Fight for economic equity under ‘assault’ 60 years after March on Washington, advocates warn

Sixty years after civil rights leaders demanded equal access to employment and fair wages for Black Americans at the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, economic equity is still far from a reality in the U.S. 

While advocates acknowledge that some strides have been made in the decades since the march, notable gaps persist between Black and white Americans in areas such as wealth and income, joblessness and homeownership.

And concern is mounting that further progress could be threatened amid rising racial tensions.

“We are strongly not on the path of bridging inequality,” said Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, chief of Race, Wealth and Community for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC). 

“I think oftentimes, people approach it like, ‘Oh, we’re almost there. There’s a few things we got to do,’” he said. But, he argued, “We are on a very clear path of ongoing Black-white economic apartheid for centuries — unless we do radical policy change.” 

Glaring disparities persist decades later 

Roughly 250,000 people gathered for the march on Aug. 28, 1963, with a list of demands from Washington for effective policy combatting discrimination in federal programs and in labor, including calls for a “decent” minimum wage, housing and education for all Americans. 

Decades later, experts and advocates point to significant remaining disparities between races.

The racial wealth gap has narrowed only slightly since the march. The ratio between white and Black wealth per capita saw a notable decline in the years following emancipation, according to a June 2022 paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 1860, that ratio stood at roughly 60-to-1. By the 1920s, it was down to 10-to-1. 

But it decreased much more slowly in the years that followed, reaching 7-to-1 in the 1950s before inching to “a similar magnitude of 6-to-1” roughly seven decades later.

Among the factors that likely slowed progress in closing the gap, the report cites the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the nation’s lengthy history of racist laws and practices, ranging from political disenfranchisement of Black Americans to Jim Crow-era policies. 

“You have to be honest about these policies and their impacts,” said Algernon Austin, the Director for Race and Economic Justice at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “And then when you fail to do that, then people who have political agendas to maintain, frankly, to maintain white supremacy, then can attack all these attempts at remediation.”

Other economic disparities have also persisted into the present day. Among Americans who are employed, research from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) showed the typical Black worker made more than 24 percent less than their white counterparts per hour in 2019 — a figure the group noted was about 8 percentage points higher than it was four decades earlier.

There is much more work to be done to address the Black-white homeownership gap, advocates add. A 2022 report from the National Association of Real Estate Brokers found the Black homeownership rate had “only modestly” increased since the 1968 passage of the Fair Housing Act, while the racial homeownership gap has widened over the years.

The report found the homeownership disparity between Black and white Americans, which sat at 23.8 percent in 1970, reached more than 31 percent five decades later. It said the gap hit 30 percent in 2022, continuing what the group called “a two-decades long trend of an expanding homeownership gap between Blacks and whites.”

“We have housing disparities that are wider than they were during Jim Crow,” said Samantha Tweedy, chief executive officer for the Black Economic Alliance, in an interview, calling housing “one of the foremost drivers of wealth in this country.”

Earlier this year, the White House cheered data showing the Black unemployment rate fell to a historic low in March, with Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, calling the news an “incredible milestone” in remarks to TheGrio at the time. 

“President [Biden] and Vice President [Harris], from the moment that they came into office, identified that they not only wanted to have a strong economic recovery, they wanted to have an equitable recovery,” Ramamurti said then.

The rate hit 5 percent in March, compared to a 3.2 percent unemployment rate for white Americans, and fell again in April, reaching 4.7 percent, before seeing upticks in the following months. But advocates are pushing for more sustained improvements.

“You can’t draw any conclusions from one month of numbers,” National Urban League President Marc Morial said. “The issue is, is the gap now over a one-, two-, three-year period?”

“​​While I like to see the gap narrow, I’m not popping a cork on one or two months of a narrower gap,” he added, adding: “We have to measure these things in sustainability.”

At the same time, experts have pointed to some progress the nation has made toward racial economic equality over a longer time, including headway in educational attainment and an overall drop in the poverty rate for Black Americans — which data from EPI shows declined more than 12 percent between 1968, when it sat at 34.7 percent, and 2016.

