Bill Moyers in Conversation Public Square Media, Inc.

On August 6, 1965, Rep. John Lewis looked on as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. In this video, he reflects on how the March on Washington led to key civil rights laws.

Historian Harvey J. Kaye talks to Bill about why FDR's "Four Freedoms” -- freedom from fear and want and freedom of speech and religion -- are more important now than ever.

I paid a visit to New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture recently to help a large gathering of the Schomburg’s devoted friends and visitors say goodbye — very reluctantly — to Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad. He’s been the beloved director of the Schomburg for the past five years and has done much to expand the reach and the influence of the Harlem institution that devotes itself to researching and disseminating the history of African Americans. But Muhammad is also a scholar and he is now eager to evaluate everything he has gleaned about the contemporary concerns of black America from a new vantage point. He’s on his way to join Harvard University’s faculty as a professor of history, race and public policy at the Kennedy School of Government.

Here’s what the 2016 election should be about: Winner-Take-All Politics — How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. It’s a groundbreaking account of how our political system was hijacked by the super rich and engineered to work for them at the expense of everyone else. Two of our top political scientists – Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson – published it four years ago to wide acclaim.

My guest is Eddie Glaude Jr., author of Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. In the first part of our conversation, professor Glaude and I discussed the crisis that continues to engulf black America. "We talk about the achievement gap, we talk about the empathy gap, we talk about the wealth gap," Glaude explained, "and the value gap is this: the belief that white people matter more than others. And to the extent to which that belief animates our social arrangements, our political practices, our economic realities, under different material conditions, as long as that belief obtains, democracy will always be an abeyance in this country." We continue with Professor Glaude’s proposal to upend our politics and launch a revolution of values.

I’m holding in my hand what has been called “one of the most daring books of the 21st century,” a “book for the ages,” “bracing,” “unrelenting.” The title is Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, and it breathes with prophetic fire. Its power comes because the author does not begin with “pristine principles or with assumptions about our inherent goodness. Rather, its view of democracy,” as he writes, “emerges out of an unflinching encounter with lynching trees, prison cells, foreclosed homes, young men and women gunned down by police and places where ‘hope, unborn, had died.’”