Forty years ago tonight, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tenn. On the eve of his death, King preached: “I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”

A new report, “Forty Years Later: The Unrealized American Dream,” by Dedrick Muhammad, my colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, examines our progress toward King’s dream of racial equality, specifically between blacks and whites. Simply put, we’re not much closer to the promised land than we were at the time of King’s murder.

The inequalities of income and wealth that have polarized our nation are even more extreme when examined through the prism of race.
Read More