“In 1962, whites had about 2.4 times the four-year college attainment level of Blacks,” Asante-Muhammad said, while discussing the racial gap in higher education. “In 2022, it’s 1.7. So still, serious disparities, but there has been some bridging over those years.”

However, he also notes African Americans with college degrees don’t have equal levels of employment to their white counterparts, nor “have equal income levels and really don’t have equal wealth levels.”

“Even with kind of solid educational attainment, even with less segregation, more civil rights laws, we still see this massive income inequality that, if it continued to improve, as it has been since 1963, it would take us over 500 years for Blacks just to get income equality with whites,” he argued. 

Research shows views of capitalism have shifted among Black Americans over the years, with a 2022 survey from the Pew Research Center finding 54 percent of Black adults said “they had a very or somewhat negative impression of capitalism.” The number is a 14-percentage-point jump from 2019.

“The question is, is it working for me?” Morial said of the findings. “That’s the issue.”

“People are saying, well, if I don’t think I’ve got a fair wage, well, they’re gonna tell you they don’t think the economic system’s working for them,” he said. “It’s less of a philosophical question and more of a practical question.”

‘A threat to progress’

There is concern among advocates and experts that an increased focus by conservatives on affirmative action and diversity initiatives could add greater hurdles to the battle for economic equality in the years ahead.

“The biggest threat is the right-wing assault on the policies which have made a difference,” National Urban League president Marc Morial said. “They’ve not made enough of a difference, but they’ve made a difference. It’s an assault by right-wing interests.”

From GOP-led efforts restricting how race is taught in schools across the country to those targeting affirmative action, advocates have been sounding alarms over what they see as a backlash to initiatives aimed at improving racial diversity and inclusion that gained momentum during the months of global protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

Bills have also gained traction in the Republican House majority that seek to take aim at diversity training and efforts to increase representation as part of a larger so-called “anti-woke” push proponents say is needed to tackle unfair and unnecessary race initiatives.

“When you’re trying to reduce some of this burden that’s been placed on these victims of racial subjugation, and you’re calling that racist, it’s racist to call that racist,” Austin said.

“That’s the problem in this society, which is in fact why we need to talk about race more, and more honestly, because we live in a society where being white has been a positive, has given you preferences in varieties of ways,” he said, citing the impact of redlining, segregation, criminal justice policies and underfunding schools in the Black community. 

The road ahead

Experts say a combination of race-conscious policies and broader measures like wage and labor reform is necessary to narrow racial economic gaps. But some have doubts about how far national leaders are willing to go to address those disparities, given history.

A recent report from the NCRC estimated it would take more than 500 years for Black Americans to reach the white median household income at the pace set in past decades. 

“I think the biggest threat is the unwillingness to seriously commit to redistribution of resources, which is what is required to bridge racial inequality,” Asante-Muhammad of the NCRC said — a problem he charged both sides of the aisle with failing to adequately address. 

“It’s one thing to take down the segregation sign, it’s another thing to invest in building affordable housing and doing lending in a way that would strongly increase Black homeownership,” he said. “Those are different.”

As the nation marks the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, advocates say the demands made by the hundreds of thousands of protesters who gathered in the nation’s capital for the event still hold today — including those for better wages and jobs.

“Raising the minimum wage is crucial,” Morial also said. “Increase in job training and education is crucial. Enforcing anti-discrimination laws is crucial.”

“Creating more tools and more of a commitment to homeownership for low and moderate income Americans is crucial,” he said. “Raising and improving access to capital for small businesses and Black small businesses is crucial.”

Asante-Muhammad points to measures congressional lawmakers have introduced that focus on Black homeownership, reparations and asset policies, like the baby bonds proposal championed by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), as steps in the right direction in countering economic inequality. 

But many experts aren’t holding their breath for significant change anytime soon.

“There used to be a time when there was more agreement on what the basic facts were, that we’re dealing with, and then we could argue about, ‘OK, what’s the appropriate solution?’” said Austin.

“But now, when people are wanting to make up facts, then it’s really hard to have a productive debate over what is the appropriate solution,” he said.