America Beyond The Color Line

Gates travels to Memphis, Birmingham and Atlanta - once the battlegrounds on which civil rights were won for black southerners in the 1950s and 60s. The very cities from which African Americans fled during the era of legal segregation are today drawing them back by the tens of thousands. But how much have these cities really changed since the civil rights era? Interviewees include Morgan Freeman and Maya Angelou.

Gates goes inside the notorious housing projects in Chicago's South Side - the Robert Taylor and the Ida B. Wells - to find out from the people who live there what life is like for America's "underclass." "What happened to the city of refuge my father's generation sought in the North; North where 'the streets of Heaven were paved with gold'?" wonders Gates. Caught up in a culture of criminality, poverty and despair, is there any hope for the fifth of black Americans who have been left behind?

The existence of a small group of African Americans at the heart of the political establishment and at the pinnacle of corporate America is something that, just two decades ago, seemed unimaginable. How did they get there and what is the significance of their success? Beginning at Harvard, Gates travels to Washington, DC, and New York to ask if this new black power elite represents genuine progress for black America as a whole. Interviewees include Colin Powell, Russell Simmons, Vernon Jordan, Franklin Raines and the first African-American chess grandmaster in history, Maurice Ashley.