Echoing the words of author Charles Dickens as he talked about the State of Black America 2009 report last week, National Urban League president Marc H. Morial told members of the Black Press Tuesday morning, “These are the best of times and the worst of times for Black America.
“They’re the best of times because obviously the election of an African-American president at this point in history is a marvelous accomplishment, a significant achievement, something that could not have been foreshadowed even 24 months ago. In addition to that, you have an unprecedented level of clout that African Americans have achieved in the Congress of the United States, with some 40-plus members of the Congressional Black Caucus. With African Americans holding four or five standing committees and some 16 subcommittee chairmanships, with James Clyburn serving as the No. 3 person in the House.
“These are tools, they are accomplishments, but they are also tools for our community which are a product of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and ‘70s, the Voting Rights Act and the understanding of political participation as being a very important step for our community towards and on the road to empowerment and full equality.
“These are the best of times for those reasons, but they are also the worst of times,” Morial continued. “We have lost ground in the last eight years from an economic standpoint. Virtually every single economic indicator for African Americans — whether it’s jobs, median income or home ownership — are down from where they were eight years ago. As we track our index from last year to this year, the gap between Black Americans and White Americans has indeed widened even if so slightly in every area with the exception of health. Again, our index measures the disparities between Black and White Americans. We formulate and make a very important contribution when it comes to statistics and numbers because we think it’s part of our obligation as the National Urban League to report facts. The numbers tell a very important story. The index that we’ve created tries to take numbers which are complex and can be confusing and place them in an index that can be easily understood. Within the index, we measure 300 data sets. We look at a whole combination of things and that forms the basis of the report.”
The annual State of Black America report is a barometer of conditions for African Americans in the United States. It includes the National Urban League’s Equality Index, a statistical measurement of the disparities between Blacks and whites across five categories: economics, education, health, civic engagement and social justice.
This year’s report shows an overall slight decline in the status of Blacks as compared to whites, moving from 71.5 percent in 2008 to 71.1 percent in 2009. The only sub index that increased over the past year was in health at about 1.1 percentage points. This was largely because the gap narrowed for those without health insurance.
The annual State of Black America report also incorporates the insight and expertise of some of the best and brightest minds in America, Morial said. “These guest authors write pieces which talk about the challenges but also offer proposals and suggestions for change and solutions,” he said. “We think it’s important for our recommendations to be data-driven. We also think we cannot simply be diagnostic; we also have to be prescriptive. We cannot simply say, ‘These are the problems.’ We have to try to offer solutions and try to put any muscle and advocacy that we have behind the implementation of those solutions.
“This year’s report’s message to the President contains recommendations in a wide range of areas, but we focus at the League primarily on the issues of economics and children. We do focus on health and a wide array of other issues, but our focus areas are really economics and education and health to the extent that it affects quality of health —it’s a very important issue.
While Morial acknowledged the progress Blacks have made politically, the 288-page report points out that Blacks are twice as likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts, three times as likely to live in poverty and more than six times as likely to be incarcerated.
The theme for this year’s report is “Message to the President.”
“As we began planning for this year’s issue, we knew that we would have a new president and that things were going to change very much in the country,” Stephanie Jones, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Urban League Policy Institute, said Tuesday. “In the middle of last year, we began planning for this issue of The State of Black America to focus on the new president, whoever that might be, and that it would deliver a message to them. The Urban League message, a message from Urban America and what we thought the new president should do to revitalize our cities and support our communities...
“We focused on particular areas of concern to the Urban League and the Urban League movement — education, health, housing, jobs — things that are of real concern to our communities,” Jones explained.
“Although we didn’t know who the new president would be, it’s all been very fortuitous because the new administration has set into motion a lot of change and people are looking to the administration for change, something different and for some very effective policies,” she continued. “We are right there in the pocket with that, with this very strong recommendation, a very clear, concise and insightful analysis. We look at this year’s report as more than just a message to the president, but a road map for the new president to help get us back on track, to support and rebuild urban communities, to create jobs, to revitalize housing and restore our homes, to give our children the opportunity to thrive, to provide quality health care for all Americans and a number of other areas that we feel are very important.
“We feel it’s a very strong policy document and something that can be used throughout the year and beyond for anyone interested in learning more about the issues and solutions that we think are important.”
Two years ago, then Senator Barack Obama was called upon to write the foreword to the State of Black America 2007, a report that focused on the conditions and challenges facing Black men.
“This sad story is a stark reminder that the long march toward true and meaningful equality in America isn’t over,” Obama wrote. “We have a long way to go.”
Among other things, the National Urban League recommended last week that President Obama “take assertive and aggressive steps to ensure that this Green Jobs evolution, revolution and transformation that’s beginning to take place in this country not become an area where there is a new divide, albeit a Green Divide that replaces the Digital Divide.
