NAACP chairman Julian Bond reviews his experiences as an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement, including helping found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Poverty Law Center. He also talks about the continuing need for social action today, both combating racism and other social issues.

An mp3 version of the lecture audio can be downloaded.

A panel discusses the documentary television series American Experience: Eyes on the Prize, which uses contemporary interviews and historical footage to follow the civil rights movement from 1954 to 1985, following a preview screening. The discussion focuses on the creation of the series and what its creators hoped to achieve.

An mp3 of the discussion audio is available for download.

Father-and-son writers Steven and Paul Kendrick discuss the legal establishment of segregation (the concept of "separate but equal"), tracing it back to 1847. In that year, an African-American man sued the city of Boston, wanting his daughter to be able to attend a school closer to her home than the nearest all-black school. He was eventually defeated.

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website:

"In this lecture, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, gives a brief and entertaining tour of African American athletes throughout American history. From Bill Richmond, a bare knuckles boxer in eighteenth century New York to the barn storming all-black baseball leagues of the late nineteenth century and finally to Jackie Robinson and Jesse Owens in the twentieth, Gates uncovers both well known and long forgotten figures who changed American sports both on and off the playing field."

From the Gilder Lehrman website:

"Columbia University professor Christopher Brown examines the rise of anti-slavery thought during the Revolutionary Era. Focusing on the often contrasting motivations behind the anti-slavery rhetoric of the British and the Americans, Brown pointedly illustrates how the anti-slavery movement was a global phenomenon that emerged from a wide variety of ideologies."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American history website:

"University of Maryland Distinguished University Professor Ira Berlin suggests that the unique circumstances of American slavery continue to shape the nation even today. Unlike most other slave-holding countries, the United States had a large indigenous slave population and one of the most stringent definitions of race—the '"one drop" rule'—in the world. The result is a society whose very fabric is bound up in the legacy of human bondage."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American history website:

"Institute President James G. Basker examines early strains of abolitionism in eighteenth century literature. From John Newton, the slave trader-turned-minister who wrote the anti-slavery hymn 'Amazing Grace,' to black poets Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley, Basker argues that slavery was very much on the minds of eighteenth century writers and readers."

Professor Eric Foner argues that the idea of sending African American slaves to colonize Africa (an idea which Abraham Lincoln at times embraced) was part of the larger idea of emancipation for American slaves, but it did not allow its supporters to consider how freed slaves might become part of American society. It was Lincoln's consideration of this very issue, Foner says, that distinguishes him from other advocates of emancipation.