Gates goes inside the notorious housing projects in Chicago's South Side - the Robert Taylor and the Ida B. Wells - to find out from the people who live there what life is like for America's "underclass." "What happened to the city of refuge my father's generation sought in the North; North where 'the streets of Heaven were paved with gold'?" wonders Gates. Caught up in a culture of criminality, poverty and despair, is there any hope for the fifth of black Americans who have been left behind?