How to Realize Dr. King’s Dream, 60 Years Later
It’s been 60 years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. King noted that Black Americans live “on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
While there have been gains made since 1963 on the question of closing the racial wealth gap, there is still a long way to go. A new report released jointly by the Institute for Policy Studies and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition finds that without policy interventions, it could take African Americans more than 500 more years to achieve economic parity with whites.
Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, chief of race, wealth and community for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on Rising Up With Sonali about persistent economic inequality along racial lines. Asante-Muhammad is also the lead author of a new report, “Still a Dream: Over 500 Years to Black Economic Equality.”
The views expressed here and on Rising Up With Sonali do not necessarily reflect the opinion of YES! Media.
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Sonali Kolhatkar
joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 TEDx talk of the same name.
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