The series was unavailable from 1995 to 2006 owing 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.
The segment about the murder of Medgar 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 Fantasmas do Passado (1996).)