123.5 - 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington: Are we closer to the dream?

50th Anniversary of the March on Washington: Are we closer to the dream?

I'm recording this on August 28 - the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which featured Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" speech. In fact, I'm doing it almost at the same hour, which is totally irrelevant except to lovers of truly meaningless trivia.

But doing this on the anniversary makes it appropriate as a time to, as we do on anniversaries, look both back and forward.

This past Saturday, August 24, tens of thousands of people - probably about 100,000, based on a comparison of the size of the 1963 rally with this one - about 100,000 people gathered in Washington, DC, to remember that march and that speech and to ask how far we've come toward reaching that dream. The only possible answer - the only legitimate answer - is "part way. Only part way."

The numbers tell the story - or at least their part of it.

For one thing, the rates of poverty and unemployment among blacks are still nearly double the overall rate. One reason for that is that blacks continue to get paid less than whites: In 2011, the median wage for black women was $13.13; for black men, it was $14.26; for white women, $15.89; for white men, $19.76.

The overall income gap has shrunk: The median income for African-American households is still a shamefully low 2/3 that of that of all American families - but that's up from 1963, when that median income was just over half the national median. But despite that smaller gap in income, the gap in the rate of home ownership has actually grown over that time.

Whites still live longer than blacks - but again the gap has shrunk from 6-1/2 to 8 years to 3-1/2 to 5 years. But they still live longer.

The gap in infant mortality rates between whites and non-whites has actually grown since 1963 - but the overall rate has come down so far that the rate among non-whites is only a quarter of what it was in 1963 and that present rate is about half the infant mortality rate among whites in 1963.

As compared to 1963, the percentage of blacks who have completed high school has more than tripled; the number of black undergrads is now more than 10 times what it was then; and the percentage who have completed 4 years of college is nearly 6 times what it was.

So yes, there have been gains. Yes, it's better than it was. Yes, we have made some progress toward that dream of measuring someone only by the content of their character. But having progressed does not mean having arrived. Martin Luther King III, MLK's oldest son, said it well on Saturday:

This is not the time for nostalgic commemoration. Nor is this the time for self-congratulatory celebration. The task is not done. The journey is not complete. We can and we must do more.

Very true. Especially when you consider the part of the story the numbers don't tell, and I don't even mean big things like the Trayvon Martin case, I mean the everyday slaps and slams, the everyday reminders that if you are African-American, you are still "other" in the eyes of too many. Such as the African-American family who recently went to a restaurant in Charleston, SC for a going-away party and after waiting two hours to get in, was almost immediately told to leave by the manager because one - count it, one - white woman customer said she felt "threatened" by the group.

Or maybe you'd prefer more aggressive slaps, such as the one delivered to University of Texas student Bryan Davis on August 21, when he was struck by a bleach-filled balloon while walking in a neighborhood populated by students at the University, another in a string of bleach attacks, all aimed at black or Asian students, stretching back to last summer.

Yes, things have improved, at least in some ways. Yes, we have made at least some progress, painfully slow, painfully limited, progress considering we're talking about a span of 50 years, but progress.

But again, advancing does not mean arriving, improvement does not mean cure, progress is not a cause for passivity. We have to keep on keepin' on. We have to keep being, as I have before called us to be, steely-eyed dreamers, people who know the hard work that is to be done but who never forget the dream that work is for, a dream that I say can be brought down to one word: justice.

As a footnote to this, I want to mention one area where we can see genuine progress since 1963: The chief organizer of the march was an African-American named Bayard Rustin. He was also a mentor to King and he helped found both the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the A. Philip Randolph Institute. But at the time of the 1963 march, his role in organizing it was played down, even concealed. Because in addition to being an unbowing advocate for civil rights who was significantly responsible for introducing Gandhian nonviolence into the civil rights movement, Rustin was gay. And in 1963 that was something better left unsaid.

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/24/march-in-washington-dc_n_3808713.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/22/black-unemployment_n_3624725.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/23/march-on-washington-infographic_n_3794682.html
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/african-american-family-restaurant-denied-us-service-after-diner-felt-threatened/
http://progressivepopulist.org/2013/08/23/blacks-asked-to-leave-south-carolina-restaurant-because-white-customer-felt-threatened-video/
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/08/24/2523051/minority-students-university-texas-attacked-epidemic-bleach-bombs/
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/texas-cops-probe-race-related-bleach-bombs-article-1.1176611
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/20/march-on-washington-bayard-rustin/2678505/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayard_Rustin