Commentaries

We must work for economic justice

By Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued its historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, ruling that separate and unequal education violated the Constitution. This was a parting-of-the-Red-Sea moment in the struggle for freedom. The court outlawed segregation. The dream -- that we would have one America, one big tent in which all could live -- was recognized in law.

We have come a long way, yet the dream is still deferred. Brown only opened a new struggle. The civil rights movement succeeded in changing the law and integrating the schools. But the resistance never stopped. We saw the rise of private academies, the creation of voucher systems, the flight to the suburbs, the savage inequality of school funding -- and in many ways, we are more separate and unequal than ever.

We've gone from segregation and separation to disparity, a shift from horizontal to vertical separation. Before Brown, separation was horizontal. We could not sit side-by-side in classrooms, at lunch counters, in movie theaters or in hospital rooms. Brown removed that racial wall.

We are now free, but not equal. Now there is a vertical split-level segregation. What used to be east and west division now is north and south.

This disparity reflects the legacies of the past, as well as the inequities of the present. While we can hail the remarkable progress since 1954, there is among blacks and browns a state of undeclared emergency.

We look at our city councils, our state legislatures, our departments of government and we see the progress we've made -- even to the White House. But people of color remain No. 1 in infant mortality, No. 1 in decreased life expectancy, No. 1 in home foreclosures. The wealth gap has widened, with estimates suggesting that more than half of the black wealth has been lost in the past two years.

We are No. 1 in church foreclosures, No. 1 in loss of public transportation, No. 1 in health-care disparities, No. 1 in unemployment, No. 1 in criminal justice crises and No. 1 in school budget cuts. Americans are struggling with a serious recession, with unemployment reaching 10 percent. But African Americans overall are suffering a depressionlike 20 percent-plus unemployment that reaches 40 percent among teens.

Average working people make less than their parents did; 40 million Americans are in poverty; 50 million are food insecure; one in five children is raised in poverty.

We are in a state of emergency -- but there is no urgency to the emergency. America faces mass unemployment, but Congress is tied in knots about jobs programs. Conservatives are using the crisis to rail about spending and deficits, not about banks that are out of control or trade policies that are shipping jobs abroad.

As many as 300,000 public school teachers face layoffs in the coming year. States are eliminating all-day kindergarten, shutting down summer schools, increasing class size and college tuition.

Conservatives complain about spending, but it isn't about spending or deficits. They will vote for a $32 billion supplement for the Afghanistan war and will spend money building schools in Afghanistan even as we shut them down in Kansas City.

The Congressional Black Caucus pleads for $1.5 billion to pay for summer jobs for teenagers. With teenage unemployment approaching 50 percent in our cities, jobs are vital. But even this is stalled -- and it is almost June.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. thought of the civil rights movement as a kind of symphony with four parts. The abolition of slavery, the outlawing of segregation and gaining the right to vote were the first three. Then came what he knew would be the hardest of all: economic justice, equal opportunity for education and jobs, access to capital, joining the American Dream.

In each of these movements, change could come not from the top but from the bottom. Slavery ended not because the slave master wanted to give up slaves, but because slaves asserted their humanity and people of conscience joined them.

If we are to gain economic justice and equal opportunity, then it will come not because the wealthy endow the poor, but because the poor assert their humanity and demand opportunity. This takes discipline, self-reliance, movement and mobilization. We must bring the urgency of moral passion to the emergency.

It is time to march.

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