50 years on, the battle for civil rights continues in America

Fifty years since the first civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, America still has huge problems with race. Only this week a federal investigation into the killing of an unarmed black man in Ferguson last year concluded that the police there were racist. They’ve been making millions of dollars by targeting black people and issuing tickets for minor traffic infractions. Across America, black people are still poorer, less educated and more likely to go to gaol than white people. In 1962 The Spectator’s New York correspondent Murray Kempton wrote:

In the best of cases, to be a Negro in America is to have a station below your capacities… The American economy sometimes seems almost designed for the care and feeding of incompetent and unproductive white men. The trade union flesh-peddler, the sheriff of Holmes County, the television producer, the loud man in the saloon, all those luxuries of a wasteful society, have really no excuse for our contributions to their comfort except being citizens and white.