(HORNS HONKING)
I know of nobody that can deliver a man from sin but God's son,
the Lord Jesus Christ.
And I wanna stand flat-footed and boldly say
to God be the glory!
I am grateful for a saviour to preach that can set people free.
SCHAMA: There's no escaping American fervour.
You can feel its heat right through the country,
burning into politics.
For a long time now, it's been the Republicans
who have claimed to speak for God.
Let it be said of our day that we did build, protect
and pass on to a new generation a shining city upon a hill.
I believe in the power of prayer because I've felt it in my own life.
The more time we spend with God,
the more we see that he is not a distant king,
but a loving father.
But in this election, nothing is the way it's been.
Evangelical Christians suspect that the Republican nominee, John McCain,
isn't really their man.
Even though they love his choice of running mate.
This time it's the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama,
who invokes faith as his inspiration.
OBAMA: There's nothing that can stop us
because that's God's intention.
(PEOPLE CHEERING)
So, I just want all of you to pray that I can be an instrument of God.
He talks about transforming America,
and what drives him is his religion.
(PEOPLE CHEERING)
That's an instinct with its roots deep in the American past.
Faith is what created America, it's what gave Americans their freedom.
To really understand this country, you have to look into its history.
And in America, the great historical moments have always been acts of faith.
...standing up for the freedom of my people!
For he made all things for himself.
Yea, even the wicked for the day of evil.
People ask questions.
(WAILING)
And I want to tell you our God had a purpose in Him for the day of evil.
"Why would you say such a thing, Preacher?"
Because it's in this book.
Whoa, blessed be his name.
Brother, we trust you'll give us liberty to talk on about Adam.
How that Adam was made just the way God wanted...
This is what real American fervour sounds like.
He said, "Comfort you one another with these words."
CONGREGATION: # In thy kingdom
# Blessed saviour
# Come and bid...
These are Primitive Baptists in rural Virginia.
And when they began their droning song, I was taken back centuries.
# O come and reign forever
All the way back, to America's beginnings.
# God of love
# And prince of peace... #
And that's where you've got to start,
to understand why religion has been such a potent force.
(SINGING CONTINUES)
The first settlers came to America to escape persecution in England.
They had to get away from the heavy authority
of the established churches in the Old World.
Their hope was to be able to worship in freedom.
Thousands came to the new colonies,
where they built their own religious communities.
Nearly all were Christians.
But there was one group who needed religious freedom more than most.
My lot. The Jews.
In 1658, 15 Jewish families sailed into Newport Harbor, Rhode Island.
They had been living in the Dutch West Indies and Brazil,
where they were allowed to practise their religion
but had few other rights.
So they came to the Rhode Island colony,
where they had been told there was greater freedom
than anywhere in the world.
The community prospered,
and they built this synagogue, now the oldest in America.
When the American Revolution began in 1775,
most Jews threw in their lot with the Americans against the British,
in the hope that in this new republic, they might finally achieve
what no country in the world had ever given them,
equality.
This place says everything to me about the unique force of American freedom.
The Jews who built this beautiful synagogue
had been living and worshipping peacefully in Newport
for more than a hundred years.
But with the creation of a new republic,
they had the audacity to ask for something much bigger.
Not just to be tolerated, but to be treated as equal citizens,
to have the vote and to hold public office,
and that was unimaginable anywhere else in the world.
When the president of the new nation, George Washington,
visited Newport in 1790,
the congregation made their audacious request for full rights.
Washington was unequivocal in a letter written to the synagogue.
"Happily,Ħħ he wrote to them, "the government of the United States,
"which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,
"requires only that they who live under its protection
"should demean themselves as good citizens."
Jews, citizens? Well, this really was a revolutionary act.
But a bigger question still remained.
Would those rights be established in the constitution?
There was someone who was determined that they should.
Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States,
author of the Declaration of Independence,
and father of religious freedom.
Jefferson believed in God, up to a point, as the author of the universe.
He thought Jesus of Nazareth a great moral teacher,
but as far as virgin births and walking on water was concerned, forget it.
Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment,
for whom the only God that mattered was reason.
That's why when he planned one of his pet creations,
the University of Virginia,
he made sure there was no school of divinity.
And, a huge shock at the time, no chapel.
Instead of a long, dark nave, Jefferson built this, a rotunda.
Now, the circle and the sphere
were the Enlightenment's favourite symbol
for the harmony of the universe.
