Chicago and the Public Sector

Black Employment in Manufacturing and the Public Sector in Chicago (Excerpt)

January 2011

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research - ...The emphasis on manufacturing as a singular path to good jobs and stable employment for African Americans in the postwar era is puzzling in light of the history of public employment as a course of labor market advancement for African Americans.

Efforts to open public employment to nonwhites, especially federal jobs, have been longstanding in the US. Once in these jobs, blacks benefited from higher wages, more generous pensions, longer tenures, greater opportunities for advancement and higher rates of unionization than in the private sector. Though rarely remarked upon in Fordist and post-Fordist accounts of urban restructuring, scholars widely agree that employment within the high-wage, highly unionized public sector contributed significantly to black upward mobility in the postwar decades (e.g. Harrison and Osterman, 1974; Freeman, 1976; Landry, 1987; Katz et al., 2005).

The first significant movement by blacks into federal jobs can be traced to the establishment of the federal civil service commission in 1883 as legislated by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act.With the implementation of a merit system in hiring and promotions, black representation in federal employment was ‘sustained, vigorous, and definite’ for the next several decades (Krislov, 1967: 19).

Reconstruction-era civil rights legislation also helped facilitate black federal employment. Notably, Congress repealed a statute in 1865 that had barred blacks from the postal service—ironically, the federal agency that was to become the single largest employer of blacks through the twentieth century (ibid.: 9–10).

Efforts to desegregate and open federal employment to nonwhites continued during the following decades, but were most vigorous during the 1920s. Desegregation of federal units such as the Census Bureau and the departments of Commerce, Interior and Treasury moved forward with such visible results that several Southern Congressional members complained of ‘delegate buying’ (ibid.: 22). By 1928, blacks were estimated to comprise 15–30% of the workforces at major urban post offices (ibid.).

During the New Deal era, blacks slowly continued to move into federal employment apart from their high representation in WPA programs. But more significant gains were on the horizon. The 1940s heralded a great burst in black economic advancement that scholars have attributed to various factors, chief among them shifts in labor demand, government intervention (e.g. Roosevelt’s 1941 Executive Order 8802 that outlawed racial discrimination in the defense industry), and accelerated migration from the South (Margo, 1995).

Public sector employment contributed to the reduction of wage inequality (Margo and Finegan, 2002), and, as Landry (1987: 121) argued, the ‘first breach in the solid wall of prejudice against the employment of blacks in middle-class jobs was achieved through employment in the federal government . . . in the 1940s’.

The most pronounced growth in black public employment occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. During this period, black employment in the public sector increased at twice the rate of whites (Eisinger, 1982b; Collins, 1983: 373; Carrington et al., 1996: 465). By the mid-1970s, 25% of all black men and 34% of all black women were employed in the public sector compared to 16% of all white men and 24% of all white women (Carrington et al., 1996: 463).

Scholars have attributed most of this growth to the expansion of government under the Great Society. Driven largely by black political pressure, antipoverty programs of the 1960s yielded an array of concessionary public services that benefited blacks as both consumers and producers—as low-income service recipients in their neighborhoods and as middle-income service providers working for the expanded public agencies (Piven, 1973: 384; Brown and Erie, 1981; Darity, 1986). Aggressive affirmative action policies, such as the Equal Opportunity Act of 1972 that expanded civil rights coverage to the public sector, helped blacks move into these jobs and, to employ Lieberson’s (1980: 379) term, the ‘special niche’ of government work for blacks became firmly entrenched within urban economies. Katz et al. (2005: 88) have called this growth of black public employment the ‘hidden labor market policy’ of the War on Poverty and the Great Society.

Scholars widely agree that this expansion of government employment contributed significantly to building the ‘new black middle class’, a group of salaried professionals no longer dependent upon work within the segregated black community (e.g. Wilson, 1978; Brown and Erie, 1981; Collins, 1983; Darity, 1986; Landry, 1987). Between 1960 and 1976, 55% of the increase of black professional and managerial jobs occurred in the public sector, compared to 34% of the increase for whites (Brown and Erie, 1981). In 1970 nearly half of all black male professionals and two-thirds of all black female professionals worked in the public sector. Comparatively, only one-third of white male and half of all white female professionals did (Freeman, 1976). By 1980, nearly 54% of all black professionals and managers worked in the public sector, compared to only 28% of whites (Edsall and Edsall, 1991).

