Season 1

As the U.N. adopts the Declaration of Human Rights, South Africa heads in the opposite direction and implements apartheid. A mass movement is born, then crushed, and Nelson Mandela is jailed for life. The future of the movement is now on the shoulders of Oliver Tambo, who escapes into exile and begins a 30-year journey to engage the world in the struggle to bring democracy to South Africa.

Tambo is sent abroad to run the ANC after it is banned in South Africa in 1960. This episode traces Tambo's efforts to bring the injustice of apartheid to the world's attention. He insists that the apartheid regime can be brought to the negotiating table if the governments would sanction and isolate South Africa, which economically and culturally depends on its links to the western world.

Youth in South Africa and around the world are next to join the growing movement against apartheid, and the brutal suppression of a youth uprising in Soweto galvanizes public support for sanctions against South Africa.

African Americans alter U.S. foreign policy for the first time in history, successfully pressuring the U.S. to impose sanctions and politically isolate Pretoria.

An exploration of the complex and fascinating drama of the anti-apartheid movement in one of South Africa's most important allies, the United States. The US is a key battleground, with African-Americans at the center of the struggle.

International grassroots campaigns against Polaroid, Shell, Barclay’s, General Motors, and others doing business in South Africa economically isolate the apartheid regime and become the first successful efforts to use economic pressure to help bring down a government.

An uprising in South Africa becomes the final blow in the cumulative world effort to topple apartheid. Nelson Mandela becomes a household name as the campaign to free him ignites a worldwide crusade.