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Hello and welcome to Morales on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander.

And it was glory for singer-songwriter John Legend and the rapper comment that this year's Oscars

they won best song for this track, Glory, from the film Selma,

which is about Martin Luther King and the campaign for voting rights for African Americans in 1965.

In his acceptance speech, legend made the point that inequality in the US is still a problem.

He said, there are more black men under correctional control today than there were under slavery in 1850.

Is that true? Well, let's start with the United States Census of 1850,

which makes for uncomfortable reading. I have to say, Wesley Stevenson has been looking at the numbers with me.

So where's the total number of African American slaves was 3.2 million?

Yes, that's right, but not all of them were men, though. Almost one and a half million are children.

And that's almost half the total slave population, which is just shocking to me.

And another 870,000 of them were women.

But John Legend was making a claim about the number of men who were enslaved in 1850,

versus the number of men who were under correctional control as he puts it in the US today.

Yeah, and the 1850 census shows there were almost 875,000 male slaves who were aged 15 or over.

Whereas today, it's estimated that there are almost 2 million African American men in either state or federal prisons,

local jails, or on probation or parole, i.e. out of prison, but under supervision.

So John Legend's correct to say that there are more black men under correctional control than were enslaved in 1850, just over twice as many.

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