

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard's chair of Afro-American Studies, travels the length and breadth of the United States to take the temperature of black America at the start of the new century. He explores this rich and diverse landscape, social as well as geographic, and meets the people who are defining black America, from the most famous and influential to those at the grassroots.
Gates travels to Memphis, Birmingham, and Atlanta—civil rights battlegrounds in the 1950s and '60s—to explore how much they really have changed.
Aired: 2/3/2004Gates goes inside the notorious housing projects on Chicago's South Side to find out what life is like for America's "underclass." Is there any hope for the fifth of black Americans who are caught up in a culture of criminality, poverty, and despair?
Aired: 2/3/2004