This film originally was shown at theaters as a "one-time-only" event on 24 March 1970 and ran 3 hours and 5 minutes. The proceeds from the $5 admission price were donated to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Special Fund. It was later shown on US television, unedited and with limited interruption.
This film has a 100% rating based on 6 critic reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.
The celebrities featured in the documentary are reciting speeches or poems from Langston Hughes, Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Ellison, William Bradford, Robert Hayden, and Ernest Hemingway. For example, Paul Newman reads the poem "War" by Hughes, while his wife Joanne Woodward reads Hughes' poem "Birmingham Sunday".