This week millions of Americans will pause to remember and celebrate the life and achievements of Martin Luther King Jr., the 20th century’s most influential civil rights activist.
King spoke passionately, wrote persuasively and led countless marches and sit-ins, crying out for justice for oppressed minorities in the United States.
At the time, America was two societies, separate but unequal.
Yet King was convinced that racial hatreds were driven not by individual convictions but by attitudes deeply ingrained in society.
He made it his mission to change those attitudes. And he insisted it could only be done without violence.
In 1963, he was Time magazine’s Man of the Year.
The following year, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize at 35, the youngest Peace Prize winner ever.
In 1977, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Like Washington and Lincoln, King was unequivocally the right man in the right place at the right time.
Watching film clips of Dr. King recently, I marveled again at his courage and intellect, his calm demeanor, his sense of hope.
King insisted we all have an amazing potential for good, that there exists in each of us a natural identification with every other human being, and that when we diminish others, we diminish ourselves.
While much remains to be done, I’d like to believe that King would be pleased with the progress the nation has made over the last 60 years.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were landmark pieces of legislation that outlawed racial discrimination.
Since the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, racial segregation in housing has fallen by 30%.
The number of African American elected officials at various levels of government has increased significantly since the 1960s.
(President Biden likened voting laws in some Southern states to “Jim Crow 2.0.” But in recent elections in those states, Black voter registration and turnout rates hit record highs and, in some cases, exceeded white turnout rates.)
The mayors of the nation’s three largest cities are Black. Two of our seven Supreme Court justices are Black. And we are the only majority-white country that has had a one-term – much less a two-term – Black president.
There have been significant advances in education and employment opportunity for African Americans.
There is far more financial inclusion, with greatly improved access to banking, investments and homeownership.
There is a growing Black middle class, and the number of Black-owned businesses has increased dramatically.
African Americans have made major contributions to American culture, music, sports, entertainment, literature and art.
More African Americans than ever are attending college and pursuing higher education.
And there are clear signs that racism has declined.
When I was born, for example, interracial marriage was forbidden in over 30 U.S. states. But in 1967, the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia made interracial marriage legal in all 50 states.
There has been a steady rise in intermarriage in the U.S. (In 2021, 22% of newlyweds and 14% of all married couples were interracial.)
There has been economic improvement as well.
Over the past 50 years, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center, the proportion of Black Americans who are high-income (more than $156,000 a year) has risen from 5% to 12%.
Fewer Black Americans are poor than 50 years ago, and more than twice as many are rich.
Yet Black poverty remains disproportionate. And so does household net worth.
According to a Pew Research Center report issued last month, at the end of 2022 white households had a median net worth of $250,400, while Black households had a median net worth of just $27,100.
Is this best explained by racism?
As economist Thomas Sowell writes in his latest book, Social Justice Fallacies…
The fundamental issue is not whether employer discrimination – or societal discrimination in general – can be a cause of different economic and social outcomes among racial or ethnic groups. It can be, it has been, and there is no reason whatever to preclude it from possibilities in our own times. But there is also no reason to preclude any of the many other factors that have also produced outcome disparities among all sorts of groups, around the world and throughout recorded history.
I’ll discuss those factors – which determine the income and net worth of every American regardless of race, creed or color – in my next column.