Shane: The world we inhabit... [Siren blares] it's a funny thing.

We're so caught up in it... [Bird chirps] it's rare that we stop to consider... [Loon calls] just how strange it is.

The way things are made, shipped, bought, and sold around the world, the way we grow our crops and clothe our bodies, the way we elect our leaders, and even the DNA inside our cells... [Singers vocalizing] They're all the products of choices we've made.

They're all a part of the human footprint, and sometimes, they're all tied together by a single thread.

We often think of the human footprint as something that happens to the planet.

But the Earth plays a role in defining our destinies, too.

Here in the American South, a primeval ocean reached across the eons and laid the foundation for an industry that shaped everything about the place I come from and even who I am.

This is the human footprint... of cotton.

Welcome to the age of humans... where one species can change everything, and what we do reveals who we truly are.

This is "Human Footprint."

[Singers vocalize] Archival narrator: Cotton was such an important part of the plantation system that it came to be called King Cotton.

Shane: As an African American from the South, the sight of cotton fields brings up complicated feelings about the past... [Film projector whirring] but until now, I've never really confronted that history.

♪ Man: Cotton's a magical plant, man.

It really is.

It looks like--just like a regular rose, but then turns into this magical cotton right here.

Yeah, I mean this is a-- it's a beautiful thing to wake up to.

My family had the first tract that was, like, down the street from here.

Then my great-grandfather was a part of acquisition of this farmland, and my granddaddy bought a little bit that was around here, so just been growing out bit by bit.

Shane: This is Julius Tillery, a high school math teacher and fifth-generation cotton farmer.

Sean Combs, Ma$e: ♪ Can't nobody take my pride ♪ Shane: In the industry, people call him the Puff Daddy of Cotton.

Combs and Ma$e: ♪ I got to keep on movin' ♪ Shane: How did you come across this name?

Julius: Well, I'm a big fan of Puff Daddy and what he did with Bad Boy... Uh-huh.

and I feel like I remixed cotton.

[Both laugh] OK.

I invented the remix of cotton.

Ha ha ha!

OK, OK. Shane: There aren't a lot of Black cotton farmers left, so when Julius isn't teaching or working his crop, he's using social media to hype cotton to a new generation.

[Text chimes repeating] Julius: You got to plant at a certain time when the weather's right, 'cause cotton don't like cold weather.

Nature's gonna nature.

You know, I live my life by that motto.

Nature is gonna nature.

So, these cotton bolls here, right?

The plant develops this, like, green, and then, like, midway through the year, these flowers start developing, right?

But once the flower develops fully, then it turns into a hard boll, and then the boll opens up and this is when the cotton comes out.

So when you have your cotton combine, and it really strips the cotton right off of the boll, and they run it through a cotton gin, and that basically takes out the seeds and give it, like, a little clean.

Do you have a favorite, like, season, like, when it comes to planting?

My favorite part of the cotton process is probably harvesting... Oh, really?

because that's the part you make money on.

Ha ha!

You know, when you're planting seeds, you're spending money.

Yeah.

When you're maintaining your crop, you're spending money... Yeah.

but when you're harvesting, you actually might make some money... Yeah.

Ha ha!

So that's probably my favorite part 'cause it's all work.

OK. Shane: When the harvest here is good, it's really good.

Julius' farm sits squarely in the so-called Black Belt, a swath of more than 600 counties across 11 Southern states, where cotton flourishes.

Shane: Like, what is it about...the Deep South that, like, makes it good for cotton specifically?

Our soil, it's nutrient-filled.

It gets the nutrients to the soil plant a little better than other areas as well.

Shane: If you want to understand cotton, or really anything about the South, the story is in the soil.

It's a story that started tens of millions of years ago.

Shane: Exactly what is it that I'm looking at here?

Yeah, you're seeing a million and a half years here.

Wow.

That's a lot of history.

Shane: This is biological oceanographer Craig McClain.

Think of a ridiculously oversized roadside attraction and, well, Craig's probably taken a selfie with it... but in his day job, Craig studies some of the smallest creatures in the ocean.

Shane: So, quite frankly, like, you know, when I look at this, honestly, I mostly just see rock.

So let's go back to about 135 million years ago.

[Dinosaur growls] Craig: And so we're at the beginning of the Cretaceous Period.

So at this time, you know, the climate's warm, and so the polar ice caps are melted.

This was all what we call shallow seas.

OK, so the Gulf, like, it extended much farther inland back then.

That's right.

Oh, very much so.

OK. We would be a couple of hundred feet underwater, and it was also a much warmer Earth than it is now... OK. and so, that caused a lot of, like, plankton production in the waters near the coast.

Shane: And among those plankton were microscopic algae with calcium carbonate shells.

There are so many of them that the zooplankton-- that they can't eat them fast enough, so a lot of it is just sinking to the sea floor.

Shane: Over millions of years, layer upon layer of those tiny shells were compressed under their own weight into chalk, a type of limestone.

Shane: We're moving from the bottom up, we're going from the past to the present?

That is right, so every foot that you see there is about 18,000 years.

So if this is about 80 feet, then we're seeing about a million and a half years of the deposition of these tiny plant skeletons, actually, millions and billions of them, and packed tight, yeah.

