Black America

40 years on from the death of Martin Luther King, attention turns to the progress made by African Americans in that time

There is a perception by some students that the serious discussion about Barack Obama’s succeeding George Bush in the White House, along with other examples of notable or prominent black people, represents the fact that race no longer matters in America.

Forty years after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, and nearly as many years of Affirmative Action programmes, how far have American Americans progressed?

One of the members of the Kerner Commission, a body founded by President Lyndon Johnson in the late sixties set up to examine the reasons for the riots that broke out after Dr King was shot, writes in the Post this week.

Edward W Brooke suggests that blacks have made “great strides” in American life, but this positive news needs to be tempered with a harsh dose of reality:

Despite the visibility of accomplished African Americans and Hispanics and the progress in race relations that has been made in this country, for America’s poor—those who do not know what health care is because for them it doesn’t exist, those for whom prison is a more likely prospect than college, those who have been abandoned to the worst of decaying, crime-ridden urban centers because of the flight of middle-class blacks, whites and Hispanics—the future may be as bleak as it was for their counterparts in the 1960s.

The core conditions that the Kerner Commission identified as key contributors to civil unrest are as prevalent, if not as virulent, today as they were 40 years ago. The lack of affordable, safe housing and the absence of jobs or hope for the future have confined even more of our citizens to an eerily familiar world that not so long ago gave rise to cities in flames.

A great feature on the Economist website could be used by teachers for class discussion or for students to sue in their revision of this topic, which provides a sharp critique of the state of race in modern America.

It argues, for instance, that:

“Affirmative action—and other efforts—have certainly failed to rid America of sharp inequalities. Past oppression probably counts for much of the persistence of black poverty: in 1967, according to the census, the average black person had an income that was just 54% of the average white one. By 2005 the gap had only closed to 64%.”