It's a humane, almost secular vision of the world.
And at its centre, the centre of the dome, is an oculus, an eye,
admitting the light of reason to banish superstition.
Jefferson believed people could preach all they liked,
but the laws of America had to make it clear
that that was as far as it could go.
Religion, any religion, would be strictly voluntary.
You would be at liberty to pray in any way you wanted
but you couldn't force your God on anyone else.
So Jefferson set down his beliefs in this,
the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom.
The document I'm looking at ought to be as well-known as the Magna Carta
because it is the foundation not just of religious freedom,
and not just in America, but of intellectual freedom in the world.
Look at this, a sort of brown ink and parchment.
But it's dynamite. It's Jefferson's little explosive charge.
It's his bid in Virginia to make America stand for
freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of expression.
The first sentence is electrifying.
No one had thought of writing these words.
"Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free."
There it is, God and freedom in the same sentence.
That's not what churches wanted you to hear.
He called it "a natural expression of the American mind".
Now, an awful lot of Americans wouldn't have agreed with that.
But that's how he wanted America to stand in the world.
Secondly, he says, "The dignity and decency and strength
"of being able to choose our belief or to have no belief for ourself
"is our natural right."
This may all sound as though we can take this for granted.
No one took it for granted until Jefferson and America said so.
Initially, these revolutionary ideas only applied to the state of Virginia.
But after independence, Jefferson and Washington travelled around the country,
campaigning for them to become the law in the whole of America.
They found a land that was now home to a multitude
of different religious sects,
Baptists, Quakers, Lutherans, Catholics, Anglicans, Jews.
They told them that the only way their freedoms could be guaranteed
was if the law refused to endorse any one of them
as the state religion.
And that's what happened.
The first amendment to the constitution, ratified on December 15, 1791,
famously declared, "Congress shall make no law
"respecting an establishment of religion
"or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
When he'd left the presidency in 1809,
Jefferson retired to the house he'd designed in rural Virginia, Monticello.
He tended his garden and explored revolutionary ideas
in science and philosophy.
Monticello is the physical expression of a tidy mind.
But there's something disturbing about it, too.
Below the house are the quarters of the Americans
for whom Jefferson's precepts of freedom didn't apply,
his hundreds of slaves.
While Jefferson and the other founding fathers argued over
the finer points of freedom of conscience,
America's hundreds of thousands of slaves languished in captivity.
It was in religion that they found comfort and consolation.
Some slaves took Jefferson's fine words about faith and freedom at face value,
none more so than Andrew Bryan.
Bryan led one of America's earliest black Christian congregations.
It's still going,
here at the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia.
A non-ordained preacher, he organised meetings of Savannah's slaves
to discuss the teachings of Jesus.
Simple stuff, really. Nothing particularly radical.
But instead of welcoming Bryan's efforts to spread the gospel to ungodly slaves,
the city's white Christians reacted with contempt and hostility.
It wasn't as if Bryan was a revolutionary
calling for the immediate end to slavery.
All he wanted to do was to create a congregation of slaves.
But even this was too much for the whites of Savannah,
who feared the blacks taking control over any part of their life.
So, for his audacity, Bryan and 50 of his followers
were seized and flogged mercilessly.
There is a happy ending of sorts to the story of Andrew Bryan.
His white owner, Jonathan Bryan, got him released from prison,
and let him use his rice barn for a church.
Bryan was officially ordained a few years later
by a white preacher, Abraham Marshall,
impressed by the black Baptists in the barn.
By the time of his death, he had achieved his dream,
a Christian congregation of slaves.
But the true significance of Bryan was not so much what he himself achieved,
but what he began.
The word of God spread from Savannah out into the countryside.
Places like this abandoned plantation on one of the islands off Georgia's coast
were visited by travelling preachers.
And for every Andrew Bryan with his moderate brand of Christianity,
there were many with a far more radical message.
When they read the gospel, it told them not to wait for deliverance,
but to rebel against their masters and to take their liberty now.
The Christianity they preached, and how they preached it,
took the white man's religion and made it their own.
Six days a week, the slaves on plantations like these
were absolutely the possession of their master.
Sunday was different.
It was in religion that they were able to come into their own,
to make their own community.
And they did it by developing forms of worship,
some of them carried from African memories
that were utterly different from the decorum of white churches.
