In addition, government websites began scrubbing African-American history, including in the case of the National Park Service eliminating a photo of the famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman and descriptions of the brutal realities of slavery.

And so, first of all, we minimized the slavery controversy which convulsed the nation from the Missouri Compromise down to the Civil War.

The report estimates that 50 million men, women and children are "trapped in slavery" around the world and says government, businesses, civil society and the public needed to work together to eradicate the practice.

The story is rooted in chilling and realistic descriptions of slavery on a Georgia plantation, but here the famed path to freedom is a literal underground railroad.

The detective says that behind the front of a High Street business "the main criminality may be modern-day slavery, exploitation and drugs".