Ted Koppel Examines America's Recent History of Racial Violence
Premieres Monday, Oct.13, at 10 p.m. ET/PT
Just weeks before the history-making 2008 presidential election, the first in which any political party has nominated an African American as its candidate, Discovery Channel presents a one-hour special on race in America. Some commentators are now speaking of a “post-racial” period in American history. While the nation has come a long way on the road toward racial equality, there is still much left to accomplish.
In this program, Ted Koppel focuses on three Americans whose lives were affected profoundly by incidents of hatred and racism as recent as a 1981 lynching in Alabama. This year, however, each was directly involved in naming Senator Barack Obama as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.
"Barack Obama's nomination doesn't mean the end of racism any more than Sarah Palin's nomination signals the end of sexism or gender bias in America. But what giant steps forward! The Last Lynching offers a look at how far we've come on the racial front, and how recent some of the worst days of racial violence really were," explained Koppel.
Koppel and his team of producers take viewers into the lives of these three: Congressman Robert Filner who, as an 18-year-old Freedom Rider, was thrown into Mississippi’s Parchman Prison; Florida schoolteacher Lizzie Jenkins who recalls tales of her grandfather watching the lynching of five African Americans in 1916; and Congressman Artur Davis who as a law student worked to hold the Ku Klux Klan accountable for "The Last Lynching," which took place in Mobile, Ala., in 1981.