Yeah, over millions of years.

Over millions of years.

OK. Basically, what we're looking at is a massive graveyard.

OK. OK.

It's the ghost of oceans past, essentially.

Shane: Here in Alabama, the Tombigbee River carves its way through the chalk, exposing the geology that underlies the entire Black Belt.

What happens here is this is so packed and so dense that it doesn't allow water to drain out of this.

Shane: After the Cretaceous seas retreated, this region became grasslands.

And for millions of years, decomposing plants and the nutrients they contained built up on top of the chalk layer.

The result?

A band of super-productive soils that traces the ancient coastline.

Craig: That is what's known as the Black Belt because of these dark, rich, organic soils that are now at the surface... OK. and have led to plant and crop production.

There is a lot more cotton production, and it could be 10 to 20 times greater than the adjacent counties outside of this region, and so that meant that there was more enslaved people to work those plantations in those areas.

Mm-hmm.

It's kinda hard to wrap my head around, thinking about, you know, the events of African American history being shaped by, like, deposits of millions of years of dead microorganisms.

That's crazy.

Shane: The planet may have set the stage for what would happen next, but the story of cotton was written by people and the decisions they made.

[Insects chirping] ♪ [Line ringing] [Click] Man: Hello?

Hey, Sven.

How's it going, man?

Good, good, good.

How are you, Shane?

Shane: This is Harvard historian Sven Beckert.

He enjoys life's simple pleasures, like a good espresso, but even on sabbatical in Florence, Italy, Sven can't stop thinking about the roots of global capitalism.

He's written an award-winning book on the subject, and at the heart of the story is cotton.

Yeah, so one of the things that you mention in your book is that, you know, cotton is so...ubiquitous as to be invisible.

You walk into a store, and you can buy a T-shirt for a few dollars, you can buy a pair of jeans for a few more dollars.

You know, it's almost like the air we breathe.

But this white, fluffy fiber, once we start looking into its history, that allows us to understand how the world in which we live in today came into being, with all of its possibilities and with all of its problems.

Shane: Humanity's history with cotton runs deep.

Sven: People need food, but then next, they need clothing.

Shane: Humans have grown, spun, and woven cotton for thousands of years, but global demand spiked in the 1700s, when key innovations in Britain made it possible to manufacture cotton fabrics at an industrial scale.

By the late 18th century, the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue-- present-day Haiti-- was the world's top producer of raw cotton.

But in 1791, enslaved African workers revolted and overthrew the government, essentially bringing cotton production to a halt and creating an economic opportunity for the new United States of America.

The moment when cotton comes to the United States and when the United States becomes important to cotton is the early 1790s.

Shane: Just two years after the Haitian Revolution, American inventor Eli Whitney designed the first mechanical cotton gin, a machine that could process cotton 50 times more efficiently than a human worker.

Whitney genuinely believed his invention would reduce the demand for slave labor, but the efficiency of the cotton gin actually made cotton far more profitable, fueling the expansion of the plantation system across the South, particularly on the ancient coastline that formed the Black Belt.

Sven: The United States had a very large quantity of land on which cotton could be grown, and then it also had a very large number of enslaved workers that could be forced to engage in cotton agriculture.

In the United States, planters, they were politically very powerful, and so they could deploy the federal government to both remove Indigenous people and also to force enslaved Africans to work in cotton agriculture.

This is the moment, then, that the United States becomes the most important producer of raw cotton for global market and the most important supplier of raw cotton to European industry.

Shane: The stories of the enslaved people whose labor powered this industry are recorded in bits and pieces in written and oral histories.

But the legacy of slavery is also written into our very DNA.

[Distant car horn honks] Man: "Ancestry" is kind of a vague term, because if we go far enough back, we all have the same ancestor.

Shane: Steven Micheletti is a geneticist at the consumer genetic testing company 23andMe.

He's also the proud owner of Buttercup, a type of desert iguana called a chuckwalla.

Wu-Tang Clan: ♪ Like Number 4 the Lizard ♪ Shane: We could've spent all day talking about lizards, but that's not what I was here for.

Steven: I started off my career looking at, actually, reptiles and amphibians before moving on to fish, then moving on to humans.

[Chuckling] That's a pretty big jump.

Yeah.

What prompted the change?

I started studying migrations using population genetics, and that brought me here, where we have the opportunity, using, you know, a lot of study participants' data, to look at these widespread migrations across the continents.

Shane: When people move from place to place, they take their DNA with them and pass it on to their children, so researchers like Steven can use DNA to explore human migrations, like the forced migration of the slave trade.

We were interested in studying Africa because we knew this was going to be impactful for many people.

Shane: For a lot of Black Americans, myself included, it's hard to know exactly where our ancestors came from, how they got here, and when.

Steve: So there's a database that keeps track of these records and actually tells us where enslaved people were being taken from Africa, and where they were being brought to in the Americas, and these are very detailed records.

Shane: But our genes can tell us stories that aren't recorded anywhere else.

To understand the history that's written into our DNA, Steven searches for the genetic links between 23andMe's research participants and their distant relatives living in Africa and around the world.

