people could really see the ugliness of what they were confronting. >> he recognized that nothing was going to change until and

unless most americans were exposed to the reality of what was going on. so that's what he needed to do was provoke a reaction on the part of bigoted southerners who are all too willing to play their part. he just had to bring them to the fore. >> you can never whip these boys if you don't keep separate. you have to keep the white and the black separate. >> eugene conner, bull conner, he was the police commissioner in birmingham. and he was large. and he was in charge. >> unicorn forces of birmingham led by commissioner eugene "bull" conner who says we were trying to be nice to them, but they won't let us be. >> the decision to do protests in downtown birmingham is a very calculated decision to see what bull conner is capable of doing

that will attract the attention of northern white journalists. >> birmingham is a symbol of hard core resistance to integration. i have a feeling that if we can get a breakthrough in birmingham and really break down the walls of segregation, it will demonstrate to the whole south that it can no longer resist integration. >> king said we have to go for broke. we have to do something dramatic. and the first thing his advisers told him is don't tell your father, don't tell any of your immediate advisers. they don't want you to go to birmingham. they think it's too dangerous and you don't have a chance to win. >> grown adult protesters get attacked. the media covers it. but after awhile, that tactic doesn't draw the media anymore. king thinks what can i do now? that's when he decides to have the children's march. that was controversial to put children in a situation where you knew that there was going to

be a violence exhibited upon them. >> we had never done that before. we had never had children before. and we didn't know what could happen. >> these children of birmingham who demonstrated in the streets and went to jail and either were suspended or expelled from school. >> these were 11th and 12th graders who were mostly 16 to 19. they were very mindful of the fact that in another year they could be sent to vietnam to die for freedom, abroad for somebody else. >> the students cut classes and took to the street by the hundreds, following dr. king's tactic of going to jail deliberately to dramatize the negro protest against segregation. the non-violent army. >> during the week's long campaign in birmingham, king himself was arrested. from his cell, he composed one

of the movement's seminol documents, his letter from a birmingham jail. he wrote -- we know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. it must be demanded by the oppressed. for years now, i have heard the word wait. it rings in the ear of every negro with a piercing familiarity. we must come to see that justice too long delayed is justice denied. more than 1,000 school children, first high school students, then much younger ones, left school and headed downtown where bull conner's troops waited for fire hoses and dogs. >> dr. king realized that if you have embers and you have

gasoline, all you need to do is get a spark and things will burn. ♪ >> we had instructed people, you don't run from dogs. you back away from them. you continue to look at them. >> i was 16, and i was stoopfied by those images. i see these 6-year-old kids marching into dogs and fire hoses singing freedom songs. and when they see the dogs and the fire hoses, they don't run. >> they would pin us to the light pole to keep us from going any further down the street. and you had to hold on to keep from being rolled down the street. >> you would have to describe it

as what hell must look like to see human beings being treated that way. screaming, especially little kids. >> i've got tears in my eyes right now. it's hard. >> these were children with ribbons in their hair, little dresses on who are getting beaten up. they weren't dressing up in their finest sunday clothes to get blood all over them just for kicks. they were dressed that way so that they were the maximum amount of sympathetic. >> when violence is that visual, it prompts people to action. it gets people's attention in the way that any amount of intellectual discussion can't even approach. >> the constant pressure of these stories, the pictures of the police dogs and the fire hoses and the kids being

arrested, those were all powerful fire crackers if you will on policy in washington. you start to see the country as a whole saying, this isn't tolerable. this has got to stop. and that puts the pressure on. >> by now the mainstream press was covering all the horrible things in the movement, and particularly what had happened in birmingham. that's an important moment in time because it kind of opens up the door for lyndon johnson, gives him the space needed to pick up the torch from president kennedy and push through the civil rights act of 1964.

