Today we celebrate both the birth of this great Human Rights activist and the impact his legacy has had, not just in the US but the world over. Yet it has has taken  over 40 years for this sea change in social and political attititudes to come about.

I came across  2 clips  that prompted me to rethink about the ‘mindset’ of that time.  As always the BBC played a pivotal role in broadcasting the events of a small town in Alabama to the the rest of the world at that time.  It is interesting to watch these two clips which  were first broadcast by Panorama on 13 May 1963.  The first is of Eugene (Bull) Connor, Police Safety Commisioner  in Birmingham, Alabama, and the second is the response by the Human Rights leader:

The political and social changes that have been wrought  by the civil rights movement have now come to fruition  - although I think the question remains whether the words of both still have resonance in many of todays social and global conflicts.