Close family members have a lot of DNA that is identical, so it's easy to figure out the relationship between two closely related people.

But with technology today, we can actually go further down the family tree.

Now we can actually infer these distant relationships that occurred 400 to 500 years ago.

Shane: Genetic data from 50,000 research participants revealed patterns that, in many cases, supported written histories of the transatlantic slave trade.

If we focus specifically on the historical records, we know that the primary source of enslaved people was West Central Africa, where 5.7 million individuals were taken.

If we look on the genetic side, we see that most people living in the Americas have genetic connections to West Central Africa... Uh-huh.

so that's pretty intuitive.

More people were being taken from West Central Africa, more people in the Americas today have genetic connections to that region.

Shane: But the genetic data also show that the transatlantic slave trade was only part of the story.

Importing enslaved people from Africa was outlawed in 1808, but slavery continued, supported by a domestic slave trade, through which more than a million enslaved people were forced to migrate from the Upper South-- states like Virginia and Maryland-- to the Deep South, where cotton was booming, and that left a signature in the DNA, too.

Steven: The group of people that were impacted the most were the Igbo from Nigeria; probably, as a result, we see that a lot of African Americans today have connections to the Igbo people.

They have a lot of Nigerian ancestry.

Shane: Most Black Americans also have some ancestry from Europe, and the details paint a troubling picture.

In general, genetic males have an X and a Y chromosome, and genetic females have two X chromosomes.

Mm-hmm.

So we can look specifically at ancestry on these sex chromosomes to determine where the maternal or paternal line originated from.

OK. And one of the disturbing things we found is, in most cases, people of African descent have a European paternal line and an African maternal line.

Mm.

And over 60% of people taken from Africa were men, yet we're seeing this... female bias in people today.

Mm-hmm.

What story does this tell us?

It tells us about exploitation of enslaved African women, and it tells us that, to be blunt, they were being raped.

We wouldn't see this pattern any other way, and we know that slavers were taking advantage of enslaved women.

These genetic data confirm it.

Shane: And centuries later, millions of us still carry the evidence of our ancestors' trauma in our DNA.

Elsewhere in the Americas, the genetic patterns are different, but equally troubling.

Steven: In the United States, people have more African ancestry, smaller female sex bias, because they were segregated.

In Latin America, there's a larger female sex bias and less African ancestry because they were attempting to, essentially, breed out the African portions of people's genome.

Yeah.

And we know that governments in Latin America-- Cuba is an example of this-- were actually funding the immigration of Europeans into their nations with the goal to, in their words, "dilute the Black race," so they wanted people to be lighter over generations.

And it differed from the United States' outlook at the time, which was to segregate people of dark skin.

Mm-hmm.

So two different racist ideologies led to different patterns.

Shane: For Steven, delving into his own family's DNA came with some unsettling discoveries, too.

Let's start by looking at the ancestry composition report, and this is actually for my grandfather, who recently passed away.

We found that his maternal haplogroup, which is his maternal genetic line, actually assigned directly to this L3F1B.

This is uncommon among 23andMe customers, but we know that it's very frequent in African populations.

And for me, what this means is-- I--I know his grandparents came from the Carolinas-- it's likely that, somewhere along the line in--in our family history, we--we had a slave owner, and at some point, they reproduced with, likely, an African enslaved woman... Mm-hmm.

and we have African DNA in our genome because of this.

Now, when you--when you saw these results, like, does it sort of... does it change your-- your understanding of--of yourself in any way?

This is telling the tale of my--my family's history that I didn't know about, and... it's--it is deeply disturbing.

Um, I--I welcome diversity in my genome, I think that's great; I just don't... like how it got there.

Yeah, yeah.

I can...yeah, I can understand that.

Shane: Our identities certainly aren't determined by our genes alone, but they're not disconnected from our genes, either.

That's--I mean, one of the things that drew me to science in the first place, like, this idea of, like, reading the story of DNA--it's just, like, a very powerful idea to me, something that just, like, really captivated me and still captivates me today, but there's something a lot more intimate and personal, you know, about talking about the genetic and biological legacy of...you know, slavery in the U.S., and all of those things are intertwined, right, both culturally, but literally intertwined in the fundamental building blocks that make up my cells.

It's just closer, you know?

It's... like, this part of the human footprint... is me, which is not something that I think about a lot.

♪ From the shores of an ancient ocean to the DNA in my cells today... cotton is the thread connecting so much in the South.

By 1860, cotton alone represented half of all U.S. exports, and it was reshaping the world in profound ways.

Sven: For one, it launched the Industrial Revolution; second, it led to a radical reconstruction of the global countryside, of agriculture; and third, it created the kind of globalized economy that we live in today.

Shane: In this new global economy, raw materials were produced at a massive scale with enslaved labor, shipped to industrial hubs for processing and manufacturing, and eventually sold around the world.

In an effort to preserve this economy and their place at its center, Southern states seceded from the Union in 1861, sparking the Civil War.

After 4 bloody years, the collapse of the Confederacy and the emancipation of enslaved people in the South could have ended the reign of King Cotton, but they didn't.

