Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there. This week confronting hatred in America.

We'll look at how in the 1960s white Mississippi struggled to emerge from a history of segregation.

We had been raised to understand that anything that threatened our way of life

threatened us and so this idea of integration was such a huge threat.

People were horrified.

Also Iran's astonishing pre-revolutionary Museum of Modern Art, the raising of Henry VIII's

wars, the Mary Rose, and the reality of the Israeli occupation of a Palestinian household

in Gaza.

They put all my family in one room and the rest of

home was the things of the soldier and you cannot use the rest of your home.

That's all coming up later in the podcast,

but we're going to begin with an attack on a young man

which shocked America and led to a new law

recognizing a wider class of victims when it comes to hate crime.

This is the story of Matthew Shepard, who was gay and in October 1998 was beaten to death in Wyoming. A number of factors led this particular

atrocity to become a cause-celeb over the following decades, among them

the brutal nature of the killing. Claire Bose has been speaking to Matthew's mother, Judy Sheppard.

There was no such thing as a stranger to Matt.

He could strike up a conversation with somebody who said next to him in a bar or

you know just on the bus or walking down the sidewalk or a coffee shop

there just was no stranger to Matt he wanted to learn about

...