Sixty Years Later, We Can Make King’s Dream a Reality

Sixty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his historic keynote at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

That 1963 rally on the National Mall was the culmination of two decades of marches focused on ending employment discrimination and demanding greater job opportunities for African Americans. The organizing manual for the March on Washington made it plain: “We march to redress old grievances and to help resolve an American crisis. That crisis is born of the twin evils of racism and economic deprivation.”

In what would later be called his “I Have a Dream” speech, King opened with the reality that 100 years after the emancipation proclamation, “The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” Sixty years later we see that while much of Black America has been freed from income poverty, Black people in this country still face a poverty of wealth.

In our new report, “Still A Dream,” we note progress—alongside some humbling findings about how far we have to go.

In 1963, the year of the march, African Americans had a stunningly high poverty rate of 51 percent. The “war on poverty” was declared shortly afterward, dropping that figure to 32 percent by 1969. By 2021, the Black poverty rate was 20 percent—significantly lower than 60 years ago, although we can hardly celebrate one in five Black people still living in income poverty.

It’s important to understand that poverty is commonly defined by income level. In 2021, a household of three people that had a combined income of less than $21,559 was considered to be in poverty. Most Black Americans have escaped income poverty by that very modest measure, although we found it will still take over 500 years for Black income to catch up with white income at the current rate.

As wide as the income gap remains, the wealth gap is even larger.

As of 2019, the last year with complete data, the median wealth of Black households was just $9,000—compared to $160,000 for white people. These figures have improved little since King’s time. In 1961, African Americans had 12 cents for every dollar of wealth of non-Black Americans. By 2019, that figure had risen to just 18 cents.

At that rate it would take780 years for Black wealth to equal non-Black wealth.

Sixty years ago, King spoke of “the fierce urgency of now.” He warned, “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. … It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.”

Yet little has been more gradual than our nation’s path to racial economic equality. It will take bold policy proposals with deep and sustained investment to bridge the divide that was created through policies and generations of disinvestment. The good news is that if we take these steps decisively, we can close that gap in as little as a generation.

Our report identified several bold ideas that would move us in the right direction. A federal jobs guarantee, for instance, could help close the income gap, while universal health care would spare millions of low-income households the threat of bankruptcy over a health scare.

Other legislation that could make a difference is sitting before lawmakers now.

The American Housing and Economic Mobility Act would invest $445 billion in a national Housing Trust Fund to help first-time home buyers in formerly redlined or segregated areas. And legislation like the American Opportunity Act, which would seed federal “baby bond” accounts for all children, could rapidly reduce racial inequality while easing poverty for all Americans.

Alongside these universal programs, reparations targeted to the African American community offer the most direct and cost-efficient means to move our country beyond the racial wealth divide upon which it was founded.

In our government’s responses to the Great Recession, the pandemic, and the war in Ukraine, we’ve seen that billions or even trillions can be found when we’re ready to take decisive action. It’s far past time to take that decisive action on racial economic inequality and finally turn King’s dream into a reality.

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is the chief of race, wealth, and community at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

Chuck Collins directs the Program on Inequality and co-edits Inequaity.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. They are co-authors of the new report, Still a Dream: Over 500 Years to Black Economic Equality.

The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.