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♪ >> reporter: in august 1963, king staged his greatest production of all. this time, the drama did not come from images of violence but from the astonishing sight of a quarter million peaceful protesters from all walks of life descending on the nation's capital. >> i have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. i have a dream today. >> reporter: viewers around the world watched transfixed as a parade of celebrities, black and white, called for unity in the

struggle for racial justice. >> mr. brando, what sort of an impression has this day left with you? >> that it is possible for all men to come together in a sense of good will and to solve problems in a democratic way. >> the truth of it is that the march on washington was what transformed a southern, predominately black movement into a national movement. it meant that we were not just an isolated movement. >> this movement became a universal movement. there were whites protesting alongside blacks. the news cameras couldn't look away and ultimately it really changed the evening news as we know of it. >> late today the federal government -- >> nightly news was only 15 minutes during the sit-ins and the freedom rides, even the birmingham crisis. but by the fall of 1963, cbs first went to 30 minutes. nbc huntley-brinkley went to 30 minutes. >> speed and efficiency in the new york and washington nerve centers of nbc news, these now

make possible the expansion of the famed "huntley-brinkley report" to a full half hour. >> television became a bigger presence in people's lives just in time for freedom summer and the peak of the civil rights era. >> reporter: the explosion of media attention inspired a surge of new recruits, mostly young and white, into the movement. >> we all feel hopeful that we are going to be able to do something. that something really will come out of this summer. >> what areas will your main activities be in? >> we'll primarily be working on voter registration, various forms of political education and then what we call freedom schools. >> reporter: one of these young leaders was bob moses of the student nonviolent coordinating committee sncc. >> sncc was thinking about how to get their point of view in front of the press. we understood that it didn't

matter that black people got killed. we saw that what attracted the media to the whole campaign was the influx of stanford and yale. >> we have been invited, and we're simply helping people. >> the students representing the elite structures of the country. >> i really believe in these things that may sound idealistic, the constitution, the bill of rights, and i think it's important for everybody to have these. >> it was clear at the orientation that the media were latching onto every young little white girl they could find who would be, you know, poster picture back home. that's what the press was interested in. that's what brought the press, right, clearly. >> i'm just wondering if people in this room understand that, one, that people should expect to get beaten, they should

expect to spend in jail, and that it may go beyond the summer when they're in jail and that they should expect possibly somebody to get killed. >> i don't believe that one single white person who came there felt that they were being used. people came, they were warned from the outset that something terrible may happen to them. >> nick, in your own mind have you thought about the dangers in mississippi that you might come into physical harm? >> yes, i certainly have. >> as a recruiter, i was asking not only for their name and the address, their parents and everything, what is the newspaper in your hometown? who should we contact if you get arrested, if something happens to you? >> even if some of us are killed, even if i'm killed, we'll have been -- we'll have died -- each death is going to bring mississippi nearer to reconciliation. >> ha, ha. i was terrified. before, during -- it was terrifying.

>> young men and young women take up the burdens of their convictions without ceremony, occupied with the paraphernalia of departure, they go. >> the media was going to follow the kids in. >> they set forth for a summer in mississippi. >> the most dangerous time, it's the entry point into mississippi. we'd have been all right if everybody had gone down together with the whole press. that was their protection to enter mississippi. >> reporter: however, soon after arriving in mississippi, three volunteers, two white, one black, left the group to investigate a church burning. >> schwerner, chaney, and goodman, two white jewish kids and a black kid from mississippi did not come back by the appointed check time. >> three civil rights workers that disappeared in mississippi still have not been heard from.

>> people are calling reporters, saying they're missing civil rights workers in mississippi. that was one of the reasons that allowed for this real convergence of press interests that went right up into the white house. >> mrs. schwerner, i have talked to the governor there and he is making all the facilities in the state available in the search. >> it became the dominant story of the summer. >> did mr. schwerner ever tell you in his own words why he came down here? >> he wanted to find what he could do about an intolerable situation. >> reporter: very quickly, the media focused on rita schwerner, the telegenic wife of missing activist michael schwerner. >> the people in this country have had enough. >> they went all over rita. and rita was about 5'2", and she weighed about 85 pounds. they went up to her, and they said, "mrs. schwerner, how do you feel?"