Foot-stamping, shouting, hand-clapping,
the sorrowful songs that we now call spirituals,
the passionate rhythms of the black preacher.
It was through the jubilation of praise and prayer
that they were able, if only briefly, to throw off their shackles.
MAN: # O, whoa, hold to His hand
# Hold on to God's unchanging hand
# You ought to hold
# Hold on to God's unchanging hand
# Come on and give... #
Nothing much has changed.
The spirituals and hymns may have a touch of Broadway in them,
but the message is as strong as ever.
The black church, America's freedom church,
the church built by slaves.
It's Easter Sunday in Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta,
where Martin Luther King preached his gospel of liberation.
REVEREND: People dare to ask why are we angry?
Two hundred and forty-four years of slavery,
and you dare to ask me why in the world are black people so angry?
Like most black congregations in the country, Ebenezer has a new hero,
Barack Obama.
They consider him one of them,
a man whose political convictions owe an enormous debt to his faith.
These days, when people ask me what role does religion play in your work,
you're running for the presidency of the United States,
the leader of the free world, what role does faith play?
I say it plays every role.
There is God's spirit in each and every one of us.
Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American.
It's waiting to be released.
I was talking to Pastor...
Obama's background in the black church,
the church of slave rebellions, comes with political risks.
No, no, no. Not God bless America. God damn America.
The sermons of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright,
dominated the talk that Easter weekend.
He'd made some incendiary remarks
that were instantly picked up by the American media.
Barack knows what it means to be a black man living in a country
and a culture that is controlled by rich white people.
Hillary can never know that.
Hillary ain't never been called a nigger.
Obama was forced to disown his pastor and leave the church
where he'd been a member for 20 years.
But here, the media attacks on Wright were seen as an attack on all of them.
REVEREND: For two weeks now, the talking heads
of the American mainstream media
have been engaged in a yellow journalistic prosecution
of the black church.
(PEOPLE APPLAUDING)
Jeremiah Wright may be the subject,
and Barack Obama may have been called to testify,
but in a real sense, the black church is on trial.
Reverend Warnock wasn't shy of taking his fervour
right into the political fray.
WARNOCK: The truth may get you killed.
The truth will get you crucified,
sometimes on a cross,
sometimes on CNN. But the truth...
So much for Jefferson's hope
that politics and religion might be kept apart.
For me, it's a question of social justice,
and justice is not simply a political issue,
it's a theological issue.
The prophets of the Old Testament spoke about the God of justice.
They said, "Woe unto you who crush the poor."
And so, when I speak to public policy issues,
I am being faithful to the gospel.
Martin Luther King, Jr said,
"The judgment of God is upon America."
SCHAMA: It's very moving for me to be here because of...
obviously because of Martin Luther King and that whole history.
How important is it for you that the black church has been essentially
associated with the story of freedom in America?
I would argue that the black church was born fighting for freedom.
The freedom struggle is the black church's very raison d'etre,
its reason for being.
It is the one thing that really
makes the witness of the black church distinctive in America.
And it has been part of the black church's gift to America.
(PEOPLE APPLAUDING)
WARNOCK: Get up with new power in your hands!
Get up knowing that greater is the one who is within you,
than the one who is within the world.
(ORGAN PLAYING)
The overthrow of slavery needed more than black anger.
It needed the outrage of whites who actually governed America.
And no one did more to equate slavery with moral depravity
than Charles Finney.
The evangelical preacher thundered from the pulpit of this church
in Oberlin, Ohio,
against a sin he considered so great that if it weren't eradicated,
it would bring destruction upon the whole nation.
At 6'3" with famously piercing eyes and long flailing arms,
Finney was an alarming sight to behold,
as he castigated sinners for their evil ways.
From 1835, Finney was a professor, and then president, of Oberlin College.
With him at the helm, Oberlin was the great centre of abolitionist politics.
The college was so radical it admitted women and blacks.
The core of the Oberlin creed was that you could not be a Christian
and countenance slavery.
Oberlin turned out hundreds of evangelical preachers,
who spread that word round the country.
Finney's fury lit their determination to get rid of the abomination.
It's often said you can't really understand Finney
unless you'd actually heard him. The words on the page are dry.
But these aren't dry, they just come exploding off the page.
And it's a lecture given at Oberlin on the occasion of a national fast.
And you get both the intense zeal and the crankiness of the man.
