Patty, a young enslaved girl, shares some insight about life on a South Carolina plantation.

On July 6, 2016, Philando Castile was pulled over by police near Saint Paul, Minn., after being misidentified as a robbery suspect. He was then shot and killed by an officer during the traffic stop. In this StoryCorps edition, Chad Eisen-Ramgren has a conversation with his 10-year-old daughter, who was a student at the school where Mr. Phil managed the cafeteria.

This story is the retelling of Robert Smalls' escape from slavery with his entire family in tow. With a plan "as dangerous as it was brilliant," Smalls commandeers a Confederate ship and successfully navigates it out of Charleston's blockaded port and into the hands of the Union army.

Although raised in a prosperous and prestigious African-American home in Tuskegee, Ala., Sammy Younge found himself drawn most to the civil rights movement. While the cause cost him his life, his actions and determination helped to transform this Southern city.

This story follows a girl who befriends the first African American to attend High Point Central High School, as a result of desegregation. What begins as an unintended and awkward experience in the cafeteria, becomes a strong and admirable friendship.

In this poem, the speaker recounts his or her shifting view of the white man stoically standing between Tommie Smith and John Carlos during their medal ceremony in Mexico City for the 1968 Olympics.

Bayard Rustin was an African American leader who worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) in the 1940s and 1950s for equal rights for all Americans using nonviolence. In this story, he writes about the struggle for an African American man to order a simple hamburger at a restaurant in the Midwest.

Regarded as one of the most important speeches in American history, it was delivered by Booker T. Washington as a plea for racial cooperation in the South during a time of deep racial prejudice.

In 1916, one family battled against the unjust laws aimed at immigrants of Japanese ancestry. In doing so, they lent their own voices to the growing chorus of Asian Americans insisting: "We belong here."

After growing up in foster care, Ashley, a young Native-American Caucasian woman, converts to Islam in hopes of finding structure in a life where it never existed. However, with that decision comes the risk of losing one of the few biological connections she still has.