Americans mark the thirtieth anniversary this year of the assassination of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. But, as David Usborne explains, celebration gave way to death and panic in one city yesterday.

The son of Martin Luther King was yesterday made head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference - on what would have been the assassinated civil rights leader's 69th birthday.

Joan Baez is back with a new album. She has undergone therapy, overcome her legendary status and finally found peace. But don't, she

For every challenge she presents a different face, says John Carlin. But behind the carefully painted layers, the truth about Winnie Mandela just gets uglier.

Maya Jaggi on a tragedy of slavery

He loved his enemy, and it paid off. John Carlin on a redneck reformed

Martin Luther King's vision of an end to the US's great racial divide has faded, writes John Carlin in Washington

In an encounter that could have taken place only in the United States, the son of Martin Luther King met his father's alleged assassin and asked the question to which all America wanted the answer: "Did you kill my father?"

What Christians owe to Jews

After almost three decades of silence, the family of Martin Luther King is reopening one of the most traumatic events in modern American history, by demanding a full-scale trial of the man who was convicted of the 1968 murder of the leader of the United States' civil rights movement.

Black women in the US have a problem - the attitudes of most black American men. So why on earth would they look to Louis Farrakhan for help? Aminatta Forna reports from New York

City of dreams

Sir: Donu Kogbara (Another View, 13 May) discusses whether black people in Britain should treat O J Simpson as a hero. Black people in Britain or any other country have no need to seek out further heroes when the two greatest men of this century are black.

DAVID USBORNE