and rita wouldn't play. she said, "you would not even be interviewing me if my husband was black." and it was true, it was true. >> mrs. chaney, the wife of one of the missing white men has said that the only reason this case has attracted national attention is because there are two white northerners involved. do you believe that? >> well, that's what i feel too because if he was by himself, i doubt that we would have ever known anything. >> reporter: the bodies of goodman, schwerner and chaney were found in an earthen dam 44 days after their disappearance. >> the question facing everybody under the sound of my voice tonight and every person who lives in this nation is not so much who killed those young men, but what killed them. and when we move from the who to

the what, in a strange sense, their death involves all of us. >> the reporters in the civil rights movement were presenting stories that made average americans question their accepted reality. >> the bombing of this church claimed the lives of four little girls attending sunday school. >> people didn't know black people very well. they weren't aware of what lives were really like because black people were largely invisible to most of white america. >> "there have been five church burnings in the past dozen days. all the churches were negro churches. >> people couldn't believe at the local level but all over america. they read about it. they saw the photographs. they saw it on the news. people identified with them.

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>> from "a writer's life," selma, alabama, march 7, 1965. it was a sunny, but chilly, sunday morning as more than 500 civil rights demonstrators made their way to the main business district of the city, ignoring the stares of the white

people and defying the court order of a local judge as they headed in the direction of the bridge. >> i was sent as one of three reporters for "the new york times" to selma. i'm watching with this photographer mcnamara, a few other reporters. we see young john lewis. i don't think he was more than 23 or 24. he was a very young man, scrawny little guy who didn't seem to be very formidable or enduring, but he was. >> we are marching today to dramatize to the nation, dramatize to the world that hundreds and thousands of negro citizens of alabama, but particularly here in the blight belt area, are denied the right to vote. >> well, in selma, alabama, in 1965, only 2.1% of blacks of voting age were registered to vote. >> the board of registrars is not in session this afternoon as you were informed. >> the only time you could

attempt to register to vote were the first and third mondays of each month, so we had to do something. we had to act. >> i was almost certain that on that sunday, if a couple of hundred people walked across that bridge, they would simply be turned around. >> i figured, there's going to be trouble. so i found a spot where i could see what was going on and had access to a telephone. the camera was right at the foot of the bridge. >> this is an unlawful assembly. you are ordered to disperse this march will not continue. troopers advance toward the group. >> they just charged, and they charged throwing tear gas bombs. it was quite a shock. >> they came towards us beating us with nightsticks, trampling

us with horses, releasing the tear gas. >> clouds of poisonous smoke rising from the sidewalk, high as the bridge itself, people in silhouette, because you couldn't see very well. >> we were pushed. my legs went from under me. i went down. i was hit in the head by a state trooper with a nightstick. i thought i was going to die. i thought i saw death. >> no matter how much you describe it, how much you show a still, the words and that still picture do not have the impact of the motion and the viciousness of the attack. >> the whole idea behind direct action, particularly the sort of nonviolent gandhian tradition is to produce conflict in a

disciplined fashion that reveals the opposition to be as morally bankrupt as it is. you want them to show themselves, and in selma, they showed themselves. >> i think the civil rights movement understood that you need to make people own their shame. you need to embarrass and humiliate people in order for them to stop doing the thing they thought they had a perfect right to do. >> reporter: in 1965, tom brokaw was a reporter for wsb-tv, atlanta's nbc affiliate. >> nbc said, we need you at the station to coordinate all the videotape feeds that are coming in. i went to the office that day, and we began to get these terrible reports of the violence. >> it's a lot of smoke. >> i was in the editing room with all this videotape, and there was a videotape editor that i was very fond of. he was a fourth generation southerner, white guy, and he was a decent man, and he began

