King's Dream: A Work in Progress

On the 20th anniversary of the holiday commemorating the birth of Rev. Martin Luther King, most Americans believe the nation has made progress towards his dream of racial equality, according to an AP-Ipsos poll. But his dream was also to eliminate poverty -- among all races, colors and creeds -- as Leonard Pitts eloquently reminds us. The Boston Globe, too, reminds us that King's larger goal was economic equality:

''We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." King spoke these words at New York City's Riverside Church in 1967, a year to the day before he was assassinated.

King spoke these words when the country was mired in an unpopular war, one that saw poor young men -- disproportionately black -- conscripted and turned into cannon fodder. He spoke these words when there was one black Senator (Edward W. Brooke - R-MA - 1967-199) and two black US Representatives (Augustus F. Hawkins - D-CA - 1963-1991 and John Conyers, Jr. - D-MA - 1965-present) -- yet blacks were more than 10 percent of all Americans. He spoke these words when the first black Cabinet member, Robert C. Weaver, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, pointed out that the 1959 "median family income among non-whites was slightly less than 55 percent of that for whites" and "[o]nly a third of the negro families in 1959 earned sufficient [income] to sustain an acceptable American standard of living."

Clearly, by those standards, the county has made progress. Julian Bond reminds us that "[p]rogress has always been stop-and-start, and sometimes backup. We're in a holding pattern right now."

And yet. "Holding pattern" does not describe the state of economic inequality in the United States. Again, from the Globe:

In 1960, the top 20 percent of the wealthiest enjoyed 30 times the wealth of the bottom 20 percent. Four decades later, this gap increased to 75 times. More children are growing up poor in America than in any other industrial nation. Millions of workers are making less money in real dollars than they did 20 years ago. Working Americans are working on average more hours than ever before. Forty-five million Americans -- eight of 10 of whom have jobs -- have no health insurance.

We've always justified economic polarization with a debatable but compelling argument: who cares if the market system yields inevitable inequalities, so long as it provides equality of opportunity? Well, we're pooching that one, too. In making college less financially accessible, Congress actively thwarts young people's opportunity for mobility. Congress recently cut nearly $13 billion from student aid, as much as doubling the interest rates of the federal educational grants on which middle- and low-income families depend. Meanwhile, the real cost of college tuition has outpaced inflation by 40 percent over the last 25 years, also outpacing the average growth of middle-class wages. Research by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that a poor American child has no better chance of getting ahead than a poor child in Britain, France, Germany, or Sweden.

In his 2002 book, David Schweickart wrote:

If we divided the income of the US into thirds, we find that the top ten percent of the population gets a third, the next thirty percent gets another third, and the bottom sixty percent get the last third. If we divide the wealth of the US into thirds, we find that the top one percent own a third, the next nine percent own another third, and the bottom ninety percent claim the rest.

Clearly, by this measure, Dr. King's dream more closely reflects Bond's "backup" than progress.

For further reading:

• African-American History Month: 50 Years of Change
• Income Inequality in the US: 1913-1988
• Income Inequality Charts
• The L-Curve: A Graph of US Income Distribution
• Lesser Known Words of Martin Luther King, Jr
• Martin Luther King Day - An Opportunity for Reflection
• Measuring Poverty and Inequality
• Race and Hispanic Origin Population Density of the United States: 1990
• Sustainable Middle Class
• Two Americas: One Rich, One Poor?

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