Amazingly, the first lot Finney has a go at are the founding fathers,
Jefferson included, whom he thinks are just a bunch of hypocrites.
He says, "As the very basis of the revolution, they, the founding fathers,
"publicly declared that all men were born free and equal.
"Now," thunders Finney, "at the very time at which this declaration was made,
"the very men who made it
"and the nation that proclaim these truths
"as an excuse for revolution and war,
"stood with their unsanctified feet
"upon the necks of the prostrate slaves.
"And from that day to this, this nation as such has continued,
"publicly and practically, when these wrongs were held up to view,
"to deny the principles on which the revolution was based."
So he's absolutely crystal clear
that this was what he called the national sin.
So here Finney produces a powerful argument
for preachers like him getting involved with the dirty business of politics.
"Let no man say that ministers are out of their place
"in exposing and reproving the sins of this nation.
"The fact is that ministers and all other men not only have a right,
"but are bound to expose and rebuke the national sins."
How much more eloquent and powerful can you get than that?
Today, Christian evangelicals have a strictly conservative reputation.
But here in the Oberlin archives,
I'm reminded of just how radical the movement's roots really are.
Finney's crusade began in the pulpit,
but it ended with the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves.
What started as pure faith changed the country exactly as Finney had hoped.
# It's been ten long years since I left my home
# On the river where I was born
# The cool fall nights make the woodsman rise
# By the sun he blows his horn
# I fell in love with a girl from the town... #
So if evangelicals back then were such progressive reformers,
why do they seem so conservative today?
# Worked in a sawmill or two
# What have they done... #
The Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia provide some answers.
# Look for a child in town #
The region is famous for its bluegrass music,
which has always helped people to escape the reality of their tough lives.
But it's also famous for its strong, simple Protestant faith.
# What have they done to the old home place?
# Why did they tear it down? #
Religion may have helped free the slaves,
but it's been just as important in the lives of the white dispossessed.
Everywhere in Appalachia, you can see the debris of lives
that have somehow got left out of the boom times of America.
Here, religion has provided a haven for many whites
whose lives have been blighted by poverty.
A sense of community, something to lean on.
And it was in this world that conservative evangelicalism
had its roots.
(DOG BARKING)
A hundred years ago, the remote mountain communities
of Appalachia were transformed by the discovery of coal.
The town of Thurmond in West Virginia,
or what little remains of it, is typical.
(TRAIN HORN BLOWING)
Today, it has a population of just seven.
But it was once a boomtown, made rich by coal and the railroads.
In 1873, an ex-Confederate officer called William Thurmond
came back home here to Appalachia, where he'd grown up.
He thought of himself as one of the dispossessed.
His house had been burnt by Union troops
and he needed to make a living.
He was a surveyor and he knew this was coal country.
Within a few years, he built this little town
that was known as Thurmond, West Virginia,
into the hub of that immense coal industry of Appalachia.
It was an industry of great fortune and great danger,
especially for the miners who worked at the coalface.
And at the centre of it all,
because William Thurmond was a strict Baptist,
as always, was the church.
Thurmond wanted everyone who moved to his town
to behave with the same religious propriety he expected from himself.
But as the town grew, this became increasingly difficult.
By the 1880s, a dozen mines were shipping coal
along the railroad through Thurmond.
And with the coal came supplies for the miners and railroad workers.
Food, clothing, equipment, tobacco,
and of course, girls.
Thurmond became notorious in the area for its saloons and brothels.
Needless to say, General Thurmond was not happy about this.
He was all in favour of modernity if it was good for business,
but not if it was good for sin.
He could ban liquor in Thurmond itself,
but just outside town, the good times rolled on.
It was the same problem right across America.
Industrialisation brought wealth, especially to employers,
but it also encouraged countless social evils.
Old-time religion was all that stood between America and moral collapse.
The church declared war on the greatest sin of all, liquor.
And preachers up and down the country took up the fight.
I am the sworn eternal uncompromising enemy of the liquor traffic.
I ask no quarter and I give none.
What means this assault against the 18th Amendment?
Oh, it's nothing under heaven but an attempt to bind and rivet
the old breweries and the old distilleries
around the neck of the American people for their own profit.
No preacher came bigger than Billy Sunday.
...and one billion five-hundred million dollars in revenue.
But where will it come from?
It'll come from the pockets of the poor devils
that drinks the stuff, of course.
