BBC Knowledge: Divided States

BBC Knowledge will screen Divided States, a series of documentaries that will examine racism, gun violence and hate crimes in America.

These include Love & Hate Crime, One Deadly Weekend in America, KKK: Fight for White Supremacy and Black Power: America’s Armed Resistance.

Love & Hate Crime (Thursdays from 31 May at 9.30pm) exposes how dangerous it is to be different in America with three devastating hate crimes explored. A beautiful teenage transsexual, Mercedes Williamson, is killed by her gang-member boyfriend Josh. With Josh sentenced to life, a series of interviews reveal the truth behind his relationship with Mercedes. When a black man is murdered in Jackson, Mississippi, an FBI investigation uncovers a campaign of attacks by local white kids, but what is the true role of one 18-year-old girl? And when coastguard officer Adrian Loya breaks into the apartment of married couple Lisa and Anna Trubnikova and opens fire, the video footage he shot during the planning and execution of his crime gives an inside look into the mind of a murderer.

One Deadly Weekend in America (Thursdays from 21 June at 9.30pm) is a dramatic and honest portrait of how the USA’s gun policy affects its citizens – a tale of violence, tragic bloodshed, and lives changed forever.
An award-winning team picks apart a series of shootings that happened over a single weekend, revealing how, when and why these crimes happened.

KKK: Fight For White Supremacy (Thursday 5 July at 9.30pm) with access to the leaders of the Loyal White Knights chapter of the Klu Klux Klan in North Carolina, this film follows their secretive rituals. The Klan travels to the South Carolina Statehouse in Charleston to protest against the removal of the confederate flag but when Black Power groups turn out to demonstrate, the two opposing visions of America violently come face to face.

Black Power: America’s Armed Resistance (Thursday 12 July at 9.30pm) filmmaker Dan Murdoch is back in the USA to revisit some of the people he met from the Ku Klux Klan and also meet members of the Black Liberation Movement. Having previously documented clashes between these two opposing visions of America – a resurgent KKK and a growing Black Power movement – his aim now is to find out what black power means, what its motivations are and why this movement seems to be gaining traction.