Black Americans have endured the unendurable for too long. Sixty years after the famed March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his landmark “I Have a Dream” speech, African Americans are on a path where it will take 500 more years to reach economic equality.

A new report, Still A Dream, coauthored by Institute for Policy Studies and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, examines the economic indicators since 1963.  Our country has taken significant steps towards racial equity since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. But growing income and wealth inequality over the last four decades has supercharged historic racial wealth disparities, slowing and even reversing many of those gains.

Sixty years without substantially narrowing the Black-white wealth divide is a policy failure. But just as federal policy helped create the racial wealth gap, it can also help close it. In this report, we look in detail at the state of that divide and recommend policy reforms that would substantially narrow it within one to two generations.

Key Findings

  • In a few areas, African Americans have made substantial socioeconomic advancements since the 1960s.
  • Yet there has been minimal progress in most socioeconomic indicators. At this pace, it would still take centuries for African Americans to reach parity with white Americans.

Solutions and Interventions

There are a wide range of solutions necessary to narrow the racial economic divide. The five that we believe would make the most difference are:

  • A push for full employment and guaranteed jobs.
  • A massive land and homeownership program.
  • A commitment to individual asset building.
  • Policies to reduce dynastic concentrations of wealth and power.
  • Targeted reparations and universal health care.

Read the full article about economic inequality by Chuck Collins at Inequality.