I have a dream. One day, this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its dream.

Because we intend to fire our people up so much, until if they can't have their equal share in the house, they'll burn it down.

This Civil Rights Act is a challenge to all of us, to go to work in our communities and our states, in our homes and in our hearts, to eliminate the last vestiges of injustice.

Welcome back to this History Extra podcast series, where we're charting some of the key moments in the transformative history of the US Civil Rights movement, the fight for equality that dominated mid-20th century America, with a legacy that continues to shape the world around us today.

I'm Rianne Davis, section editor for BBC History magazine, and in this six-part series, I'm speaking to leading historians to explore some of the crucial moments that defined this struggle for racial equality.

In each episode, our experts will recount one significant story from the movement and consider its place in the wider fight for civil rights.

In this final episode of our series, we're leaving the 1960s and 70s behind. We'll be bringing things right up to date, interrogating the legacy of the US Civil Rights movement, both in America and beyond, and exploring whether the activist dreams of the mid-20th century actually came true.

At the start of the series, we heard from Adrienne Lent Smith, an associate professor of history at Duke University, an expert on the US Civil Rights movement, and the historical advisor of this series.

I invited her back to speak to me again for this concluding episode.

To begin, Adrienne told me a story from the 21st century that I'm sure will be familiar to many listeners, the moment when the Black Lives Matter protests engulfed America and the world in the summer of 2020.

Americans took to the streets in protests. Protests that hit 200 cities, more, some say, involving people of all ages, people of all races, Black folks in news coverage, in shorthand, and in actuality were often at the fore.

We're highly visible, we're highly vocal, but the protests that swept America from June to September were never simply or solely Black people protesting on their own behalf.

They were Black people protesting in defense of their own humanity and in defense of the humanity of others.

The incident that sparked this, we often shorthand that's the summer of protests as the George Floyd protests, and there's a reason for that.

In May of 2020, close to the end of the month, two months into COVID spring, when we'd all learn to sit and watch the world go by on TV screens, be it Zoom,

or literal, you know, literal local news, we all bore witness to the murder of a Black man on the streets of Minneapolis by a police officer, Derek Chauvin, who pushed him to the ground, got on his neck and stayed there for nine minutes.

As the man begged for his life, as George Floyd begged for his life, as bystanders around him begged for his life.

A woman caught it on video, she recorded literally nine minutes of a man dying, and we all could see it.

It circulated over the internet. It was one of the most devastating things I have ever seen, but it also wasn't the only thing that happened that summer, right?

So the murder of George Floyd moved folks into the streets. They were there for George Floyd, they were there for themselves, but they were also there for Breonna Taylor.

They were there for a mod arboree who was jogging through a Brunswick, Georgia town when self-styled vigilantes shot him because they thought that he was burgling someone as if theft should carry a death sentence enacted by random men on the street.

They were there for any number of other cases. This is the horrible thing about America in the first two decades of the 21st century that there have been so many people killed in police-related killings that were hard pressed to remember the names of them all.

...