First, the day: It was an unseasonably pleasant summer day 53 years ago today when nearly 250,000 people assembled peacefully and purposefully on the National Mall for the March on Washington D.C. Accounts describe an almost cloudless sky, bluer than reality, the air unseasonably dry, with the mercury hovering in the mid 70s for most of the day. And the mood, famously, was electric, crackling with energy, pregnant with triumph, as though the park were a leviathan, roofless church.
But then there is this: In the 19,359 days since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered perhaps his most praised address–a sort of christening of a new and better Republic–a case can be made that the material conditions of African Americans has actually worsened, not improved.
When King stepped to the dais, the incarceration rate in the U.S. was roughly identical to Germany and Finland’s, as Michelle Alexander notes in her bestselling book, The New Jim Crow. In the intervening years, the U.S. has quadrupled its prison population, Finland has cut its incarceration rate by more than half, and Germany’s has remained stable. Drug offenses account for virtually the entire explosion in the U.S. prison population, and Blacks, in turn, represent nearly three-quarters of offenders sentenced to jail for drug offenses, despite representing only 13 percent of the population and the same percentage of the nation's drug users.
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And blacks have fallen much farther behind whites since 1963. According to the Urban Institute, average white family wealth in 1963 exceeded that of African-American families by about $117,000 in 1963. By 2013, the average wealth of white families exceeded Black families by $500,000, when adjusted for inflation.
Another reason why African-Americans have less wealth than whites is debt. With good-paying manufacturing jobs drying up, especially since Congress passed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, Blacks have redoubled their efforts to improve their earning power, but mostly what they have to show for it is merely debt. Forty-two percent of African-American Americans between the ages of 25 and 55 had student loan debt in 2013, compared to 28 percent of whites. The figure was negligible for both in 1963 which was two years before the federal government began its program of federally-guaranteed educational loans.
This dispossession, and the loss of decent work for men especially has fundamentally restructured the Black family, making marriage almost obsolete. This has a compounding effect because research shows that marriage almost erases racial disparities in income and health.
In 1950, 17 percent of African-American children lived in a home with their mother but not their father. By 2010 that had increased to 50 percent. In 1965, only eight percent of childbirths in the Black community occurred out-of-wedlock. In 2010 that figure was 41 percent; and today, the out-of-wedlock childbirth in the Black community sits at an astonishing 72 percent. The number of African-American women married and living with their spouse was recorded as 53 percent in 1950. By 2010, it had dropped to 25 percent.
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And to dismiss the trope that these figures on family formation merely reflect Black male irresponsibility, a 2007 study by a Boston University researcher found that Black men who did not live with their families make more of an effort to spend time with their children than any other racial or ethnic group.
Reflecting on the 50 year anniversary three years ago, one of King’s top lieutenants, the Rev. Joseph Lowery stood on the same marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial and summed up the last half century thusly:
"Everything has changed,” he said succinctly, “and nothing has changed."