Sven: The devastations of the war and the effects of emancipation in 1865 have an impact on the amount of cotton that's being grown in the American South, but by--I think, by 1870 or 1872, already, cotton production in the American South is again where it was in 1859, before the Civil War, and then it continues-- Oh, really?

Yeah, and then it continues to grow very significantly for the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th century.

Shane: Despite the end of slavery, cotton continued to thrive.

The industry was still built on the backs of African Americans, now laboring as sharecroppers and tenant farmers instead of slaves.

Sven: The planters in the American South, they lose the war, but they retain access to the land, they find a way of organizing economic, social, and political life in the South that enables them to still retain significant control of now-freed African Americans.

Shane: That control wouldn't begin to slip until the seemingly invincible empire of cotton finally started to crumble.

In the early decades of the 20th century, an unexpected newcomer brought the industry to its knees and changed the South forever.

A Tribe Called Quest: ♪ Buggin' out, buggin' out ♪ Shane: So what happens in this room?

Man: We use this room to rear insects.

Is the boll weevil one of the species that gets reared here?

We wouldn't want the boll weevil to get out again, so we don't rear any boll weevil here.

So there's no live boll weevil?

There hasn't been a live boll weevil that we know of in North Carolina for 24 years.

Shane: Dominic Reisig didn't singlehandedly take out the boll weevil, but given his skills in a traditional Japanese martial art, he probably could have.

[Sword whooshing] A self-proclaimed "nerdy entomologist," Dominic is passionate about insect pests, and few insects have been as pesky as the boll weevil.

Shane: I've heard a lot about this boll weevil and its impacts.

I have never actually seen a boll weevil.

That's a good thing.

OK. Ha ha!

My understanding is that you actually have a specimen.

Yes.

Shane: There are certain insects that are so problematic, so devastating to our economies, that we don't want them alive anywhere, not even in a lab, so we keep them like this.

If you move the stereoscope up and down, you can see the patterning on its body, the little hairs that it has.

It's really pretty.

Wow.

That's such an unassuming little thing.

It is very pretty when you take a look at it... Yeah.

like, up close.

Yeah.

The last thing you think of is, like, economic destruction.

Yeah.

Shane: From its native home in Mexico, the boll weevil first appeared in Texas in 1892.

From there, it spread like wildfire through the Black Belt.

Dominic: So you essentially had a sea of cotton from Texas all the way up into southeastern Virginia, so it was really easy for the boll weevil to move across the United States where cotton was growing.

Shane: Basically, once it arrived, it was literally cotton heaven... Yeah.

and it just went to work.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Cotton heaven, yeah.

It was ripe for exploitation.

Shane: And that's what the boll weevil did.

In just 30 years, boll weevils had spread across the entire Black Belt.

County by county, cotton production dropped by an average of 50% in the first 5 years after weevils arrived.

The boll weevil was so destructive that it motivated many of the pest control strategies that we still use in agriculture today.

The way that we spray insecticides now came out of boll weevil.

Shane: And it wasn't just the South.

The boll weevil created ripple effects that reshaped the entire country.

Dominic: So the cattle moved east, the economy went south, and the poor people went north.

Mm.

And they're referring to the Great Migration, where all these African Americans were brought in, enslaved, mostly lived in the Southern U.S.

The economy went bad, they moved to the Northern U.S. Shane: With the cotton industry reeling from the boll weevil, many African Americans left the South to start new lives in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West.

Ultimately, this exodus would involve 6 million people.

Dominic: So that obviously had a huge effect on the United States.

It's so humbling to think that a little beetle can come in and cause so much upheaval... Mm.

in our society.

Shane: The South would never be the same.

But folks here in Enterprise, Alabama think that's a good thing.

Here, the boll weevil is a damn icon.

Pete Seeger: ♪ Boll weevil, he's a little black bug ♪ ♪ From Mexico, they say-- ♪ [Music changes abruptly] Ying Yang Twins: ♪ On the streets, I'm a legend ♪ ♪ In my hood, I'm a star ♪ ♪ On the streets, I'm a legend ♪ ♪ In my hood, I'm a star ♪ ♪ On the streets, I'm a legend ♪ ♪ In my hood, I'm a star ♪ ♪ On the streets, I'm a legend ♪ ♪ In my hood, I'm a star ♪ [Bell rings] Man: I would like to order the Boll Weevil Special.

I am also going to go with the Boll Weevil Special.

When in Rome, as they say.

Here we go, sir.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Man: It's good-tasting.

My grandboys love it.

Oh, yeah?

My great-grandboys love it even more.

[Both laugh] See, every generation, it gets more and more delicious.

Yes, it does.

Shane: LaPonce Harrison is a local historian with deep roots here in Enterprise and a known-about-town singing voice that won him a leading role in a play about--you guessed it... LaPonce: ♪ Come on, put your cotton sack on ♪ ♪ Y'all come on ♪ Shane: ...the boll weevil.

Man: ♪ There goes the neighborhood ♪ Shane: Do you have any... memories of the boll weevil?

Yes, I do.

We would go and pick cotton, and I actually experienced the boll weevil on my cotton sack, on my hands, on my arms.

You would knock them off-- they didn't bite--and it was always fascinating with that little thing sticking out in the front.

