MLK to Obama: A dream realized?

Our homes, our courthouses, our churches — these were places where King dreamed that Americans would "transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood."

No one should be satisfied, he declared, "as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one."

The Fair Housing Act, passed on April 11, 1968, just seven days after King's assassination, was intended to eliminate residential segregation. So, are we more residentially integrated 40 years later?

Segregation "is declining very slowly, and indeed increasing in some areas," according to an April report by the National Fair Housing Alliance, a consortium of more than 220 nonprofit organizations, state and local civil rights agencies.

Nationwide, residential segregation fell by 12 percent between 1980 and 2000 in metropolitan areas. Generally, a decrease was seen around smaller cities with populations that were less than 5 percent African-American, according to the census. Similarly, researchers from the Urban Institute, analyzing 69 of America's largest metro areas, discovered that the share of neighborhoods that were "exclusively white" fell from 65 percent in 1980 to 47 percent in 2000.

However, among neighborhoods that were "exclusively white" (less than 5 percent black) in 1990, 81 percent remained so in 2000, while 15 percent shifted to "predominantly white" (5-10 percent black), the institute said.

Meanwhile, more than 90 percent of the neighborhoods that were predominantly or exclusively black in 1990 remained that way a decade later, the institute reported. And residential segregation actually increased in eight of 220 metropolitan areas, according to the census bureau.

"As long as we live in racially and ethnically separated communities, we're never going to reach the dream," says Lisa Rice, vice president of the National Fair Housing Alliance.

Mortgage discrimination, redlining, real-estate steering and credit scoring customs have helped keep blacks from getting things like homeowners' insurance, even as the Justice Department has been filing fewer housing discrimination charges, she says.

Video   The last days of MLK April 3: NBC's Brian Williams examines Martin Luther King's struggle to keep his dream alive in final weeks of his life. Nightly News

The Center For Responsible Lending, an advocacy group that fights predatory lending, reported in 2006 that "for most types of subprime home loans, African-American and Latino borrowers are at greater risk of receiving higher-rate loans than white borrowers," even after factoring in "legitimate" risks.

Within the criminal justice system, racial disparities are no less stark: The black-to-white incarceration ratio stands at 6-to-1; in some states, that ratio reaches as high as 14-to-1, according to an analysis of Justice Department figures by The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit criminal justice policy group.

One of three black men, on average, will spend time in a federal or state prison at some time in their lives, compared to 1 of 20 whites, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Video   Obama addresses America's "racial stalemate" March 18: Barack Obama gave the most expansive and intensely personal speech of his campaign in what many said was a politically necessary move. NBC's Lee Cowan reports. Nightly News

And there's a disparity when it comes to sentencing convicts to Death Row: Between 1995 and 2000, 48 percent of those sentenced to die were black — only 20 percent white, according to Justice Department data. (Hispanics accounted for 29 percent of capital punishment convictions.)

How much of this is tied to discrimination? Black poverty? Cultural differences? Harsher sentences for crack, more commonly sold by African-Americans, than for powder cocaine, more common among whites?

"It's tough to claim that there is no discrimination in the criminal justice system, but a 6-to-1 ratio is far too great a variation to be attributable only to discrimination," says Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Some, such as Heather Mac Donald, a research fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a policy think tank in New York City, say that the high percentage of blacks behind bars overwhelmingly reflects a racial difference in crime rates, not bigotry.

Video   'Quite a speech' March 18: Washington Post political columnist Gene Robinson discusses the possible historic significance of Barack Obama's speech on race in America. MSNBC

Indeed, from 1976 to 2005, blacks accounted for more than half of all arrests for murder in America. In 2006, African-Americans constituted 39.3 percent of all violent-crime arrests.

The dropping crime rate of the '90s, "to which stricter sentencing policies unquestionably contributed, has freed thousands of law-abiding inner-city residents from the bondage of fear," Mac Donald recently wrote in City Journal, a conservative quarterly magazine on urban affairs.

But others insist the high incarceration rates partly reflect uneven enforcement. The war on drugs, says Ryan King of The Sentencing Project, has turned into a de facto war on minorities.

And what of a final racial gulf in the America of the 21st century — the one still existing in our houses of worship?

It's been remarked that, in churches across the nation, 11 o'clock on Sunday morning is America's most segregated hour. Rev. Lowery, when he puts retirement aside to preach in churches, still notices only "tokens" of the non-majority race in the congregation. His old friend, King, would be deeply saddened by this, he believes.

"I think Martin would be very proud of the progress we've made in some areas, like politics," he says.

And in the church?

"He'd be smiling through his tears."

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