A onetime professional baseball player,
he toured the country, railing against the evils of drink.
His theatrical style held millions spellbound.
He preached the gospel to more people than any other person in history
up to that point.
I'll kick it as long as I have a foot.
I'll punch it as long as I have a fist.
I'll butt it as long as I have a head. I'll bite it as long as I have a tooth.
(INAUDIBLE)
In his most famous sermon he thundered,
"I am the sworn enemy of liquor traffic.
"I will go on fighting that damn dirty rotten business
"with all the power at my command."
Billy Sunday made several tours of the mining towns of Appalachia,
sponsored by the mine owners.
For as well as temperance, Billy Sunday preached hard work
and obedience to the bosses.
He made little mention of the grinding poverty
and deadly working conditions that blighted the lives of the miners.
His message was much more concerned with the dangerous influence
of secular modernity.
Evolution, illicit sex, swearing, dancing, playing cards,
even reading novels were all sins to be resisted.
I'm sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals
and the perverts and the liberals and the leftists
and the Communists coming out of the closets.
It's times for God's people to come out of the closets,
out of the churches and change America. We must do it!
Sunday left a huge legacy in terms of what he had to say
and certainly how he said it.
Like him, Christian fundamentalists have used showbiz to thrill the flock
and damn the heathens who have been sending America to hell.
I'd like to challenge all of my friends watching by television,
and all of you here in this auditorium,
to do something for God and country.
Ministers like Jerry Falwell used the airwaves
to crusade against modern iniquities, abortion in particular.
Thank you. You may be seated.
What America needs more than anything else
is that God might one more time shed his grace on this great nation.
They also mobilised millions of the faithful
to go out and vote.
First for Ronald Reagan and then for George W Bush.
That way, they hoped to bring America back to the gospel.
...soul-winning, aggressive local church somewhere.
But in this election, everything has changed.
He has been ornery, arrogant,
and one day he called and he said, "I'm fed up, I'm ready to go."
Pastor Johnny Hunt of Woodstock, Atlanta
is one of the stars of the Mega-Church movement,
the fastest growing evangelical community.
I know of nobody that can deliver a man from sin but God's son,
the Lord Jesus Christ.
And I wanna stand flat-footed and boldly say
to God be the glory!
I am grateful for a saviour to preach that can set people free.
Mega-Church is basically a new phenomenon,
and people seem to be drawn more to a church.
Some are saying it's like a family
looking for what mall they're going to attend.
It's the one that offers the services they're looking for.
Like it or not, the terminology is people kind of shop for a church.
So it's a lifestyle choice for them, you think?
That's our desire, is to become so holistic
that whatever their spiritual or material,
physical need, maybe, emotional need,
we would like to think that we could help them.
HUNT: Often times, when I stand here and say
I'm grateful for you and I love all of you,
I would think that it would not be unreasonable,
periodically, for one of you to say,
"How can he say he loves us when he doesn't know us?"
Politically, Johnny is a social conservative,
vocal on issues like abortion and gay marriage.
My love for you is not contingent on me knowing you,
my love for you is based on my relationship with Jesus Christ.
- CONGREGATION: Amen. - The Bible says the love of God...
But he doesn't think the church should get so deeply involved
in electoral politics.
I don't believe the answer is in the White House.
I believe it's in our homes.
We're making the decisions. You can't legislate morality.
You can't pass laws to make people better.
But we feel like maybe... We almost look at a presidential candidate
sometimes as a saviour that can come and rescue our country,
when we really need to be rescued ourself.
That's what salvation is.
It literally means to be delivered or rescued.
So I think that Christ is the answer.
# Jesus is here, see His grace
WOMAN: # We need you, Jesus
This reluctance to shape elections may be because
evangelicals have been disappointed about what they've got
from Ronald Reagan and George W Bush.
# Send us your mercy
The legal right to abortion is still there
and there's still no prayer in schools.
# Jesus will find us
# If you love the Lord #
And it's also because they don't really trust John McCain,
a man who once described some evangelicals
as agents of intolerance.
In this election, it's the black church that's mobilised to change America.
They've done it twice before, to end slavery
and 40 years ago, to end segregation.
I don't think any white person can really understand
what it is to be a Negro in America.
Even though the law of the land says that a passenger can ride interstate
and participate in the lunchroom, waiting rooms and bathrooms,
that even though the law says this, everyone cannot,
particularly the Negro.
