1968, Charleston, South Carolina, USA

Mississippi is still a very rough place. People is not just walking out like they used to do in the past, walking up and shooting a man down, and getting maybe two or three hundred people carryin’ out and lynching you, but it’s in a more settled way.

They let you starve to death, not give you jobs. These are some of the things that are happening right now in Mississippi.

See Mississippi is not actually Mississippi’s problem.

Mississippi is America’s problem. Because if America wanted to do something about what is going on in Mississippi, it could have stopped by now.

It wouldn’t have been in the last two years, between forty and fifty churches bombed and burned.

This lead me to say, you know, all of the burning and bombing, it was done to us in the houses …

Nobody never said too much about that, and nothing was done.

But let something be burned by a black man, and then, my god.

You see the flag is drenched with our blood. Because you see so many of our ancestors was killed because we never have accepted slavery.

We’ve had to live on it, but we never wanted it.

So we know that this flag is drenched with our blood. So what the young people are saying now, give us a chance to be young men, respected as a man, as we know this country was built on the black backs of black people across this country, and if we don’t have it, you aint gonna have it either, because we gonna tear it up, that’s what these people are saying …

And people ought to understand that.

I don’t see why they don’t understand that. They know what they’ve done to us. All across this country. They know what they’ve done to us.

This country is desperately sick, and man is on the critical list.

I really don’t know where we go from here.

Here is the full documentary, ‘The Heritage of Slavery’, by George Foster, 1968