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Ted Koppel, managing editor for the Discovery Channel, speaks during the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour panel discussion January 13, 2006.

Veteran broadcast journalist Ted Koppel focuses on a 1981 lynching in Alabama to tell how acts of hatred and racism have affected the lives of three Americans:

Congressman Robert Filner who, as an 18-year-old Freedom Rider, was thrown into Mississippi's Parchman Prison (currently representing Calfornia's 51st congressional district); Florida school teacher Lizzie Jenkins who recalls tales of her grandfather watching the lynching of five African-Americans in 1916; and Congressman Artur Davis, who as a law student worked to hold the Ku Klux Klan accountable for the lynching (currently representing Alabama's 7th congressional district).

This year they each played a role in Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) becoming the first African-American tapped to be a national party's nominee for president.

"The Last Lynching offers a look at how far we've come on the racial front, and how recent some of the worst days of racial violence really were," said Koppel.

It's a story about how 19-year-old Michael Donald was killed in 1981 in Mobile, Ala., by two members of the Ku Klux Klan.

"Lynchings are a form of terrorism. And the particular purpose was to say to African-Americans that you will never vote or be a part of the political process in this country. And if you think you will move in that direction there will be terrible consequences," Koppel told Tell Me More host Michel Martin.

The one-hour special on race in America airs tonight on Discovery Channel.