48 years and one day ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of the greatest pieces of oratory in the history of the United States. Within it, he shared a radical dream of an America based not on greed, divisiveness, and hate, but rather of one built on social justice, brotherhood, and racial equality. His words still speak to us today; however, we have overwhelmingly failed to put his dream into action.
I do not mean to say that our society hasn't made great strides in some areas. We have an African American as president. Many colleges use affirmative action measures to ensure that minorities represent a fair share of the student body. Few people willingly admit to being racists anymore (though some Tea Party activists come close to). All of this marks great progress. However, Dr. King's dream of an America free of any form of racism is still far from becoming a reality.
Our criminal justice system is often still full of racism. The War on Drugs has particularly hit the African American community hard. Over 80% of those sentenced in federal court for crack related crimes are black, though they make up only 1/3 of regular users. And, due in large part to the War on Drugs, more than 3 times as many African Americans live in prison cells as in college dorms. Furthermore, though blacks make up only 12.6% of the American population, they make up over 41% of prison inmates. A quick review of our capitol punishment trends reveal a similar story. In fact, our death penalty sentencing statistics are so bad that, according to Amnesty International, "A report sponsored by the American Bar Association in 2007 concluded that one-third of African-American death row inmates in Philadelphia would have received sentences of life imprisonment if they had not been African-American." All of this reveals a criminal justice system is still racist and falls massively short of the standard's set by King's I Have A Dream speech.
The terrible thing is that at least half of King's dream isn't even paid attention to. King believed just as much in economic justice as in racial equality. Anymore, the media has painted King as nothing more than a crusader for racial equality, completely ignoring the fact that he was a self-described democratic socialist. In fact, one of King's main reasons for opposing the war in Vietnam was because the war took money away from the poor.
There is...a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed that there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, and new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam. And I watched the program broken as if it was some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic, destructive suction tube. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such.
We have utterly failed King's dream. We spend trillions nation building as 9.1% of our countrymen are unemployed. The least wealthy 80% of people control only 15% of the wealth. There are 643,067homeless in the United States right now. We have abandoned the least of us, and abandoned King's dream. To sustain a fair and right nation, we must return to what that great American envisioned.