American Experience Season 37

E1: Forgotten Hero: Walter White and The NAACP

While many consider the birth of the civil rights movement to be 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus, the stage had been set decades before by activists of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Some of the NAACP leaders are familiar, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall, but Walter White, head of the NAACP from 1929 to 1955, has been all but forgotten. With his blond hair and blue eyes, Walter White looked white; he described himself as “an enigma, a Black man occupying a white body.” Like virtually all light-skinned African Americans of his day, White was descended from enslaved Black women and powerful white men. But he was Black — by law, identity, and conviction and spent his entire life fighting for Black civil rights. Forgotten Hero: Walter White and the NAACP traces the life of this neglected civil rights hero and seeks to explain his disappearance from our history.

E2: Change, Not Charity: The Americans with Disabilities Act

The emotional and dramatic story of the decades-long push for equality and accessibility that culminated in the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. A story of courage and perseverance, the film highlights the determined people who literally put their bodies on the line to achieve their goal and change the lives of all Americans.

E3: Mr. Polaroid

Before the iPhone, the Polaroid camera let people instantly chronicle their lives. Along with instant photo mania, its company culture became the model for Silicon Valley. Mr. Polaroid is the story of Edwin Land, the man behind the camera.

E4: Clearing the Air: The War on Smog

A chronicle of how Los Angeles' devastating smog problem in the 1940s and 50s led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Clean Air Act.

E5: Hard Hat Riot

Hard Hat Riot tells the story of a struggling metropolis, a flailing president, a divided people, and a bloody juncture when the nation violently diverged ― culminating in a new political and cultural landscape that radically redefined American politics and foreshadowed the future.

E6: Kissinger, Part One: The Necessity of Power

The story of Henry Kissinger, the enigmatic powerbroker who served in the topmost echelons of U.S. diplomacy. Celebrated or reviled, his contradictions reflect those central to late 20th century U.S. foreign policy. With interviews from proteges and colleagues, Kissinger endeavors to understand his relentless drive for power, and how his policies shaped today’s world.

E7: Kissinger, Part Two: The Opportunist

Discover how Henry Kissinger's anti-Communist zeal would shape U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam, China, Chile, and the Soviet Union in the second half of the 20th century, through the voices of historians and colleagues.