USA TODAY International Edition
Martin Luther King wouldn’t have settled for an incomplete
The only place most Americans see “Whites Only” signs these days is in movies or old photos, but when the Rev. Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream speech” 50 years ago today, they were strewn across the South — water fountains, movie theaters, churches, swimming pools, libraries, even ambulances.
Being in the wrong place could land a black person in jail; giving someone the wrong look could be punishable by death.
Such casually brutal racism is hard to imagine for anyone who never lived through it, and hard to forget for those who grew up burdened by it, officially second class.
For all its power, King’s remarkable speech wasn’t the beginning of the end of this shameful system. By then, the Supreme Court had ruled that separate schools for blacks and whites were unconstitutional, and non- violent protests had been going on for years across the South, at lunch counters and in city streets.
The reaction was often violent. Just three months before the speech, Bull Connor’s police in Birmingham, Ala., beat protesters and turned fire hoses and dogs on them. In June, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was shot to death in the driveway of his Mississippi home. A little more than two weeks after the speech, one of the many bombings that targeted blacks in Birmingham ripped open a church and killed four girls, the youngest of whom was 11.
King’s speech reflected the violence, the humiliation and the determination not to endure it anymore. Mixed with the inspirational poetry that everyone recalls was a warning that seems prophetic: “There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America,” King said, “until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.”
Measured against the awful system of the day, race relations have come a remarkable distance. King’s speech and the events that inspired it led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination in public facilities such as restaurants and hotels. In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which began to stamp out the measures used to keep blacks from voting.
Many markers of progress have followed, punctuated by the election of a black president in 2008, something hard for even King to dream of in 1963. “We’ve occupied offices that we used to not be able to get an appointment in,” says the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a colleague of King’s.
Of course, there is a “but.” The racism of 2013 is nothing like the American apartheid of 1963. Yet it persists, and helps account for the vastly different ways blacks and whites view incidents such as the shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin.
King said in 1963 that blacks lived “on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” And while that’s less true today, economic disparity remains the defining difference between black and white Americans.
Blacks are three times as likely to live in poverty, and the median net worth of white households is 14 times that of black ones. Black unemployment is twice that of whites, and black family income is only about two- thirds that of white families.
Those problems are the legacy bequeathed by centuries of slavery and segregation — of families forcibly broken up, of hopes dashed, of education denied — that leave families trapped in a cycle of poverty not easily broken by changing the law.
The strongest have escaped, creating a thriving black middle class, but King would never have settled for so incomplete a triumph. He aspired to a fuller equality not yet attained.
Were the great orator alive today, he would surely celebrate the moment. But he would still be looking forward to the day when the final bonds of racism have been broken and all Americans are “free at last.”