to look at this stuff, and i'd say, eddie, it cannot go on. >> well, i -- and he would, well, look, here. i'd say, eddie, look again. i'd make him roll the tape back. these are cops, they're beating these people, and they're beating them nearly to death. come on, eddie, and he looked again, he said, it's wrong. it's wrong, and he lowered his head. that was the power of television. it could bring it right to your home and to your heart. you could not deny what was going on. you couldn't excuse it in some way. >> by the mid-1960s, watching television had become a nightly ritual in most american households. >> americans did what americans did on sunday nights. they had dinner, they watched "the ed sullivan show." then on that night, it was the first viewing on television of

the movie, "judgement at nuremberg." >> it's easy to condemn the german people, to speak of the basic flaw in the german character that allowed hitler to rise to power. >> we interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin. >> it was one of the rare times that a television network preempted its regularly scheduled programming for a news event. >> order! order! >> you're breaking into the first showing of this academy award-winning film about tyranny. the content made the average viewer say, gosh, are we like nazi germany? >> the most challenging picture of our time. >> maybe at the moment nobody really appreciated the irony, but you're watching a movie about the trial of nazi war criminals. suddenly, the tv switches to innocent unarmed americans being mercilessly beaten on live television. that's a moment that will forever be known as bloody sunday. >> this airs on sunday night, march 7th. tuesday morning, at 9:00, there are over a thousand people from as far away as hawaii.

before expedia, they mobilized instantly. >> i've come to selma to put my body where my heart is, to make sure that the negro people recognize that there are white people in the north that are with them in their fight. >> reporter: the shockwaves from selma reverberated around the world. >> dr. king made an appeal for religious leaders to come to selma. ministers, priests, rabbis and nuns came and walked across the bridge to the same point where we had been beaten. it was one of the finest hours for people to respond the way they responded. without television, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings. >> that's pretty amazing, the convergence of a media phenomenon and a mature movement coming together to shape politics. >> reporter: like birmingham before it, the brutality at

selma shocked the nation, compelling washington to respond -- >> ladies and gentlemen, the president of the united states. >> reporter: this time with the voting rights act of 1965.>> wh cincinnati is a matter of legitimate concern to every american. this is one nation. >> reporter: on march 7th, 2015, america's first black president, barack obama, with john lewis at his side, visited selma to commemorate bloody sunday. >> in one afternoon 50 years ago, so much of our turbulent history, the stain of slavery, and anguish of civil war, the yoke of segregation and tyranny of jim crow, all that history met on this bridge. >> reporter: just seven months earlier, in ferguson, missouri, peaceful demonstrators

protesting the shooting of teenager michael brown were confronted by a militarized police force. >> all of a sudden, three urban tanks came. >> it looks like flash grenades. there's smoke rising up and now it looks like the tear gas is coming out. >> we just need to open our eyes and our ears and our hearts to know that this nation's racial history still casts its long shadow upon us. >> it's not just negroes, but really it's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice, and we shall overcome. >> reporter: president johnson's 1965 speech to congress, invoking the movement's anthem marked the peak of the civil rights struggle. for a brief moment, the promise of a nation united against racial injustice seemed within

reach. but would it last?

>> you tell them white folk in

mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead. >> reporter: after selma, fractures within the movement began to show as a more militant group of activists gained traction. >> do you think you'll be able to keep it nonviolent, dr. king? >> yes, i think so. >> mr. carmichael, are you as committed to the nonviolent approach as dr. king is? >> no, i am not. >> why aren't you? >> well, i just don't see it as a way of life. i never have. >> reporter: newly annointed sncc chairman stokely carmichael spoke for a younger generation when he issued a battle cry. >> don't be afraid. don't be ashamed. we want black power! we want black power! >> black power! >> it was here in mississippi this summer that carmichael with his cry for black power first became a national figure and to many a frightening one. >> we want black power. >> it's two words that come to capture a whole host of white anxieties about race and about african-american civil rights activism. >> what do you want? black power.

