This week the world has been honouring the memory of Martin Luther King Junior. King had a dream. It was to live in a society where people were judged by their character rather than the color of their skin. But that dream was shattered by an assassin’s bullet on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. The Civil Rights champion was just 39 years old. Five decades later, on the anniversary of his death, people across the US, and the world, paused, to remember what happened and what King stood for. How much progress have Black Americans made in the struggle to achieve racial and economic equality? Presenter: Dareen AbuGhaida Guests: Reverend Bernard Lafayette, a lifelong civil rights activist who was appointed by Martin Luther King to direct the Alabama voter registration project in 1962. Vincent Warren, the executive director of the Centre for Constitutional Rights. Tami Sawyer, a social justice activist and director of diversity and cultural competence at Teach For America.

Slavery might have ended on paper after the Civil War, but many white landowners did everything they could to exploit newly freed slaves well into the 20th century. Thousands of black laborers across the South were forced to work against their will as late as the 1960s—a new form of enslavement that went on in the shadows of rural America.