By: Marc H. Morial
President and CEO
National Urban League
With the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina upon us, who can forget how that
disaster made poverty real in American again? How it underscored our nation's need to
erase the economic disparities that exist between whites and minorities?
For some Americans, it was pictures on a television screen. For me, it was family
members and neighbors stranded on roofs in makeshift floating devices, turned-over
refrigerators.
I could rattle off tomes of statistics about disparity. I could talk about the wealth gap,
the job gap, the wage gap and the health gap. I could speak in erudite and intellectual
terms about income, health and equality in America. But I don't have to: Katrina did
that for me through images of people suffering. It was through reality's lens that
Americans witnessed the tragedy not through a full-length movie or cheap sound byte.
But the images seen on most Americans' television sets nearly a year ago were not
just pictures of my hometown. They represented people in poverty in urban areas all
over the nation. And while they are mostly people of color, they are not exclusively
people of color. One of every 10 white Americans and one of four black Americans live
in poverty.
That's why it is important to discuss and define the future of civil rights in the United
States because the idea of expanding the American dream and table to everyone is as
relevant in 2006 as it was 40 years ago.
The fight to sit at a lunch counter was an important fight. The fight to be able to afford
what was served at the lunch counter is an even more important fight today. And the
fight to own the lunch counter is the civil rights struggle of the 21st century.
We in the African-American community must focus anew on income and equality and
poverty. It is indeed the calling of our generation of Americans
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