Fifty years after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream speech, nearly half of those who responded to a new poll said a lot more needs to be done before people in the US would “be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”.
The Pew Research Centre in Washington, DC, found that 49 per cent of those polled think “a lot more” needs to be done to achieve the colour-blind society King envisioned in his 1963 I Have a Dream speech. But 73 per cent of black respondents and 81 per cent of whites thought the two races get along “very well” or “pretty well”.
The telephone poll of 2,231 adults, including 376 black Americans and 218 people of Hispanic descent, was conducted between August 1 through 11.
A quarter of the black Americans polled said the lives of blacks were better now than they were five years ago, when the US elected its first black President, Barack Obama. In 2009, after Obama’s election, 39 per cent of black Americans expressed the same opinion.
The economic gulf between whites and blacks is roughly the same as it was half a century ago
“It’s clear now that the rosy glow that followed that historic election has faded among both blacks and whites,” said Pew Research Centre senior editor Rich Morin. “We don’t know for sure but it’s reasonable to suggest that among the biggest reasons would be the Great Recession, which hit all Americans hard, but particularly blacks.”
King’s speech was the centrepiece of a march on Washington that drew some 250,000 people to the National Mall. In it, the famed orator described the lives of black Americans, telling the nation: “The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
The Pew poll found the economic gulf between whites and blacks is roughly the same as it was half a century ago.
The gaps between blacks and whites in the areas of household income and household wealth have widened, but the poll found that on measures such as high school completion and life expectancy, they have narrowed.
The poll found that on other measures, including poverty and homeownership rates, the gaps are roughly the same as they were 40 years ago.
Pew said that between 1967 and 2011 the median income of a black household of three rose from about $24,000 to nearly $40,000. Expressed as a share of white income, black households earn about 59 per cent of what white households earn.
When expressed as dollars, the black-white income gap widened, from about $19,000 in the late 1960s to roughly $27,000 today. Pew said the race gap on household wealth has increased from $75,224 in 1984 to $84,960 in 2011.
Pew said other indicators of financial well-being have changed little in recent decades, including homeownership rates and the share of each race that live above the poverty line. The black unemployment rate has consistently been about double that of whites since the 1950s, according to Pew.
When it came to criminal justice, Pew said that significant minorities of whites agree that blacks receive unequal treatment when dealing with the criminal justice system.
Pew said seven in 10 blacks and about a third of whites said blacks are treated less fairly in their dealings with the police.
And about two-thirds of black respondents and quarter of whites said blacks are not treated as fairly as whites in the courts.
Thirty-five per cent of blacks polled said they had been discriminated against or treated unfairly because of their race in the past year, compared with 20 per cent of Hispanics and 10 per cent of whites, Pew said.
Key dates in US civil rights movement
1948: President Harry Truman desegregates the armed forces.
1954: Supreme Court outlaws segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education.
1955-1957: Bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked by seamstress Rosa Parks and organised by King.
1962: James Meredith enrols at University of Mississippi after President John F. Kennedy sends in troops.
1963: Images of Birmingham, Alabama, police using fire hoses and dogs on black demonstrators gain widespread sympathy for civil rights movement.
1963: About 250,000 people gather for March on Washington. King gives ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
1964: President Lyndon Johnson signs sweeping Civil Rights Act, forbidding discrimination in many areas of life.
1965: King leads march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in support of black voter registration.
1965: Johnson signs Voting Rights Act.
1968: King assassinated at age 39, sparking riots in more than 100 cities.
1978: Supreme Court rules in Bakke vs Regents of University of California that fixed racial quotas are illegal.
2003: In Grutter vs Bollinger, Supreme Court upholds University of Michigan Law School policy that takes race into account for admissions.
2013: In Shelby County vs Holder, Supreme Court strikes down Section 4 of 1965 Voting Rights Act, which determined if a state or locality required approval before changing voting laws. (Reuters)