what do you want? black power. >> it has taken off like a lightning bolt in the media. it sounds kind of aggressive. it sounds on the verge of military revolt. i mean, everybody was full of black power. it drew all the news coverage. >> in baltimore, the concept of black power. >> the issue of black power here in grenada, mississippi -- >> here in watts, black power -- >> black power. >> black power. >> black power. >> the press was fixated on the notion of violence. >> are you talking in violent analogies because you want to see a negro violent uprising? >> when stokely says "black power," he's not just whistling dixie. three white male journalists as the panel, and they're saying to him, "well, don't you really mean it's about violence?" and he's saying, very, i mean, very calmly, he says -- >> when i talk about black power, i talk about black people in the counties where they outnumber them to get together to organize themselves politically and to take over those counties from the white racists who now run it. >> we just want what everybody else has. and he's looking at three people

who represent, they know what we're talking about. they had to make themselves not understand him. neighborhoods and kill us! >> they wanted to see us as only passive. it's like, oh, the bad movement has taken over, '65, that selma march, that was wonderful, you know. people locking arms and singing "we shall overcome" and stuff. >> we want to talk about this thing called violence that everybody is so afraid about. >> the media tends to be stuck in the narrative that they understand. >> reporter: as black activists became less conciliatory to white america, the mainstream media began to cool on civil rights. >> so far a definitive statement on what black power is has yet to be forthcoming except that it is damaging. >> for most of the history of the civil rights movement, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, it was easy for the white press to pick which side they're on. they were clearly on the side of the civil rights demonstrators.

>> black power, black power! >> with the advent of black power -- >> black power, black power! >> -- it becomes a little bit more difficult for the press to cast it in terms of good versus evil. >> black power! what do you want? >> the message of black power, kind of like the message of black lives matter 50 years later, this is a message that is geared to blacks themselves. >> what do we want? justice. when do we want it? now. >> this movement is not brand new. this is the latest chapter in a liberatory struggle in america for black people and for people of color. >> what's been the response so far? >> the real truth of the matter is that children are the ones who are suffering from this occupation the most. >> my role is to take the demands from the street and make them relevant in the policy space. >> reporter: brittany packnett, a leading black lives matter activist, was one of several civil rights leaders, past and present, invited to the white house in 2016. >> people like brittany, who

served on our police task force in the wake of ferguson has led many of the protests. >> the beginning of our work in ferguson was simply to help people understand that there really is a problem, that racism is not dead no matter who was in the white house at the time. some of our tactics were still rooted in the traditions of the civil rights movement. but given that this is the next chapter, things evolve. we weren't going to sing "i shall not be moved" and "we shall overcome." we're going to play lil boosie. ♪ >> our streets. >> we're not carrying protest signs, we're wearing protest tees. to wear your sunday best, that was a strategic move in the civil rights movement, but i shouldn't have to dress my best for you to see me as a human being. >> reporter: when black lives matter activists objected to the coverage of their movement by mainstream media -- >> looks like we've got a stash

here of some amsterdam, new amsterdam citron vodka. >> reporter: they took control of their story. >> we were not pleased with the media, because somebody would be at home watching a channel. they would text or tweet someone and say this is the story that's being told about you. >> this is just an excuse to just go out there to rob and loot. >> and i know that's not true because i was just out there myself. >> there's police marching behind us. >> that's why social media was such an important tool for us because it allowed us to tell the truth unfiltered. >> why do you need me, white tv host from new york, to be the person that points a camera at your protesting? people got a lot more control over their own stories. and that's profound and powerful. >> it was social media that propelled the black lives matter movement onto a global stage. >> put your hands behind your back. >> i can't breathe. >> keep your hands where they are, please.

>> yes, i will, sir. i'll keep my hands where they are. >> reporter: when cell phone images of unarmed african-americans killed by police went viral. >> the body of michael brown laying on that ground for four and a half hours shocked america back into its consciousness once again. it woke so many people up that thought emmett till was a figment of the past and not a very relevant figure of the present. emmett till is michael brown and tamir rice and sandra bland and eric garner, and all of those folks because they woke us up once again. $9.95 at my age?