Yeah, that little proboscis.

Heh heh!

Yes, in the front there.

They didn't bother humans.

Mm.

But they was devastating to cotton.

It would bore a hole into that green cotton boll before it opened.

Once they bored a hole in it... Game over.

Game over.

What did Enterprise look like before the boll weevil?

The main income, the cash crop, was cotton.

The boll weevil came and devastated this place.

Mm.

It devastated the rich, the poor, and in-betweens.

Shane: But then, something unexpected happened.

LaPonce: The turning point, the people of Enterprise listened to Dr.

Carver and those who had the agricultural ability to teach and to share.

Man: ♪ George Washington Carver made the peanut great ♪ ♪ Showed any man what the mind could create ♪ Shane: The agricultural scientist George Washington Carver could see how decades of cotton production had depleted the rich soils of the Black Belt.

He promoted crop rotation, using crops like peanuts and sweet potatoes to restore the soil and provide food and income to farmers even if cotton crops failed.

These diversified farms wouldn't be as vulnerable to the likes of the boll weevil.

They listened to his advice, and the-- it brought the city back, and this is some of the reason that I believe the city is called the City of Progress, because they see how much it progressed by listening and taking good advice.

Shane: So the boll weevil brought ruin to Enterprise, but in a roundabout way, it also sparked a revival.

Today, the boll weevil's become the town mascot... [Record scratches] and some of these things you just can't un-see.

[Hip-hop music playing] So the boll weevil sounds like it's a symbol of triumph over adversity.

LaPonce: Yes, it is a symbol of diversity over adversity.

Mm-hmm.

OK.

Yes.

Ha ha ha!

I like that.

Yes.

Shane: Yet even as Enterprise bounced back from the boll weevil, the Great Migration continued.

African Americans headed north, carrying with them a vibrant, resilient culture born under slavery and Jim Crow, and moving to beats, rhythms, and melodies that would change the world.

LaPonce: ♪ In the water ♪ ♪ God's gonna trouble the water ♪ [Distant car horn honks] [Guitar playing] [Record scratches] ♪ Producer: 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Shane beatboxing] [Hip-hop music playing] Man: The records are like time capsules.

They're stories, and you can listen to these stories, and they're exposed when you put the needle to the groove, you know what I'm saying?

Shane: Mm, it seems like you're doing more than collecting music; it's like you're collecting history.

[Engine turns over, revs] Shane: Adrian Younge is a hip-hop legend.

From his 1960s Mercedes, to his custom-made suits, to the way he records music, all on old analog machines, the dude is committed to authenticity.

Oh, and he also composed the music for this show.

Adrian: We are hip-hop, right?

Shane: Yeah.

That's our culture.

That's our lifestyle.

The music led the charge.

Shane: In his barbershop-meets- record-store-meets-studio, Adrian celebrates the past, present, and future of Black music.

[Record scratches] Adrian: When we look at the evolution of Black music, we look at Blacks coming to America, still remembering their rhythm, but not having the drum to play.

Shane: Enslaved people brought rich, diverse musical traditions with them from Africa, but on most plantations, music was forbidden.

One exception was in worship.

Adrian: We're assimilating into a brand-new culture.

We are now becoming these Christians.

Mm-hmm.

And we're singing these psalms.

These psalms start turning into Negro spirituals.

These are communal songs that are very specific to the Black experience.

Mm.

And these are the roots of Black American music.

Shane: When enslaved Black folks were emancipated, this music they'd created was also liberated from the church, and it took a new turn.

Adrian: And a lot of Blacks didn't want to do the Negro spirituals anymore.

Mm.

Blues is a kind of secular music that is personal... Mm.

and talks about your problems in life.

Shane: Problems like the oppression of the South and the collapse of the cotton industry from the boll weevil.

Adrian: Blacks began to migrate in droves.

I mean, 6 million people, gone... Mm.

Going to the North, going to the Midwest to going to places like California, and changing culture where they went.

Shane: As the Black experience evolved, so did Black music.

Adrian: So what started happening in the 20th century is that Blacks started to study Western scales... Mm.

and we started breaking all that apart.

Shane: From work songs and folk to the blues and jazz, Black Americans were forging new sounds that would become the soundtrack not just of Black culture, but of a new American identity.

And while Black people fought barriers in education, business, and politics, Black music began to reach new audiences across the country.

♪ Meal barrels empty, crops burnt to the ground ♪ ♪ Great God A-Mighty, folks feeling bad, lost everything they ever had ♪ Adrian: Then, we started getting into rock.

[Guitar playing] Sister Rosetta Tharpe: ♪ Tell me, didn't it rain... ♪ Adrian: We had Sister Rosetta Tharpe banging on the guitar, killing it, literally selling out stadiums.

Mm-hm.

But she wasn't getting played on white radio.

Then you have Elvis playing her songs and blowin' the hell up.

Shane: Suddenly, new audiences were finding Black music through white performers who brought it into the mainstream.

Over time, people began to realize that a lot of the music they loved had emerged from the Black experience.

Music is the universal language.

The moving molecules in the air does something to us.

People listen to music and there's an understanding.

Shane: And that understanding, it didn't just bring people together.

