On the morning of August 28, 1963, john fitzgerald kennedy woke up upset. Despite her attempts to abort it, a march of up to 250,000 people gathered in the heart of Washington to demand the racial equality in some USA broken by discrimination and ethnic segregation.
From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. then delivered one of the most famous speeches in history, a cornerstone of the movement for civil rights of African Americans. “I dream that my four children will one day live in a country in which they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the traits of their personality,” she proclaimed, stressing that racial injustice cannot be solved without a “radical distribution of the political and economic power & rdquor ;.
The four words of that rhetorical milestone —“I have a dream” (I have a dream)—still rumbling 60 years later. This Saturday, tens of thousands of people gathered in the same place to denounce that the activist’s dream is in danger. The event, the organizers clarified, was not a commemoration, but a “continuation & rdquor; of that path.
Action and reaction
King’s iconic speech paved the way for the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended racial segregation and outlawed multiple forms of discrimination that until then had condemned the African-American population. However, his contesting of the system made him “dangerous enough to get shot,” as he wrote. James Baldwin. On April 4, 1968, King was murdered in Memphis, where he was supporting the strike of the city’s black garbage collectors.
American democracy has come a long way since then, but every advance has generated a backlash. At the ceremony held this past weekend, King’s relatives denounced a setback of rights in USA. Just two months ago, the Supreme Court prohibited the country’s universities and higher education centers from giving priority to racial minorities to guarantee their access to more diverse classrooms. The same court, in conservative hands, has also rejected the lawsuits against the Mississippi law that restricts the access to vote of a part of the African-American population.
systemic racism
60 years after King’s dream, the racism it remains deeply embedded in the system and takes many forms. In 2018, whites represented 60% of the country’s adult population and blacks 12%. Even so, white families are ten times richerAfrican Americans are more than twice as likely to be in the poverty (with a quota of 19.5%) and a disproportionate rate of prisoners in jails that is six times higher.
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Racial inequality also claims lives. In 2020, the fbi record 10,299 complaints for hate crimes, the highest figure in two decades. More than a third of these had the African-American community as victims. In addition, it represents 26% of the killed by police violence, a figure that almost triples that of white victims. This brutality has also generated greater organization and cooperation of civil denunciation, as illustrated by the movement Black Lives Matter.
This Monday, in commemoration of the march on Washington, the US president Joe Biden and the vice president Kamala Harris They will meet with the family of the civil rights leader. “Let’s continue to show that racial equity is not just an aspiration. Let’s reject the corseted view that the US is a zero-sum game that holds that for one to succeed, another must fail,” the president’s team wrote in a letter. published opinion in ‘The Washington Post’. The dream still has a long way to go.