“We think that that means that we have to invest in preparing our community and also in preparing our businesses and opening doors for our businesses for new opportunities in this burgeoning and expanding green economy that is here and I believe is here to stay. What form and shape it takes is not necessarily clear. The President, we think, is committed to that and we believe that that ought to be a very important marker. There needs to be an investment in training — the stimulus bill has money for training but we want to make sure that there’s a focus on the worker at the bottom of the economic ladder, that there’s a focus on small and African-American businesses and that we work to get this green economy thing right at the beginning so we’re not fighting a Green Divide three, five or seven years down the line.”
The NUL also strongly recommended “mandatory universal early childhood education for all kids.
“We think we cannot close the achievement gap, you cannot close the effective performance of our children, unless we make a strong move to get them in school as early as possible in a full developmental setting,” Morial said. “To hear the President talk about that is an affirmation. We say ‘Let’s work to get that done.’”
Other NUL recommendations included:
• Expanded school days
• Universal health care and a “comprehensive” system to provide Blacks with health education, prevention and intervention
• Increased funding for job training and placement for disadvantaged workers
• Mortgage counseling and education programs for underserved communities and communities of color
• Legislation to end predatory lending.
Hal Smith, the NUL’s Vice President of Education, said the Urban League is advocating qualitative advances in public education, not simply longer days. “It’s not doing more of the same for an extended period of time,” he said, “it’s actually changing the content curriculum approach during the school day and school year by involving community-based organizations to enhance content, to enhance teaching and learning relationships, to give young people a better, richer, deeper set of opportunities to learn and develop.
“It would also focus on the arts, strong youth development, strong counseling and a real emphasis on literacy and math skills in addition to some of the things that we would want to promote 21st-century living and success, success after high school.”
“For the first time we have a president whose political base is in a city so we feel that he can better understand the issues and concerns of urban America,” Morial said. “We want to make sure that we work with the administration to ensure that urban America is included... Only then can we begin to close the equality gap.”
Asked what the Urban League can do to encourage Black men to get involved in mentoring efforts, Morial told The Louisiana Weekly, “This is where we have not done the best job — not the Urban League, not African-American leaders across the board. We just have to acknowledge that we have not done a good job stimulating and encouraging the kind of leadership from Black men with respective to their families, with respect to our communities as we should expect of ourselves. I just don’t think that we have in this generation stepped up the same way generations before have.
“We shouldn’t fight the fact that that is the fact,” he continued. “What we should do is acknowledge that it is a fact and we should try to encourage one another to do better. That’s not to say that there are not great people out there working with youth — 100 Black Men comes to mind, as well as some of the African-American fraternities and sororities and some of the church organizations at the grassroots level — but we need a lot more in this area of responsibility to family, to self and to community and it requires us to push harder.”
While Morial lauded former Essence magazine editor Susan Taylor for encouraging more people of color to get involved in mentoring programs through the Cares Mentoring movement, he admitted that much more needs to be done to address the problems facing Black youth. “We are not doing enough as a community,” he told The Louisiana Weekly. “The condition of our boys and young men is nothing short of a tragedy because of the low high school graduation rates, the high incarceration rates — it is indeed a state of emergency. Whatever we have been doing for the last 15 to 25 years, it has not been working. We need a wakeup call for the nation and we need a wakeup call for ourselves.”
The State of Black America 2009 report notes that it will take more than just relying on the Obama administration to make a difference in urban America. While they should hold government officials accountable at all levels, individuals must participate in order for change to happen.
“President Obama has stressed that change comes from the bottom up, not the other way around,” Morial said.
“It is up to all of us – as citizens and advocates – to take a more active role in governance at all levels to make sure our voices are heard from City Hall to the State House to the halls of Congress to the White House.”
Martin Luther King, III, in the foreword to the report, says President Obama’s election does not mean his father’s dream has been realized.
“His election is not the fulfillment of the Dream,” King wrote. “This is because President Obama is not the only character in this narrative, nor is he the story’s only writer. The American narrative cannot realize its greatest promise unless the narratives of all its peoples are part of that promise. In other words, realizing the American Dream must be a complete possibility for every American.”
“Again, for Black Americans, it’s the best of times and the worst of times,” Morial concluded. “It’s an important time to celebrate the historic successes in the political arena. But as Dr. King’s son, Martin Luther King III, mentions in the first piece in the book, that alone does not mean that the Dream has been realized. It is very important to note that while they are important accomplishments and important steps, for anyone to suggest that these accomplishments mean that the Dream is realized means that that they do not realize what the Dream is all about.”
This article was originally published in the March 30, 2009 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper |
