The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision for a more just and equitable society included a fundamental opposition to the death penalty. To Dr. King, capital punishment was both wrong as a matter of morality and misguided as a matter of policy.

A London production of the U.S. play Slave Play, written by actor and playwright Jeremy O. Harris (Zola, Euphoria, Gossip Girl), is making political waves after the U.K. prime minister criticized plans to offer two performances exclusively for Black audiences as “wrong and divisive.”