In the Spring of 1944, the town of New Iberia, Louisiana, threatened, beat, and expelled key leaders of the town’s black community – leaders who had recently formed a new NAACP branch and were in danger of getting, by some accounts, the “upper hand.” Among the expelled were the town’s only black physicians, and their removal left the town without a black doctor – or strong black community leadership – until the civil rights movement.

On a cold, rainy afternoon in 1968 a Memphis garbage truck malfunctioned and killed the two "garbage packers" riding inside. It was the last straw for the city's more than 1,000 sanitation workers, who walked off the job in protest of the conditions. But they ran head-on into an immovable Mayor, and the ensuing battle brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to town for what was to be his last march.

When filmmaker D.W. Griffith released Birth of a Nation in 1915, the revolutionary film changed the way America thought about the movies and in many respects launched the modern film industry. But lesser known is the role Birth of a Nation had in the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.

People from all walks of life conspire to vengeance after a 1917 murder. Law enforcement is all but suspended as an organized committee forms to abduct a suspect from police custody and stage a horrific public spectacle.   

For forty years -- and as many as 5,000 babies -- Georgia Tann used political influence to steal children and operate a nationwide adoption business. Meet the relentless woman who wrecked thousands of families, presided over the deaths and abuse of countless -- and brought adoption into the American mainstream.