America Beyond the Color... Episodes

Part 2 of four. Harvard profesor Henry Louis Gates Jr. explores the plight of the black underclass as he visits two Chicago housing projects and Cook County Jail. Among the people he meets: a young man who takes home $600 a month working in a fast-food restaurant who tells Gates that he could make $6000 a day selling drugs. “They say it takes a village to raise a child,” Jesse Jackson says. “Sick villages raise sick children.” But when Gates meets with graduates of an inner-city high school, his tone changes. “Education,” he asserts, “is the blackest thing we can do.”