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.