"Forty Years After King's Death His Legacy Still Resonates," echoes a subtitle in one of arguably thousands of articles that appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout the nation to mark the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968. Despite his appearance on the national stage for a mere 13 years, Dr. King ranks as one of the greatest reform leaders of the twentieth century.
The national media first caught wind of King during the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott when, a rather young, inexperienced Baptist minister was selected to serve as the spokesperson for a local civil rights demonstration to desegregate the city's busses. By the conclusion of the campaign in 1956, when a federal court ruled that Montgomery's bus segregation law was unconstitutional, Dr. King, merely 27 years of age, had become a national figure.
It was as if the Montgomery Bus Boycott permitted Dr. King to leave his calling card and announce to the nation and the world that a bright, fearless, and resilient new leader had arrived on the scene, and if African Americans and progressive whites only trusted and believed in his message, he would be willing to carry us on the remaining leg of our tortuous journey to freedom.
Indeed, many of us, good men and women of all races, nationalities, and ethnic groups, hitched ourselves to this man and his profound movement of non-violent passive resistance. And we watched with fascination as centuries of bigotry and hatred and white supremacy slowly dissolved before our very eyes. We could look to the sky in 1968 and know with utter certainty that the United States was a far better place than it had been 13 years earlier before this "drum major for freedom" came on the scene and dedicated his life to our freedom and dignity.
I can testify that the United States, while not entirely free of discrimination against African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, women, or any number of underrepresented groups, is a far more tolerant and inclusive society today than when I grew up and came of age during the 1960s. Yet as the eminent labor leader A. Philip Randolph wrote, "Freedom is never given." It is taken and demanded. It also comes with a cost. Many courageous men and women of all ages and races literally put their lives on the line, as the disturbing images of lynching, snarling police dogs, and high pressure fire hoses, and bombed out churches remind us when we watch newsreels or documentaries of this troubled era.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act and its counterpart, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, remain the two most significant civil rights laws passed by Congress in the twentieth century. The Voting Rights Act not only toppled the remaining barriers that stood in the way of African Americans on their march to the ballot box, but it, in time, revolutionized the South's political landscape.
A surge of African-American voting in the past 40 years has led to a dramatic increase in black office holding, highly capable individuals who have served in elective offices as diverse as mayors to governors and United States senators, one of whom, Barack Obama, has just recently been elected president of the United States, an extraordinary achievement for not only African Americans, but for all Americans. I concur with the words of the great poet and writer Maya Angelou who, in the aftermath of the election, stated that she was so proud of our country because Obama's decisive victory demonstrated that our nation had finally grown up. By any measure, these gains represent remarkable progress in the space of four decades.
The black middle class has also experienced phenomenal growth since the 1960s, as more college and professionally trained African Americans moved into the ranks of white collar jobs. It is hardly newsworthy today when an African American is elected to state or national office, heads a major corporation, or is promoted to the rank of general or admiral in the armed forces.
Who could have predicted in 1968 that Colin Powell, an African American, would serve as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State or that Condoleezza Rice, an African-American woman, would serve as the president's National Security Advisor and as Secretary of State? African Americans can be found today on Wall Street, in corporate board rooms, as executives of major companies, and as presidents and chancellors of predominately white colleges and universities.
Yet as impressive as the progress that African Americans have made as a group in the past 40 years, several disturbing signs point to trouble on the horizon, not the least of which is the persistent gap between black and white income. African Americans made significant gains in closing the disparity between their median income and that of white workers during the 1950s and 1960s, but progress in this area has slowed considerably since that time.
Today, black household median income is $31,969 compared to $37,781 for Hispanics and $50,673 for white families. African Americans also have fewer assets such as stocks, bonds, annuities, and savings than whites, less access to preferential low interest loans and other forms of credit and collateral, less equity in their homes, and are less able to withstand the vagaries of economic misfortune.
African Americans have lagged considerably behind whites in access to health care historically, a pattern that persists to this day, and an area that Dr. King was deeply concerned with. To be sure, this is a national problem, for at least 50 million Americans do not have access to affordable heath care. But African Americans and Hispanics share the brunt of the burden in 2008 because of their tenuous, low-paying jobs. Visit the emergency room or the charity hospital in any American city, large or small, and witness the sea of black and brown faces requesting the most basic of medical services from routine checkups to treatment for chronic illnesses.
