There Is Still Much Work to be Done

Benjamin Jealous, President and CEO of the NAACP, is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change.

Since the struggles of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement, we as a country have celebrated significant breakthroughs. Last year's inauguration of President Obama as the nation's commander-in-chief broke the White House color barrier, while the appointments of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Attorney General Eric Holder signified a new wave of diverse and highly qualified officials committed to equality. Undoubtedly, these political achievements are indicators of hope, steps closer to Dr. King's dream of racial and ethnic equality in both treatment and opportunity.

Unfortunately, our inclination to celebrate these triumphs is overshadowed by the daunting disparities and inequalities we have yet to eliminate.

-- Whites make up over 80 percent of drug users nationwide, while African-Americans, who comprise 12 percent of the population, make up 13 percent of drug users. Yet, African-Americans make up 38 percent of those arrested and 59 percent of those convicted of drug offenses.

-- Major racial disparities plague our health system. According to the American Journal of Public Health, the deaths of 880,000 black people would have been prevented if the mortality rate of blacks had been the same as that of whites.

-- Americans missed out on hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding due to an undercount in the 2000 Census, with low income and minority populations most frequently undercounted and disproportionately absorbing the effects of those lost funds.

-- In Haiti, a legacy of poverty has left the country completely unable to withstand the force of a devastating natural disaster. The deforestation of the hills by people desperately seeking firewood and charcoal, lack of infrastructure and fragile buildings transformed this terrible natural disaster into a human catastrophe.

We must heed the words of Dr. King, who said "the time has come for us to civilize ourselves, by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty," whether in our neighbor Haiti or at home. Dr. King would appeal to our humanity to give as much as we could to Haiti in this time of need. Here in the United States, he would urge us to continue the long-standing fight to create living-wage jobs that will bolster the economic conditions of the nearly 40 million Americans living in poverty. It is our responsibility to encourage the estimated 6.4 million people missed in the 2000 Census to register this year, which will allow for proper allocation of jobs, funds and other resources in hard-to-count areas in an effort to help reduce poverty.

Poverty is exacerbated by a criminal justice system that captures far too many people in its web. The United States is the world's leader in incarceration, with 2.3 million people currently in our nation's prisons or jails. Over the past 30 years, the U.S. prison system has experienced a 500 percent increase, resulting in prison overcrowding and states being swallowed by the burden of funding the swift growth of the penal system, despite increasing confirmation that mass incarceration is not the most effective means of achieving public safety. Ex-prisoners returning to their communities face enormous barriers to finding employment; nationally, two-thirds will reoffend. We must enact national law enforcement standards that are both smart and safe, which will effectively end the practice of racial profiling and take a significant step toward the long overdue derailment of the school-to-prison pipeline.

A man of noble vision, Dr. King once said: "Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals." It is time for America to carry on the legacy that Dr. King has left us by dedicating itself to the improvement of our communities, embracing a passion for social justice and working tirelessly to ensure that his dream becomes a reality.

Photo credit: US National Archives