It helped build the foundation for a revolution.

Adrian: For centuries, our institutions were telling us that we were inferior.

Our music helped to dispel this theory because we're fighting.

Now, our marching music, it's not the military drum.

Mm.

It's Sam Cooke singing.

Sam Cooke: ♪ You, you, you send me ♪ Adrian: It's Charlie Parker playing his horn.

It's James Brown saying, "I'm Black and I'm proud."

James Brown: ♪ Say it loud ♪ Backup singers: ♪ I'm Black and I'm proud!

♪ Adrian: That's how music helped to galvanize and provide energy... Mm.

to our civil rights movement.

It's the message.

Mm.

James Brown: ♪ Hey ♪ Shane: By the 1960s, that message started to break through as the civil rights movement gained momentum across the South.

James Brown: ♪ Say it loud ♪ Backup singers: ♪ I'm Black and I'm proud!

♪ James Brown: ♪ Heh!

Say it loud ♪ Backup singers: ♪ I'm Black and I'm proud!

♪ James Brown: ♪ Lordy, Lordy, Lordy ♪ [Camera shutter clicks] Shane: And here in the heart of the Black Belt-- Selma, Alabama--the fight for equal rights reached a climax on a March day in 1965 that the world now knows as Bloody Sunday.

TV news anchor: The President referred to the events in Selma as an American tragedy, and throughout the nation, there were marches through the streets... Shane: But apart from where it happened, what's the connection between Bloody Sunday and the prehistoric coastline?

The answer took me by surprise.

Woman: ...speak for themselves.

So here we are on another gorgeous day.

We are so thankful to be here, and we are so thankful that we have some good news to share.

Shane: Faya Rose Touré is the host of "Faya's Fire," a weekly radio show.

She's got a pretty dope hat collection, and she's a civil rights icon.

Eazy-E: ♪ The greatest of all times ♪ ♪ Like Muhammed Ali 'cause I punch rhymes ♪ Shane: As an attorney, she won more than a billion dollars for Black farmers in a landmark trial against the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and she was Alabama's first Black woman judge.

Faya: I want to remind us again that August the 6th is the anniversary-- I think it's the 58th anniversary-- of the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and I know what y'all are saying.

"What do we have to celebrate?"

You know, the Shelby case in 2013 actually gutted the pre-clearance of the Voting Rights Act, but just because they gutted it, we cannot gut our faith.

We cannot gut our struggle and our movement.

Shane: I'm talking to Faya because the way people vote in the South is a product of that struggle, unfolding in a place where our history has roots a hundred million years deep.

Shane: How many times have you been arrested?

[Record scratches] In Selma?

Mm-hmm.

Um, well, not that many.

OK. Heh!

OK. Maybe 5 or 6.

Heh!

Maybe 5 or 6.

OK.

I mean... Shane: After Faya's radio broadcast, we visited Selma's National Voting Rights Museum, which Faya co-founded more than 30 years ago.

Faya: This is Claudette Colvin, who sat on the bus before Rosa Parks.

We just put her in.

She's still living.

Oh, wow.

So much history.

Shane: My father came of age during the civil rights movement, and I've often wondered what it was like to be a Black person at that time.

Faya: There are many stories, but all with the same theme.

It depended upon what part of the country you lived in at the time.

Whenever we were more of a threat, the consequences were more deadly.

Was there a sort of a turning point where it looked like change was coming on the horizon?

The--Emmett Till's case.

OK.

The Emmett Till case.

When people saw that-- that brutal image of her son, the way he was literally crucified, it awoke this spirit of resistance in people, and it also gave people the courage, especially young people, to fight back.

Shane: But that fight took time.

Nearly a decade later, an activist named James Orange was arrested in a Black Belt county where more than 60% of the population was African American, even after the Great Migration.

When other civil rights activists rallied to support him, an Alabama state trooper shot and killed one of them, a man named Jimmie Lee Jackson.

A few weeks later, civil rights leaders organized a march from Selma to Montgomery to protest the killing.

Faya: So they lined up, front of Brown's Chapel, in twos, without a permit, but they marched on the sidewalk.

And when they got across the bridge, when they met the forces-- I call them the forces of evil-- when they were told to turn back or they would be beaten back, and that's when John Lewis asked for permission to pray, but before they could do anything, they beat them unmercifully... and that day and that beating became known as Bloody Sunday.

Shane: The brutality of Bloody Sunday proved impossible to ignore... [Crowd shouting] and later that same year, the Voting Rights Act passed Congress and was signed into law.

It was a landmark victory for civil rights, but like every victory in the struggle for equality, it came at a cost.

Faya: The trigger was the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson in Marion.

And it's interesting because any time any major change comes, somebody has to pay the price.

Somebody has to die.

♪ Faya: To the children... ♪ There's a river ♪ ♪ Flowing in your mind ♪ ♪ There's a river ♪ ♪ Flowing in your mind ♪ ♪ And it's telling you ♪ ♪ And it's telling me ♪ ♪ One day we'll all be free ♪ ♪ For there's a river ♪ ♪ Flowing in my mind ♪ I can't believe I sung that.