We want equal rights.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s
wouldn't have happened at all without the black church.
I want my freedom just like everybody else.
It may mean going to jail...
Many of its leaders had come up through that church.
Martin Luther King was a Baptist minister.
...that I will die standing up for the freedom of my people,
God has spoken to me.
Its fiery words came out of the pulpit,
its songs out of gospel music,
its hatred of segregation as un-Christian out of the Bible.
You can never whip these boys if you don't keep you and them separate.
You've got to keep the white and the black separate.
Pigment of skin isn't the problem.
The problem is that the Negro in this country today
stands for venereal disease, prostitution,
the numbers racket and crime.
Of all the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement,
there's one in particular who's always inspired me.
A deeply religious cotton picker from the Mississippi Delta,
Fannie Lou Hamer.
ALL: # Go tell it on the mountain
# Over the hills and everywhere
# Go tell it on the mountain
# To let my people go
This is Fannie Lou, with the amazing voice,
at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City in 1964.
# Just like the children of the Israelites
She's leading the protests on the boardwalk
outside the convention centre.
# Go tell it on the mountain #
Fannie Lou was protesting that every delegate at the convention
from her home state of Mississippi was white.
She had helped form an alternative party known as the Freedom Democrats
with her own delegates.
Fannie Lou demanded that the Freedom Democrats be regarded
as the only legitimate Mississippi delegation.
REPORTER: Will you identify yourself for us, please?
My name is Mrs Fannie Lou Hamer.
I'm the vice chairman of the Freedom Democrat Party.
Duncan, how about this? You going to seat this lady?
No, there are no seats there and I'm supposed...
She can stand
but I'm not suppose to let anybody through this aisle.
HAMER: To us, this is a closed society to us.
All we want is a chance to be a part of America.
Her chance came when she was invited to speak
to the party's credentials committee.
If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now,
I question America.
Is this America,
the land of the free and the home of the brave,
where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks
because our lives are being threatened daily
because we want to live as decent human beings in America?
I was there in Atlantic City that hot summer day in 1964.
I saw Fannie Lou Hamer.
I was a young reporter for a student magazine in England,
and when Fannie Lou walked in, it was extraordinary.
It was like someone from another world.
Her speech was full of a kind of tragic pain and defiance.
And no one who heard it will ever forget it, I think.
It changed America,
and called the country to a kind of reckoning.
Fannie Lou Hamer, the youngest of 20 children,
was born and raised in the Mississippi Delta.
Like most blacks in the Delta, her family were sharecroppers,
and she was forced to work in the cotton fields from the age of six
just to help them survive.
She married and stayed working on the plantations
until one day, in 1962, aged 44, she went to a church service
in her hometown of Ruleville.
It was her epiphany.
A civil rights activist was speaking that day,
and he inspired Fannie Lou by the way he linked
the gospel to social justice and freedom.
When he asked for volunteers to go to the courthouse
in nearby Indianola to register to vote,
Fannie Lou, who'd never been involved in politics,
was the first to raise her hand.
Charles McLaurin was a civil rights activist
who was leading the volunteers on the bus the following day.
McLAURIN: You know, people on the bus were...
These were people who were going to the courthouse to register to vote.
And it was dangerous, in a sense, to them
because many of these people had never been to the courthouse before
to register to vote.
You know, the courthouse represented power.
As in many southern states, Mississippi's deliberately complicated
procedures of registration had kept most blacks from the vote.
Of the 450,000 blacks of voting age in the state,
just 7,000 were actually registered.
(INAUDIBLE)
On that day, their attempts to register were rejected.
So they got on the bus and headed back to Ruleville.
And that's when they were stopped by the police.
Their offence, impersonating a school bus.
It was deemed too yellow.
All the while that bus is sitting there,
trucks are driving by with white men in them and guns,
and they are saying things like, "Niggers, you gonna get killed.
"Niggers, you shouldn't... There ain't gonna be no niggers votin'."
And they are hanging out of the windows and just gesturing toward us.
So then as we're sitting there and all worried,
a church song just kind of eases out of somebody.
And somebody on the bus said, "That's Fannie Lou."
You know, when she starts to sing,
now they're looking to her for inspiration.
They're looking to her now to help calm them,
make them feel good.
- Was it a big deep voice or... - No, no, it was not.
- No, it was smooth. - Smooth.
I mean, it was... You remember I mentioned it just kind of eased out.
