MPR News Presents

To mark the 55th anniversary of the day President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act, hear a personal and impassioned televised speech he gave to Congress, often remembered as his "We shall overcome" speech.

Have our courts – intended by America’s founders to be an independent arbiter of justice – turned into another political battlefield? Are today’s judges mere “politicians in robes?” The appointment of judges looms large as we head toward Election Day. This program reconstructs the wild history of how we got into this dilemma, which has left bitter feelings on all sides.

Marketplace Tech’s Molly Wood shares how current innovations might help us transition to our post-pandemic future and how the crisis has underscored the inequity in internet access.

Before the civil rights movement, African Americans were largely barred from white-dominated institutions of higher education. And so Black Americans, and their white supporters, founded their own schools, known as Historically Black Colleges and Universities. In this documentary, we hear first-person testimony from students about why they chose an HBCU; and we travel to an HBCU that’s in the process of reinventing itself wholesale.

Before the civil rights movement, African Americans were largely barred from white-dominated institutions of higher education. And so Black Americans, and their white supporters, founded their own schools, known as Historically Black Colleges and Universities. In this documentary, we hear first-person testimony from students about why they chose an HBCU; and we travel to an HBCU that’s in the process of reinventing itself wholesale.

APM Reports documentary, “Covid on Campus.” Coronavirus disrupts higher education, magnifies inequities and accelerates change.

BBC documentary about sports and society: The Most Important, Least Important Thing

NPR coverage of Monday’s ceremony at the U.S. Capitol for the late congressman John R. Lewis.

With the COVID-19 pandemic underway, and a lot more of our lives lived in the digital world, Sherry Turkle was invited by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to share her insights on this world that seems turned upside down.

Humankind documentary, “The Right to Vote: a history of voting rights in America,” explores the long and controversial history of America's decisions about who gets to vote.