Julius Waties Waring presided over the trial of a white police chief who brutally beat and blinded Black soldier Isaac Woodard in 1946. He became an unexpected civil rights champion with rulings on several pivotal cases in the 1940s.

Isaac Woodard entered the military in 1942 and served in the 429th Port Battalion as a longshoreman. After the war, he was honorably discharged on February 12, 1946 and headed home.

In 1946, Isaac Woodard, a Black army sergeant on his way home to South Carolina after serving in WWII, was pulled from a bus for arguing with the driver. The local chief of police savagely beat him, leaving him unconscious and permanently blind.

In 1946, Isaac Woodard, a Black army sergeant on his way home to South Carolina after serving in WWII, was pulled from a bus for arguing with the driver. The local chief of police savagely beat him, leaving him unconscious and permanently blind.

In 1925, 28-year-old Marian Anderson won a New York Philharmonic competition that drew national attention. But most signing opportunities in the U.S. remained closed to Anderson because she was Black.

Hailed as a voice that “comes around once in a hundred years” by maestros in Europe and widely celebrated by both white and black audiences at home, Marian Anderson's fame hadn’t been enough to spare her from the indignities and outright violence of racism and segregation.

In 1930, Walter White took over as executive secretary of the NAACP. When the Daughters of the American Revolution barred Marian Anderson from singing at Constitution Hall. White had an inspiration that transcended the whole debate: a free, outdoor concert on the Lincoln Memorial steps.

On Easter Sunday, 1939, contralto Marian Anderson stepped up to a microphone in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Inscribed on the walls of the monument behind her were the words “all men are created equal.”

Barred from performing in Constitution Hall because of her race, Marian Anderson would sing for the American people in the open air.

The story of Greenwood, an extraordinary Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that prospered during the 1920s and 30s despite rampant and hostile segregation. Torn apart in 1921 by one of the worst racially-motivated massacres in the nation’s history, the neighborhood rose from the ashes.

The story of Greenwood, an extraordinary Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that prospered during the 1920s and 30s despite rampant and hostile segregation.

In the early 1900s, a group of black businessmen purchased land in the northeast section of Tulsa, Oklahoma. They called their community Greenwood.

The Codebreaker reveals the fascinating story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the groundbreaking cryptanalyst whose painstaking work to decode thousands of messages for the U.S. government would send infamous gangsters to prison in the 1920s and bring down a massive, near-invisible Nazi spy ring in WWII.

Elizebeth Smith Friedman was an American codebreaker from Indiana. During Prohibition, her decrypts and testimony brought down international drug rings and liquor smugglers. Friedman’s codebreaking in WWII enabled the US to win the “Battle of the Atlantic” and smash Nazi spy rings.

The story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the groundbreaking cryptanalyst whose painstaking work to decode thousands of messages for the U.S. government would send infamous gangsters to prison in the 1920s and bring down a massive, near-invisible Nazi spy ring in WWII.

The fascinating story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the groundbreaking cryptanalyst who helped lay the foundation for modern codebreaking today.

William F. Friedman married Elizebeth Friedman in 1917 and the two began a life of codebreaking for the U.S. Government. During WWI, they invented new methods of codebreaking and laid the foundation for modern cryptology.

On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—were brutally executed by the Ku Klux Klan on a secluded dirt road in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Now a new short film from American Experience tells the story of the murder plot, carried out by the Klan and enabled by police collusion and a Mississippi state spy agency.

Freedom Riders is the powerful harrowing and ultimately inspirational story of six months in 1961 that changed America forever.

The murder of a 14-year-old black boy and the subsequent trial horrified the nation and the world. Emmett Till's death was a spark that helped mobilize the Civil Rights movement.