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we are tired of our men not being able to be men because they can't find work. we're tired of working full t-te jobs with part-time income. >> with the rise of black power, martin luther king's agenda shifted. >> we're tired of living in dilapidated, shacks and slums. >> reporter: he began to voice a more radical denunciation of society. to broaden his message, he took his movement north, where he encountered a backlash. >> there was progress in the south. there was violent resistance in the north. the nation suddenly learned what it should have known. that racial prejudice was not just a southern problem.

it was nationwide. >> king takes his campaign to chicago and he moves into the ghettos there. people felt differently when the microscope was being turned upon their own communities. >> i have never seen, even in mississippi and alabama, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as i've seen in chicago. >> shaken but one undeterred, h returned south. he returned to memphis, tennessee, in 1968, to show support for sanitation workers. >> a lot of people tell him, don't go to memphis. but king insists. we're here to help the garbage workers. these are the exact types of people we're supposed to be helping. >> april 4th, 1968, martin

luther king jr. stepped out of room 306, on to the balcony of the lorraine motel. he told his young aide, jesse jackson, to put on a tie for dinner. >> i said, dr. king, it's not a tie. he said, you bring it, we'll laugh. he never knew what hit him. he didn't suffer at all. i remember saying, he's my friend, martin. hold on, martin. he was gone. he was here, and he was not here. >> god knows this is the most tragic thing that's ever happened in my life. >> that's something that you

never really recover from seeing. >> knowing dr. king was a marked man, news crews shadowed his every move. but at the moment of his death, no television cameras were present. the only pictures taken that day was by a south african filmmaker, joe lowe, who was working on a documentary of dr. king. >> i heard the shot ring out. i ran out to the balcony. i saw dr. ring about 45 felt away. i ran to help. but there was nothing anyone could do. >> i have bad news for all of you. martin luther king was shot and killed tonight in memphis. >> we're upset today. we have lost somebody like a father. and today, many people are out on the street wondering which

way they're going to turn because they don't know where they're going to go. do we go to the right? do we go to the left? we lost something and we feel it, deeply. we feel it. >> our moses, our leader, has been taken from us because of hatred and prejudice. the white people don't know it but the white people's best friend is dead. >> looting in varying degrees and burning in a dozen cities. >> an uncontrolled carnival of looting began. >> dr. king gets assassinated. and the cities in the north go up in flames in riots. there's a sense that the nation is on the brink of civil war. >> once the demonstrators were seen burning those things and seen as violent, all of the components that made the white

man the obvious bad guy suddenly gets reversed. and that was a horrible moment of watching the narrative shift. >> martin luther king's death was not the final chapter in the struggle to overcome racial injustice in america. but for a time, king changed the plot from disillusioned to defiance. and despite the hate, he saw hope. >> dr. king said, you have to create a crisis, so the power structures are forced to answer. we had to create crisis, rooted far older than our chapter of the movement. >> the state of the world today does not afford us the luxury of an anemic democracy. >> if you are fortunate, his memory can stick to your mind

and inspire you to keep moving. >> king used to talk about that the real peace was not the absence of tension but the presence of justice. ensuring the presence of justice is a whole lot more complicated. >> the price that america must pay for the continued repression of the negro is its own destruction. >> there was something that was happening in america that responded to his voice and his message. >> it is a struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. >> it was a moment that galvanized people and brought people off of the sidelines, made them speak up and take a stand. >> this isn't a conflict between black folk and white folk. it is the tension between justice and injustice. >> it was to redeem the soul of america. it's a tragedy that he's seen as

a leader for black people from a different era, rather than our leader. >> let freedom reign. >> dr. king said, you're going to die. you have nothing to say about where or when, or how you die. your only choice is what is it you give your life for. >> when we have a people from every citizen in every hamlet, we'll be able to join hands and sing in the old spiritual. free at last, free at last, thank god almighty, free at last.

i can't breathe. i can't breathe. i can't breathe. i can't breathe. i can't breathe. >> one, two, three, four. five, six, seven, eight. >> america was never great. >> i can't breathe. >> i can't breathe. i can't breathe.