Shane: The Voting Rights Act triggered a seismic shift in American politics, but exactly where its impacts were greatest, well, that has everything to do with a now-all-too-familiar Cretaceous coastline.

Craig McClain had the data to show me the connection.

Craig: All right, so what you're looking at now is the Cretaceous period, you know, about 140 to 65 million years ago.

We're here in Alabama, and this location would have been underwater... OK. probably about 200 to 300 feet of water.

So this is a geologic map.

This was put out years ago by the USGS.

The different colors here sort of represent different types of rocks and rock formations, right?

OK. And what you can see here in this green band is what-- that sort of limestone chalk that we were standing on.

Ah.

This is what eventually becomes the belt.

That's right, that is the sort of chalk deposits that begin the Black Belt.

OK. And you can see faintly here, this line in here, that's that-- Same band.

That same band.

This is cotton production.

Each one of those dots represents about 10,000 bushels of cotton.

And this is the percentage of enslaved people, And you can see that in some places, you know, it's quite high, 50% to 75%, you know, throughout that band and, of course, as you go further north and further south, those percentages really begin to drop off.

This is--this is harder to look at than I thought it would be.

I can imagine so.

Yeah.

So where do we go from here?

So this is more recently, and this is the Black population by county through the South.

It's the same band over and over again.

It's the same, so, once those enslaved people were freed, a lot of them stayed in those same regions.

Mm-hmm.

How do these demographics then translate into politics?

OK, so, this is the 2008... Oh, my God.

presidential election.

And so it's that same band, right?

African Americans, on average, typically vote Democratic, and so, in these cases, in a sea of Republican counties that are Republican-dominated, these counties often vote primarily Democratic.

This is crazy.

This is crazy.

Right, and it continues to play out.

So this is the recent 2020 election.

[Scoffs, chuckles] You sure?

Wow.

So it continues to play out over and over and over again.

I've never seen anything like this before.

Shane: The patterns Craig is showing me only appeared after 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was signed into law.

Craig: So, after that, we start to see it coming in faintly, and then, every presidential election, it gets stronger and stronger and stronger in pattern until the last 2 to 3 decades, where it has been a prominent feature of every election.

Shane: In other words, each time the U.S. holds an election, a blue wave crashes ashore on that ancient coastline that cuts across the American South.

Shane: Oh, my God.

The idea that there's, like, a single through line that links piles of dead Cretaceous organisms to voting patterns...

Right.

across geographic space, is--is phenomenal.

I've never seen anything-- I--I've just literally never seen anything like this before.

When I sort of heard about this, I really went out and searched for, like, the maps and kept finding more and more patterns that reflected that, and so, for example, this is obesity prevalence in females in 2011 across the South, which follows the Black Belt as well.

I think, of the maps that we've looked at so far, this one may be one of the most alarming, right?

Mm-hmm.

This is a now map.

This map wouldn't exist if there wasn't healthcare disparities, right, if there wasn't economic disparities that we still haven't yet addressed.

Mm-hmm.

We wouldn't see evidence of the Black Belt, we wouldn't see evidence of this ancient coastline if we had been better as a society dealing with these issues.

Shane: Today, efforts are underway to dismantle what remains of the Voting Rights Act and reinstitute many of the barriers that long kept African Americans from wielding political power in the South.

So Craig thinks that seeing some geology in today's electoral maps is actually kind of reassuring.

Craig: When the blue belt goes away... Mm.

then there's real cause for concern; it may mean that the voting rights are being diminished... Mm-hmm.

of African Americans in the South.

Shane: The places we live and even the soil under our feet make a certain set of histories possible, but they don't make any one history inevitable.

What actually happens-- that's on us and the choices we make.

Let's not get it twisted.

I mean, it's one thing to have, like, you know, here in--in Alabama, to sit on fertile soil.

That's one thing.

What you choose to do with that soil and how you do it is a whole different thing.

I mean, just because these soils were here does not mean that slavery had to happen, right?

And just because slavery did happen doesn't mean that Black folks still living in the South can't reclaim the legacy their labor created.

Big Boi: ♪ Well, it's the M-I crooked letter ♪ ♪ Coming around the South ♪ ♪ Rolling straight Hammers and Vogues ♪ In that old Southern slouch ♪ ♪ Please, ain't nothing but incense ♪ ♪ In my atmosphere ♪ ♪ I'm bending corners in my 'Lac, boi ♪ ♪ 'Cause that's how we be rolling here ♪ [Backup singers vocalize] Shane: So this is where the magic happens.

This is the Black Cotton office, where the magic happens.

Do you use, like, every part of the cotton plant?

Yes, every part of the cotton stalk.

All of it has value to us.

[Record scratches] Man: ♪ Ladies and gentlemen ♪ Shane: You remember Julius Tillery, the Puff Daddy of Cotton?

Here at Black Cotton, Julius and a team of artists craft unique cotton creations that they sell across the country.

Julius: Take your pruning shears.

Just cut off any unwanted parts.

That's where you get artistic at, you know what I'm saying?

OK. You just freestyle with it.

You're freestyling with it.

Heh heh heh!

How did all of this start?

