♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ KENNETH MACK: In the early 20th century, life for African Americans in the South had been changing for the worse for decades.

The vote is being suppressed, lynchings are increasing, segregation is increasing.

We're really at the nadir of African American experience since slavery.

♪ ♪ KARLOS HILL: Lynching is the primary form of enforcing and reinforcing white supremacy.

There is nothing that provides sanctuary for you or your family.

NARRATOR: The freedom struggle had never seemed more forlorn.

But in 1909, during this darkest hour, a group of activists gathered to form a new organization dedicated to the radical ideal of equality.

They called it the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

It would be at the heart of Black America's freedom struggle for the next 50 years.

This was not a natural American development.

This came from people who understood what America could be, and were willing to put it all on the line to make it happen.

JOSE ANDERSON: You had W.E.B.

Du Bois-- absolutely brilliant, phenomenal communicator.

Charlie Houston, spectacular legal mind.

Thurgood Marshall-- card-playing, bourbon-drinking, great storyteller; the ultimate legal rock star.

They were really an odd set of people.

NARRATOR: The man who ended up leading this fractious group of geniuses was brave, gifted, egotistical, gregarious, deeply flawed, and utterly, fiercely devoted to the cause.

♪ ♪ MACK: Walter White makes the NAACP into a national player.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: The NAACP and Walter White lay the foundation for the movement that we see in the 1960s.

NARRATOR: For decades, Walter White was arguably the most influential Black man in America, the face of the civil rights movement.

Yet he was an enigma even to himself, as he put it, "a Black man occupying a white body."

ELLIS MONK: He is very light-skinned, indistinguishable from white Americans.

ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH: He used his appearance to go into places where lynchings had happened.

HILL: He was a revered person because of the risks that he was willing to take.

♪ ♪ RANDOLPH STAKEMAN: The question is, why is he forgotten?

ROSE PALMER: Somehow, my uncle was just written completely out of Black history.

♪ ♪ WILLIAMS: There are so many assumptions about the civil rights movement, because people are looking for simple stories.

And this isn't a simple story.

(wagons creaking, horses walking) (bicycle bell ringing, car horns honking) (streetcar bell ringing) (people talking in background) NARRATOR: Something was wrong.

13-year-old Walter White could feel it as he rode through the city with his father.

Race-baiting politicians had been stirring up trouble all summer long.

The newspapers were full of rumors about Black men and white women.

"The Negro grows more bumptious in the street," "The Atlanta Journal" warned, "more impudent in his dealings with white men.

"And, when he cannot achieve social equality as he wishes, he assaults the fair young girlhood of the South."

♪ ♪ WHITE (dramatized): All over downtown Atlanta, little bands of sullen, evil-looking men talked excitedly on street corners.

Father told me that rumors of a race riot that night were sweeping the town.

♪ ♪ DAVID LEVERING LEWIS: Someone shouted to the milling crowd, "What are you waiting for, men?

Women are being raped every day as I speak."

(crowd clamoring) ♪ ♪ Suddenly, this mass of 10,000 souls began to attack every person of color.

(crowd shouting) 10,000 white people attacking African Americans, willy-nilly, on the street, wherever they saw-- "There's one, let's go get him.

There's one, let's go get her."

You know, didn't matter if it was a woman, didn't matter if it was a child.

(woman screams, crowd clamoring) They would get them, beat them.

NARRATOR: "In some streets," "The Atlanta Constitution" reported, "the sidewalks ran red with the blood of dead and dying Negroes."

But the mobs took no notice of Walter and his father, with their pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes.

PATRICIA SULLIVAN: They're not identified by the mob as African Americans.

So they're able to move through this horror and, and witness what's happening.

NARRATOR: Walter and his father ran the gauntlet of violence, and finally made it back home to safety.

But as darkness descended, they braced themselves.

PALMER: There was a rumor that they were going to burn down the entire Black community.

And so my grandfather and Uncle Walter stood at the front window, watching for the advance of the mob.

NARRATOR: For hours they waited, listening for the sounds of rioting in the distance.

(crowd shouting) Around midnight, the roar grew louder.

Walter watched in horror as a mob made its way up the street.

WHITE (dramatized): Some of them were bearing torches.

Suddenly, there was a volley of shots.

(guns firing) Friends of my father's had barricaded themselves in a two-story brick building just down the street.

It was they who had fired.

MYRICK-HARRIS: African American men were patrolling the area, protecting their neighbors.

And when the white mobs came... (guns firing) ...they shot back.

WHITE (dramatized): The mob hesitated, stopped.

Our friends fired another volley.

(guns firing, people shouting) The mob broke and retreated up Houston Street.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Walter and his family had been saved by their Black compatriots, but all the same, the 13-year-old was deeply scarred.

♪ ♪ HILL: The violence that Walter White witnessed, he finds it repugnant and so distasteful that he says, "I am so glad that I am not a member of, of the white race."

He develops his sense of not only identity, but of who he wanted to be in the world.

WHITE (dramatized): In that instant, there opened up within me a great awareness.

I was gripped by the knowledge of my identity.

I was a Negro.

In the depths of my soul, I was glad of it.