You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today has been a participant in and an observer of the African-American struggle for equality and justice

in the United States for the last 50 years. Mary Francis Berry is both a respected academic historian

and a longtime civil rights campaigner who rose from a childhood of poverty in Tennessee to serve for more than two

decades on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, including 10 years as its chair. She left that post in

2004. Much has happened since then, including the two-term presidency of Barack Obama, the first black man to lead the nation.

But right now, African Americans are asking themselves whether anything has really changed at all,

not just in decades, but maybe in centuries.

The shocking death of George Floyd, while being detained by white police

officers in Minneapolis, has prompted a convulsion of protest and anger across America and far

beyond. The demand is for justice and a dismantling of enduring racist attitudes and practices,

but will the killing of George Floyd really come to be

seen as a tipping point? Well, Mary Francis Berry joins me from New Orleans now. Welcome to Hard Talk.

Thank you very much for having me. We're having beautiful weather here. Well, I can see there's a little

bit of a hurricane through your

window, but let us focus on the storms that have been hitting and sweeping across America in

recent days. The whole world has been watching the response to the killing of George Floyd in

Minneapolis. You have an historian's eye. Does all of this feel different to you from

previous cases of the killing in police detention of unarmed black men? Now what's

different about this one? We had video in earlier protests, on most occasions,

...