Contemporary history with David Hoffman...

100 Frustrating years after the emancipation proclamation, the Negro Community has arrived to the decision to celebrate the centennial in an all out effort to achieve full rights now!

A live television show that was broadcast in 1963. It is more than 60 years old, and yet, I feel it is so relevant to some issues we face in the United States today.

It is also amazing because of the eloquence of these five American Black leaders who are about to discuss the State of the American Negro.

I am David Hoffman, film maker. I didn't shoot this. But, I was a college senior and I was watching the show on television with my parents, and what I saw so affected me and it made me decide to go down to Washington to attend the March on Washington that Summer.

It also got me to make my first documentary which is posted on my channel, from 1963 about migrant workers in Riverhead Long Island, near where I lived.

So look, before I run this amazing show, I got to tell you a little bit of background which I think will matter to you.

It was the Spring of 1963. President Kennedy is exciting the nation with a feeling of all kind of new things are going to happen, and America is going to be great. It's also 100 years after the Congress passed the Emancipation Proclamation, which free the slaves.

There was new and bold legislations before Congress. And it was exciting legislation, because it had to do with voting rights. Giving Negros, as the said at the time, the right to vote, and making certain that they could vote to support this legislation. The five major Negro organizations in America announced that they are going to have this march in Washington to support the legislation.

The issue of Civil Rights in America had been fomenting for several years. 1960-61, black students in the south began to protest by sitting in at lunch counters. Martin Luther King, in the late 1960s, had had his bus boycott, and the march in Birmingham, and other things were happening around the country that those of us in the North, like people like me, were watching, very sympathetic to what the students were trying to do: Get people to vote.

So National Educational Television, before we had PBS, decided to do this live show with five Negro leaders, the top guys, talking about what they hoped will happen at this march. It's prophetic!

What they were saying 60 years ago is so relevant to what people are saying and thinking... and truly apply today.

There was Roy Wilkings, the head of the N.A.A.C.P

There was Whitney Young Jr, National Urban League

There was James Farmer, of the C.O.R.E - Congress on Racial Equality.

There was James Forman, the head of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, S.N.C.C, who had been training students in Mississippi to attempt to register voters.

I knew young people who attended the training sessions and went south, and I tought they were heroes. This was scary stuff. And there were the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. S.C.L.C

The host was Dr. Kenneth Clark, a professor at New York's City University.

So much of this is relevant as I said

Host: Dr. Kenneth Clark

Professor at New York's City University.

Roger Wilkins in his own words.

I used to be a runner in High School and College and in my late thirties I began to jogg. Early way of joggers is the most foolish thing I ever did.

I was jogging near my house in Washington, I was the assistant attorney general of the United States. Best friend of the attorney general of the United States. I was jogging near my house...

And a police car came by - fortunately I had my Justice department in my hidden pocket.

-Boy ! I kept on jogging.

-Boy ! I was jogging... I keep on jogging.

-Hey, you boy! Spotlight on me...

-Spread your legs! I spread my legs, they hit me pretty hard between the legs and and hurt. And, I kept saying look in my back pocket. Reach in my back pocket.

-Boy, you robbed the store!

-Boy, you'd better stop! I think I'd better stop. And so, I stopped. And two white cops get out and slammed me against the wall.

-Boy, this, boy that, boy, boy, boy. and they pulled out this thing. It was a nice leather thing... it says Justice Department Official.

Ah, they melted.

-Oh, I was just like... he had a call and it was just like...it fits you to... ah, sir! Bla, bla, bla.

Yes, of course I called the police chief the minute I get home, and those guys were suspended and disciplined.

If I had had no credentials in my pocket, I would have been in jail that night.

Middle Class, 37-year old father of two children, doing nothing wrong but jogging. That's not the only time it happened to me. Well, if it would happen to me, imagine what would have happened to seventeen year old black kid in the inner city?...