Shares the story of Sarah Roberts and her 1847 case petitioning that she be allowed to attend a white school, explaining how her heroic efforts established key precedents and paved the way for civil rights advancements.

In 1954, one of the most significant Supreme Court decisions of the twentieth Century aimed to end school segregation in the United States. Although known as Brown v. Board of Education, the ruling applied not just to the case of Linda Carol Brown, an African American third grader refused entry to an all-white Topeka, Kansas school, but to cases involving children in South Carolina, Delaware, Virginia, and Washington, DC. Here is the story of the...

The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides that "No State shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Yet many state universities give preferences to members of certain races and groups when deciding whom to admit. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court approved such preferences but only in specific circumstances...

In 2007, the first Arabic language public school in the U.S. opened in New York City, generating a tidal wave of controversy. This program follows the Khalil Gibran International Academy's turbulent beginnings; the political firestorm that culminated in the resignation of Debbie Almontaser, the academy's founding principal; and Almontaser's legal battle to get her job back. The compelling narrative combines news clips, interviews with key players...

Danger in a book lies in the eye of the censor. This program hosted by Alberto Manguel takes a broad look at forbidden reading through examples of people willing to risk grave civil and criminal penalties in order to be heard: Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin, who writes in hiding due to an Islamic sentence of death; Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas, whose video posts of police brutality have drawn intense governmental scrutiny; Danish cartoonist Kurt...

In 2003, the Wide Angle program Time for School profiled children in seven countries-Afghanistan, Benin, Brazil, India, Japan, Kenya, and Romania-as they started their first year of school, often in the face of great adversity. Three years later this Wide Angle episode returns to visit each child, updating the progress of their educational and personal development. The similarities and contrasts that emerge among the lives of these young people provide...