The lack of access to health care manifest itself in a multitude of ways. African Americans have a shorter life expectancy that whites, and black males have the shortest life span of all. Black children, while generally healthy and robust, suffer more childhood illnesses than white children, the consequence, I maintain, of poverty, indifference, and environmental conditions.
Expectant black mothers who are living on the margins are less inclined to receive adequate prenatal care or to provide proper nutrition for their infants once they are born. Black children compose a significant part of the nation's obesity rate, although white and Hispanic children are not far behind. Inadequate health care takes its toll not merely on the individual, but on the entire community.
Dr. King might well have predicted the persistence of African-American poverty, for the 1968 Poor people's Campaign was designed principally to draw attention to this insidious problem and to press a reluctant president and Congress to take a more aggressive stance in rectifying this issue.
But even King's wildest dreams, or my own, for that matter, would never have predicted the fragmentation of the African-American family after 1986. The large percentage of African-American families headed by females, approximately 70 percent today, the majority of whom fall at or near the poverty line, would have been unimaginable a generation ago when one in four black families was female headed. In many inner city communities, 80 to 90 percent of African-American families do not have a father in the household. If this sounds remarkable, the New York Times reported in 2006 that less than one in ten black children under the age of five live with both parents.
Rest assured that millions of black families are living in the lap of luxury, and some may even resemble the Huxtables, portrayed by Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad on The Cosby Show. The overwhelming majority of African-American families are hard working, law-abiding, religiously devout, and utterly devoted to their children and extended family members. In a word, they behave almost no differently than middle class families from other races. However, the divide between the black middle class and the black impoverished has grown wider since 1968, a sign that the civil rights movement and even a robust economy during the 1990s did little to improve their lives. These individuals, who number in the millions, defy simplistic descriptions or easy categorization. Many are chronically unemployed or underemployed, have little schooling, have had frequent brushes the law, and possess few of the skills required to compete in a modern, information-age society.
One calamity that no one could have foreseen in 1968 was the AIDS epidemic and its devastating impact on African Americans. The African-American community acknowledged belatedly that HIV-AIDS was a serious problem in their community, and many Blacks viewed HIV-AIDS incorrectly as a gay white disease. How wrong they happened to be.
The HIV-AIDS crisis continues to rise to unimaginable proportions. The Black AIDS Institute, an independent advocacy group, reported recently that nearly 600,000 African Americans are living with HIV, and up to 30,000 become infected each year. Blacks, they report, are two and a half times more likely to die than infected whites, and this is the real kicker. If African Americans in the U.S. composed a nation, it would rank number 16 in the world in the number of persons living with the AIDS virus. Ironically, the United Nations, in a separate report, concluded that fewer people worldwide are dying of AIDS if measured from the apex of the disease in the late 1990s.
The numbers in the African-American community, by all indicators appears to be moving in the opposite direction, a sobering fact. This epidemic has reached such drastic proportions in the African-American community that any realistic solution will require the joint effort of the federal government, public health officials, and broad-based African American leadership. It will also require that African Americans accept greater personal responsibility and refrain from engaging in the unsafe practices which spread this disease.
Despite these obstacles, African Americans have made tremendous progress in some areas. Dr. King, however, would not have rested comfortably until African Americans and their allies constructed an effective coalition to end poverty and human suffering for all Americans.
He would have been at the forefront of the fight for universal health care and to guarantee a basic, livable wage for all working people. And Dr. King would have insisted that we use diplomacy rather than warfare to settle our international disputes. Least we forget that Dr. King's final two public campaigns, the support of Memphis sanitation workers for fair wages and the Poor People's Campaign were designed to achieve these goals. And I have no doubt that Dr. King would have taken great pride in the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president in the history of this nation, a nation with a tortured and troubled racial past, where change in race relations has come in slow increments.
Yet when the post-election euphoria died down, Dr. King would have challenged President Obama, as he challenged presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, to endorse programs and policies that would reduce unemployment in the African-American community, to raise the minimum wage, to provide universal heath care for all Americans, and to improve the dismal quality of schools in the inner cities that are heavily populated with African Americans and Hispanics. These are some of the many legacies that Dr. King has left for us to ponder. Above all, Dr. King's life is a testament that one individual can lead a movement so powerful that it can change the world.
Dr. Albert S. Broussard is professor of history at Texas A&M University. He is the author of several books and articles on African-American history.
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