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A. PHILIP RANDOLPH: At this time I have the honor
to present to you
the moral leader of our nation.
I have the pleasure to present to you
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
[Cheers and applause]
SHUKREE TILGHMAN: We all know what happens next.
Martin Luther King gives the "I Have a Dream" speech,
racial equality is achieved, and we all did overcome.
[Chuckles]
At least, that's what they told us in elementary school.
For my generation, the civil rights movement
is already in the rear-view mirror
and fading.
So the 50th anniversary of the march
makes me want to look deeper,
to try to connect it to today, to my own life.
On 130th and Lenox Avenue in Harlem,
a few blocks from my home,
the march began
inside an abandoned row home turned office,
where two labor leaders --
Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph --
headed the planning and administration
of what would become the most important social demonstration
of the 20th century.
But did it succeed?
Have the demands of the marchers
for access to jobs, for voting rights,
for an end to segregation --
50 years later, have those demands been met?
The primary goal of the '63 march was jobs.
It's embedded in the very title.
So what's the status of jobs today,
and how does it compare to '63?
I visit the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
Algernon Austin heads the Program
on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy.
What is the state
of African American employment today?
The condition for African Americans
in terms of jobs is never good.
We have about 50 years of data.
We can go back, and we can see
that the black unemployment rate is always
between 2 and 2½ times the white unemployment rate.
You know, I joke sometimes that blacks
should stop asking for equality with whites --
that they should say,
"We just want the highest unemployment rates
that whites have seen in the last 50 years.
Just give us your worst."
That would actually be an improvement.
Remember the recession,
where national employment rates
were ticking into the double digits?
That's where black unemployment rates sit on a normal day.
Yep, black unemployment on a normal day
is nearly twice the national rate of unemployment
during a recession.
When the economy hits a rough patch,
levels of black unemployment can balloon to 15% or more.
And that's been the case for 50 years.
I don't think people fully get it, how deep the jobs crisis is
for African Americans.
Rustin and Randolph
recognized the importance
of access to jobs -- to the movement
and to the march.
The March on Washington was preceded
in June of '63 by a massive march
in Detroit, Michigan,
where King is said to have first delivered
the "I Have a Dream" speech
in Cobo Hall.
Supported by labor leaders like the UAW's Walter Reuther,
access to jobs was key to that march,
and 50 years later,
at the commemorative Freedom Walk in Detroit,
the city now in bankruptcy, it's still an issue.
On the front lines of the fight for jobs,
aside from Al Sharpton,
there's also Focus: HOPE,
a Detroit nonprofit
born out of the civil rights era
and dedicated to addressing
job training and education.
Access to jobs was being denied to African Americans,
to women, to other minorities
here in this city as late as the '80s,
and Focus: HOPE has been fighting against that.
In one of Focus: HOPE's I.T. training classes,
I find Barbara Perry,
65 and looking for work.
PERRY: I never had a hard time getting a job.
I was always working somewhere,
working and going to school somewhere.
At this point in my life,
this is the first time I've been unemployed-unemployed, you know,
and I'm finding that in this period in my life,
I can't hardly take care of myself.
Excuse me, I'm not -- I'm not going to cry.
TILGHMAN: It's okay. It's all right.
PERRY: [Sighs]
Barbara worked in the car industry
before it eroded,
then in skilled trade manufacturing
before her job of 25 years was shipped to China.
She wanted to take me
to the site of a few of the places she worked,
though they hardly exist anymore.
What does it mean to have this kind
of place in a community?
It creates a way of life.
You know, you work, you make the money, you life your life.
Like a foundation, you take it away, you know,
everything else crumbles.
Barbara's story is not terribly unique.
In a changing economy, people lose jobs.
But when one considers the trifecta of disparities
in joblessness, income, and wealth
for African Americans, the effect of unemployment
can be particularly devastating.
AUSTIN: So we see that,
even for the black middle class,
when they're hit by some economic crisis, they fall down.
They're more likely to fall back into poverty.
PERRY: I was grossing between $70,000 and $90,000 a year.
TILGHMAN: Wow.
Now I got to the place of having to choose between
a loaf of bread and toilet paper.
Toilet paper won. So what I'm saying --
JONES: I think that there's been a true failure
to properly educate people and to prepare them
for jobs in an ever shifting economy.
So we can repair a lot of the educational shortcomings
and also then help those folks get jobs.
Perhaps this is why
the March on Washington organizers called for
a massive federal jobs program as part of their core demands.
That program never happened.
If you have the federal government saying,
"Our number-one priority is making sure
that everyone who wants a job can get a job,"
then this problem of high unemployment
in black communities
and high poverty in black communities will go away.
A federal jobs program that -- whose main sort of interest
is to benefit all people, but certainly
it would benefit African Americans,
seems like a tough political thing to get through.
AUSTIN: Absolutely.
TILGHMAN: Is that even possible?
AUSTIN: Absolutely. The question is, what's the alternative?
We've done an experiment in the last 50 years.
We said, "We're not going to have
the federal government do it.
Let's see what the private sector can do."
And the private sector hasn't done anything.
Equal opportunity employer programs
and legislation
for anti-discrimination in the workplace
are legacies of the march.
There is progress.
But did the march ultimately succeed
in securing access to jobs for all those who wanted to work?
The answer is in the numbers.