American Scandal

Billie Holiday makes a decision. The jazz singer will perform "Strange Fruit," the protest song about lynchings, no matter what happens to her—and no matter how many times law enforcement tells her to stay quiet. But that puts her in the crosshairs of one federal official, who uses any means necessary to silence Holiday.

The FBI goes after Martin Luther King, Jr., after the civil rights leader calls for an end to racial injustice. The bureau begins to spy on King—and forces him to make an impossible decision.

Fred Hampton is a rising star in the civil rights movement. But when he challenges police brutality, he finds that his life is suddenly threatened.

Antiwar activists hatch a risky plan. Led by a physics professor, the group decides to burglarize an FBI office. The goal: to find incriminating documents, and to expose decades of federal abuses.

From the mid-1950s to the early '70s, the FBI employed a secret program known as COINTELPRO. It aimed to disrupt a wide range of social activism, from anti-war protests, to the fight for racial justice. At the time, Clayborne Carson was on the front lines of the battles for civil rights. He’d go on to become the founding director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, at Stanford University. He and Lindsay sit down to discuss the FBI's investigations of civil rights leaders. They also discuss how those events echo what's happening now between law enforcement and activists.