“We have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” Martin Luther King Jr. told the rapt throng on the National Mall 50 years ago.
The 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington
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The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which he gave the speech, commemorated the 100-year anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. A century after that proclamation, “the Negro still is not free,” King told the crowd. “The life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.”
We asked Mayor Emanuel for his thoughts about the March on Washington anniversary. We wanted to know how far Chicago had come since then, in his view, and what more needed to be done. How did he think things were better, or not, for the city’s African-Americans?
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The arc of history has spanned fifty years since Dr. King declared “I Have a Dream,” yet the echoes of his voice still ring loud and clear here in Chicago, urging us to honor the anniversary of his historic speech, not by looking back on all that has been accomplished, but by looking forward as we each pull together to bend the arc of history ever further towards justice. Dr. King’s dream inspired generations of Chicagoans since, from those who marched with him to integrate education and housing in this city, including my mother, to those who broke down old barriers, especially Mayor Harold Washington, to those who have changed the course of history, none more so than President Barack Obama. As we mark this historic anniversary, we know that dream lives on, as we work together to improve education, safety, and opportunity for all our residents, and build a city for our children that is defined not by its divisions, but by what is possible when we work to overcome them.
Segregated neighborhoods
“We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one,” King said on that August day.
The African-American migration into Chicago slowed in the 1960s and ’70s, but the white migration to the suburbs didn’t—so the city’s black neighborhoods expanded and their population thinned. “The ‘ghetto’ in which black Chicagoans are confined has grown to an even more enormous size, while becoming more and more hollow at its core,” the Chicago Urban League said in a 1978 report.
A host of social scientists have demonstrated how the segregation that was imposed on African-Americans has concentrated their poverty, intensifying the ills of their neighborhoods. For his book, Sharkey tracked the economic outcomes of a large cohort of children raised after the civil rights movement. The black children had “substantially lower” income as adults than the white children—even when they were raised by parents with similar jobs and levels of education and aspirations for their kids.
