Did You Know?
The series was unavailable from 1995-2006 due to copyright issues. Licenses for "Happy Birthday", news footage, various photographs, songs and lyrics used in the film expired in 1995, and the film Company Blackside could not afford to renew these licenses. A grant from the Ford Foundation enabled them to renew the licenses. The series was rebroadcast and released to DVD in October, 2006.
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The segment about the murder of Medger Evers states that Evers' killer has never been brought to justice. In 1989, a few years after this documentary was made, attorney Bobby DeLaughter reopened the murder case and brought Evers' killer Byron de la Beckwith (who had been tried twice resulting in a hung jury) to trial for the murder. Beckwith was convicted and sentence to life in prison. He died in prison of heart failure in 2001. (These events were dramatized in _Ghosts of Mississippi (1996)_.)
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