The 93-year-old activist was honored Thursday for his work in civil rights at the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts in Memphis, Tennessee.

“Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror” unflinchingly explores America’s brutal history of lynching and provides a powerful history lesson, using individual stories that show, despite “emancipation,” thousands of African Americans were brutally murdered in this country in the name of the White supremacist status quo.