From the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. to the bombing of the MOVE house, Episode 9: “Liberation” traverses years of startling upheaval and profound struggle, as older American cities seek a way out of economic obsolescence, poverty and rising crime. What could America’s birthplace mean to the nation in the year of the Bicentennial?

With documentary testimony by those who experienced these conflicts firsthand, “In Pursuit” moves into the late 20th century with a balanced look at how real urban residents navigated political and economic swings while working to shape the world for the future. At the heart of the story is the political rise of police commissioner Frank L. Rizzo, an ally of President Richard M. Nixon, who learns how to exploit media attention to consolidate his power, becoming mayor in 1971. Until that attention — in the form of investigative journalism by, among others, Andrea Mitchell, Gene Roberts, Buzz Bissinger and the late J. Whyatt Mondesire, all on-screen featured voices in the episode — exposes corruption, police brutality and the mayor’s penchant for punishing perceived enemies.

The daily public struggle between journalists and the mayor comes to a head in the approach to 1976, the 200th anniversary of the birth of American democracy, as civil rights, anti-war and gay rights groups demand justice in the streets, activism that further enrages the mayor. One such group is the lesbian collective DykeTactics, hounded by the FBI; another is the radical back-to-nature front MOVE, whose confrontations with the mayor result in a blockade and then a gun battle that leaves a police officer dead and nine MOVE members in jail.

Organizing the Black electorate results in the election of W. Wilson Goode as mayor in 1983, like Harold Washington of Chicago and Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, and Coleman Young of Detroit, the first African American to be elected to the position in the city’s 300-year history. All these men are children of the Great Migration.

Goode fails to contain MOVE’s transformation of their new house into an armed bunker; he permits the police to use violent means to try to forcibly remove MOVE members, including children. When that fails they drop an explosive device on the bunker and refuse to allow the fire department to put out the ensuing fire, which rages the night of May 13, 1985, consuming three blocks, killing 11, including five children, making 250 people homeless. No one is ever made liable for an act that comes to signify the tragic decline of a great American city.

Director: Andrew Ferrett

Writer: Nathaniel Popkin

Executive Producer: Sam Katz

Producers: Andrew Ferrett, Jonathan Kohl, Nathaniel Popkin, Eva Roben

Editors: Adam Rosenbloom, Rachel Sophia Stewart

Director of Photography: Paul Van Haute

Narrator: Michael Boatman

Composer: Daniel Slatkin