A period of racial unrest followed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in April 1968. That summer, CBS News presented Of Black America — a groundbreaking series of seven one-hour documentaries exploring various aspects of history and the state of the Black community. The fifth episode, “The Heritage of Slavery,” featured the famed civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who spoke about the staggering and persistent poverty and hunger in her home state of Mississippi. While the expression of racism may have grown more subtle, shootings and lynchings of Black southerners were supplanted by economic deprivation and hunger.