And then it come out and then it rises softly, sweetly.
I mean, she was deep.
I think that was the beauty about her,
was that she made you feel what she felt.
I... I'll never forget her.
So began a career as a civil rights activist
that would inspire millions.
MAN: Roll 30, sound 19.
Fannie Lou would be shot at,
imprisoned, beaten up, but nothing would stop her.
But then, that's what she thought happened to people
who believed in the gospel.
There were saints and martyrs for every age, including her own.
She changed a lot of American minds with the unbeatable force of faith.
Fannie Lou never had any children of her own.
But her adopted daughter, Vergie, still lives near the Delta.
She was a very powerful woman when it come to the word of God
because her father was a minister.
She was raised up, you know, with God.
And you couldn't get it no better than that.
Because she believed in Him, she constantly prayed,
she constantly read her Bible.
And she constantly spoke verses of the Bible.
Did Fannie Lou sing at home?
She sung at home, she sung at church,
she sung in the fields. Wherever, she was singing.
- Can you remember any particular songs? - I remember all her songs.
She loved This Little Light of Mine and Go Tell It on the Mountain.
And then she would sing songs to us that Grandmamma had taught her,
and she'd sing them to us and now I sing them to my grandchildren.
I've passed it on, you know.
But her favourite song was This Little Light of Mine,
and it would go...
# This little light of mine
# I'm gonna let it shine
# This little light of mine
# I'm gonna let it Let it shine
# This little light of mine
# I'm gonna let it shine
# Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine #
She loved it, that one.
And then she would do Go Tell It on the Mountain.
# Go tell it on the mountain
# Over the hills and everywhere
# Go tell it on the mountain
# To let my people go #
Fannie Lou never did succeed in replacing the all-white delegation.
But she did wake America up.
Mr Speaker, Mr President, members of the Congress,
I speak tonight for the dignity of man
and the destiny of democracy.
The following year,
Lyndon Johnson introduced the voting Rights Act in Congress,
which finally outlawed racist voting practices.
Many of the issues of civil rights are very complex and most difficult.
But about this there can and should be no argument.
Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote.
(PEOPLE APPLAUDING)
And what a difference that has made for today.
- Hey, my brother. - What's going on? How you doing?
Hey, sweetie.
Activists like Mark Anthony Green
don't have to fight for the right to vote.
They're campaigning to elect an African-American to the White House.
- What's going on? - What's up?
- How you doing, sir? - Fine. How are you?
- Good, you gonna vote tomorrow? - Yes, I am.
Who you gonna vote for?
GREEN: Less than 40 years ago, Barack Obama
would have been considered less than human to a lot of Americans.
Less than a hundred years ago, you know,
it wasn't necessarily illegal to kill them in certain areas.
They weren't considered human beings,
they weren't considered something that was made from God.
- How are you? - I'm good. How are you?
Great, great, great. Are you gonna vote tomorrow?
And God is never very far away from Mark Anthony's thoughts.
Would you agree that it's God's will for him to become a president?
That's what I'm saying now, that I know...
Me being out here today and me pulling for Obama
and me, you know, organising this and going so hard
is simply because I know that he won't get elected
and God's will will not be done unless we all step up.
And you can either sit back and be one of those that hope...
And in the Bible, it speaks a lot about hope,
but it also speaks about action.
And you have to have those that are quick to, you know,
that are quick to do God's will, quick to put something into action.
I mean, faith and freedom mattered in the 1800s,
and then they mattered again in Martin Luther King's day and in civil rights.
And that's also part of its importance to you?
- It is. It definitely is. - Yeah.
I honestly feel like there's something special about this man,
that God wants him to change the demographic of our country.
(ALL CHEERING)
(INAUDIBLE)
So this year, the fervent call to save America
has gone out from the liberal side, the Democrats.
John McCain is doing his best to win back the evangelicals.
He hopes his choice of running mate will have them flocking to the polls.
But it's Barack Obama who talks of redemption.
It's okay, it's true, I talk about hope, Pastor.
I talk about it a lot,
because the odds of me standing here today
are so small, so remote,
that I couldn't have gotten here without some hope.
Obama may have come from the history of the black church,
the church of slavery, the church of the Civil Rights Movement,
but now he's reaching out to the rest of America.
His message brings together the two great themes
of America's religious history,
the passion of belief
and the zeal for freedom.