Black Panther Party members, civil rights activists, and the FBI and CIA officers who once targeted them sit for interviews that anchor this account of the movements the U.S. government treated as internal enemies. Director Lee Lew-Lee, credited also as interviewer and camera operator, builds the film from declassified government documents and archival news footage sourced from ABC News, Third World Newsreel, and UCLA's film archive, tracing the arc from the Southern civil rights campaigns into the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO. Fred Hampton's killing by Chicago police and FBI informants recurs as a case study in how far surveillance and disruption went. Former FBI agent Wes Swearingen and ex-CIA officer Philip Agee describe the machinery from the inside, set against Bobby Seale and other former activists recounting the movement's aims and losses. The film closes with a rolling memorial listing more than a thousand people killed during the era, from Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. to lesser-known local organizers, a scale the rest of the film has been building toward.