By 1962, King had become, by the media's reckoning, the new civil rights leader.

Had it not been for James Meredith, who was willing to risk his life, the University of Mississippi would still be all white.

I remember being infuriated from the top of my head to the tip of my toes the first time a screen was put around Bob Carter and me on a train leaving Washington in the 1940s.

I grew up in a house where nobody had to tell me to go to school every day and do my homework.

My father kept his distance from working-class American blacks.

We Americans entered a new phase in our history - the era of integration - in 1954.

The fact is that racism, despite all the doomsayers, has diminished