Finding Your Roots

Roots Of Freedom

These three guests' families have long been engaged in the battle for freedom and civil rights, but they had no idea that those principles were passed down through generations of ancestors. Ben Affleck's mother was a Freedom Rider in 1964 and her roots include the 19th-century spiritualist Almon French, who attempted to heal the bereaved masses in the aftermath of the Civil War; NAACP president Ben Jealous learns the heroic story of his great-grandfather Peter G. Morgan, a free black man who was forced to purchase his own wife and family in order to keep them safe; and actress Khandi Alexander, who never knew who her grandfather was, learns that he may have been murdered in the Jim Crow-era South.