Slavery and race are making headlines thanks to a new Stephen Spielberg film, President Clinton's crusade to raise the US's consciousness about racial discrimination and the return of Tawana Brawley.
She was the 15-year-old black girl who was found in November 1987, outside an apartment complex half-naked, wrapped in a plastic bag and with faeces smeared on her body. She claimed she had been kidnapped, beaten and raped by six white men, one of whom was a policeman.
Her case caused outrage in the black community but, after a lengthy investigation, a grand jury decided that she had made up the story. She refused to co-operate with the investigation.
Now, 10 years later, she and three men who had become her "advisers" are being sued for defamation. This has reawakened strong feelings in Brooklyn where Ms Brawley has told emotional meetings that she has not lied.
The film is Amistad, a spectacular epic about a largely forgotten episode in African-American history in 1839 when 53 slaves rebelled on a Spanish ship off Cuba, slaughtering most of the crew. Their leader, Joseph Cinque, makes some of the sailors steer the ship, called Amistad, back to Africa but they deceive him and eventually the ship is captured by the US navy off Long Island.
Cinque and the other slaves are put on trial for piracy and murder but are defended before the Supreme Court by a former president, John Quincy Adams, who is played by Anthony Hopkins, and set free. This was an amazing verdict at a time when slavery was widespread in the US and six of the nine judges were slaveowners, but Adams was able to argue that the rebels were not yet any American's property. Queen Isabella claim for the slaves to be returned to Spain was rejected.
For Spielberg, Amistad is a logical sequel to his powerful film on the Holocaust, Schindler's List. Spielberg says this may be the most important film he has made.
"I particularly wanted to do it for my children. I wanted them and the public to realise the horror of slavery, the brutality of the slave traders . . . I wanted them to understand why it was necessary for this country to fight the civil war," Spielberg has testified in a court action accusing him of breach of copyright.
The accuser is a distinguished African-American writer and sculptor, Barbara Chase-Riboud, who claims that Amistad uses material from her book on the incident called Echo of Lions. The writer failed to block the opening of the film in the US this week and her claim will be heard next year.
Spielberg's portrayal in a flashback of the horrors of the slave ship crossing the Atlantic - the middle passage - is being compared with the impact made in Schindler's List of the Nazi rampage through the Jewish ghetto.
The film appears as President Clinton is being urged by some African-Americans to make a public apology on behalf of the US for slavery and commission a suitable monument. The President is also half way through the year he has dedicated to a "national dialogue" on race through a series of town hall meetings across the country.
He has also set up a race advisory board to come up with new proposals but President Clinton is being criticised for the lack of progress on both fronts. His main aim seems to be to defend the "affirmative action" programmes which are now being challenged by the higher courts as infringing the constitution's guarantee of equality of treatment regardless of colour, creed or sex.
If minorities get favourable treatment under the affirmative action programmes when applying for university places or for jobs, this causes resentment among white rivals who are unsuccessful although they may have equal qualifications or even better ones. But the rationale behind the programmes is that they make up for "past discrimination", including the harmful effects of slavery on later generations of African-Americans.
Conservatives trying to abolish affirmative action are criticising those schools called after the nation's founding father, George Washington, which are changing their name. The reason is that Washington was a slave-owner although he later freed them.
President Clinton believes that these racial tensions can best be resolved by discussion in "honest dialogue". But he found it hard at his town hall meeting in Akron, Ohio, to get African-Americans and whites to engage in a proper debate.
Academics who research and write on racial problems disagree on the value of dialogue. One critic says it is not enough to achieve results - "at the end of the day, you believe one thing and I believe something else. It's racial conversation as a one-night stand, a cheap thrill."
Mrs Hillary Clinton has described being at the receiving end of racial prejudice at school when she was playing on a hockey team and tried to make conversation with the black goalie on the opposing team. She was rudely rebuffed and told: "You'll always be the enemy."
That was over 30 years ago.