(CNN) The lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson is highly critical of President Donald Trump's favorite slogan, "Make America Great Again."

"As an African-American, what decade am I supposed to want to relive?" Stevenson said to David Axelrod on "The Axe Files," a podcast from The University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN. "When was America better for black people, or for women, or for a lot of people in this country who have been marginalized?"

He told Axelrod the country is still a long way from coming to terms with its past.

"Slavery didn't end in 1865, it just evolved," he said, explaining why African-Americans fled the South for cities.

"Black people in Cleveland, in Chicago, and Detroit, and Los Angeles and Oakland didn't come to these communities as immigrants looking for new economic opportunities. They came to these communities as refugees and exiles from terror in the American South, and we've never really addressed that."

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