I've been farming all my life, but I'm an entrepreneur at heart; I told my dad, you know, I wanted to do something-- something different: "Let's put some cotton stalks in some boxes and we'll figure it out from there," and that was in 2016.

I notice your motto, "Cotton is our culture."

Yes.

What does that mean to you?

I just want our community to be able to rally around something we see every day, instead of feel saddened by it or oppressed by it.

Our phrase, "Cotton is our culture," is short for, "Cotton is our culture.

Let's grow together."

Mm.

I like that.

I like that.

You got more creative today than you thought you was going to get.

Yeah, yeah.

If you decorate with Black Cotton, anything is possible.

I love that.

Fellas, ladies, get the loved one in your life a piece of Black Cotton.

Yeah.

Heh heh!

Shane: Seeing Julius not only embrace, but reclaim cotton, despite all of its history, the trauma, the generations of oppression that go along with it, it made me think about my own relationship with the South.

Leon Bridges: ♪ Baby, baby, baby ♪ ♪ I'm coming home ♪ ♪ To your tender, sweet loving ♪ Shane: Yeah, man, it's good to be back in the Carolinas.

I've got a little mixed history with the Carolinas, you know, but every time I come back, especially, like, meeting new people, man, like, nothing beats Southern hospitality.

Mm-hmm, speaking of which, look at that.

Oh.

Oh, yeah, buddy.

Thank you so much.

Chef Malik: Fried collards, fried pig ears.

Man, this looks amazing.

Oh, yeah.

It's been an interesting, you know, last couple of days.

Like, for me, personally, I feel like I have a lot of mixed feelings about cotton.

Mm-hmm.

I feel, like, an inherent pride... Mm-hmm.

right, in the history, but there's also, like, part of my brain that vilifies it in a way.

I like to put it in perspective--is the cotton plant never really attacked anyone.

Ha ha!

That's fair.

You know, the people who tried to control and oppress people to do the work, that's the issue.

Mm-hmm.

It seems like you've pretty well separated the history and the circumstances... Mm-hmm.

you know, from the crop itself.

Absolutely, and it-- you know, as I call myself a fifth-generation farmer, I also want you to remember that this is 5 generations of free men that's deciding to do this work.

My ancestors go back into slavery doing it, but my first-generation ancestor, he decided that he wanted to start a farm and do this type of work, and we followed suit, and we continue to follow suit, so this is a decision we made.

Yeah.

We decided to help our communities or help ourselves through this work.

It seems like the story that you're telling is one of decisive action, you know, like, taking one's own future into their own hands, like, you know, starting a business and making what they can out of it.

Absolutely, and, you know, Yeah.

it's very important that we be good stewards of the land that we have; you know, in a rural area, somebody has to farm the land, and I think we should farm it with pride.

If you want to hold on to something important, you need to work it and show it the love it deserves.

I've come into this story, like, tracing, you know, the impacts of cotton on, like, humans and society.

What does that tell you about us and who we are as a species?

I think that human beings, we can evolve.

We could also be forgiven.

If I was caught up in the negative thoughts of what our ancestors went through to get us here, maybe I wouldn't want to do this, but if I can see hope in the future of maybe we can have pride in this and we can maybe get back some of what we thought we was missing, I can continue on.

Shane: It's about knowing our history, all our history, but also seeing the possibilities that are still in front of us.

That's how you move forward.

It's as true here today as it was on that bridge in Selma.

As much as this is a journey about science, it's become a journey about something a lot larger.

It's really broadened my understanding of what science is.

There's all of these hidden threads.

You know, every single person that I've talked to on this journey has plucked a string that I'd never realized was there.

Frank Ocean: ♪ Sweet King Martin... ♪ Shane: The world we live in, more than any other species, is the product of the choices we make; choices that can lead to unspeakable horrors, but also to beauty and love and art and, yeah, even to science.

Here in the Black Belt, a biological legacy a hundred times deeper than our own species' history set the stage for the rise of cotton, the inhumanity of slavery, the collapse of an industry, and the genesis of a culture that changed the world.

I am...

Crowd: I am... Black... Black... beautiful... beautiful... proud!

proud!

I am...

I am... somebody!

somebody!

Shane: And every step of the way, the choices people made-- some brilliant, some devastating, shaped the arc of our history.

The story of this place captures everything I've been thinking about our human footprint.

So do we have the ability to change?

Like, do we have ownership of what our future looks like?

Absolutely.

The question is, will we?

I think, you know, that requires a longer view than I think we're used to thinking about, in the same way that thinking about the relationship between geology and contemporary politics, that's a longer view than most people are used to.

There are these, like, tiny little organisms, each one microscopic, but together is such an incredibly impactful change over a hundred million years later.

In the same way, like, those choices that we make now, like, we don't last forever as individuals, but those choices, those individual choices, stack up.

Thinking about, you know, how to make decisions now, like, right now, today, all right, that will change, reverse, alter the devastating impacts that we will have tomorrow, 10 years from now, a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now.

You know, it takes a longer view.

The story of humanity is ours to write, whether we choose to embrace that responsibility or not.

That's the crux of the "Human Footprint."

[Distant church bell chiming] [Wind blowing softly] ♪ Human Footprint is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.

♪