Additionally, public employment played a crucial role in shoring up and expanding the black middle class by providing blacks a critical channel for intergenerational mobility (Erie, 1980). Eisinger (1986), for example, found that municipal employment served as a pathway to intergenerational mobility for urban blacks in a way that it did not for whites. In his study of a NewYork City public agency, black professionals were much more likely than whites to come from lower-class backgrounds. Hout’s (1984) findings confirmed the link between public sector employment and mobility — both intergenerational and individual. On the latter, Hout (1984: 317) found that the ‘risk of downward mobility is much greater for men in private employment than it is for public employees’. Hout’s analysis showed that among black men employed in a non-manual occupation in 1962, only 7% of those initially employed in the public sector moved to lower manual occupation by 1973, compared to 21% of black men initially employed in the private sector. Few researchers have subsequently recognized this feature of public employment as an economic buffer.

Government jobs have widely been viewed as good jobs because of their relatively high wages and generous benefits. Studies on data from the 1960s onward have consistently found that similarly skilled blacks across all educational levels and occupational statuses have earned higher wages in the public sector than the private sector, despite shrinking wage differentials in recent decades (Harrison and Osterman, 1974; Freeman, 1976; Landry, 1987; Boyd, 1993; Zipp, 1994; Bernhardt and Dresser, 2002).

Like other groups, less-educated blacks (those without a college degree) have profited most from public employment. That is, their public sector wage premium has been higher than that of more educated workers (Poterba and Rueben, 1994; Bernhardt and Dresser, 2002). Public sector jobs also provide substantially more generous benefit packages. In 1998, 82% of all black men employed in the public sector had employer-provided health insurance and 76% had a pension plan compared to 55% and 41% in the private sector, respectively (Bernhardt and Dresser, 2002: 9).

Lastly, racial wage inequality has been less pronounced within the public sector (Long, 1975; Freeman, 1976; Erie, 1980; Smith, 1980). Though recent trends indicate a reversal among federal employees, racial wage inequality has continued to steadily decline among state and municipal employees (Zipp, 1994).

Higher unionization rates largely account for the public sector’s higher wages and more generous benefits — a causal factor unique to the last 30 years (Freeman, 1986; Card, 2001). Prior to the 1960s, few public sector workers were covered by a union contract due to their exclusion under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. In 1962, President Kennedy granted unionization rights to federal employees through executive order, opening the doors to public sector organizing. Many states quickly followed the federal government’s lead in authorizing public sector collective bargaining, and rates of public sector unionization increased dramatically at all levels of government through the 1960s and 1970s. By the mid-1980s, union density in the public sector far exceeded that in the private sector — a trend that continues today.

In 1984, 44% of all government workers were covered by a collective bargaining agreement (36% were union members) compared to only 18% in the private sector (Freeman, 1986: 41). In 2008, nearly 37% of all government employees belonged to a union compared to 8% in the private sector (Zipperer, 2009). The numbers for workers in the Chicago CMSA reflect a similar trend. In 1987, union density in manufacturing was 27% (18% in all private employment) compared to 49% in the public sector. By 2000, union density in manufacturing in the Chicago region had fallen to 17% (14% in all private employment) compared to 50% in the public sector (Hirsch and Macpherson, 2003).

Politics and public employment

In sum, public employment has accorded black workers multiple socio-economic benefits not available to them in the private sector and has fostered the most racially equitable, albeit imperfect, employment domain available to black workers. This route to upward mobility and economic prosperity has depended on politics and policy to a greater degree than other employment pathways because of the distinctively direct effect of politics on public employment and the degree to which government employment has been targeted to address racial incorporation and economic equality.

Government employment is more proximate to the political process than private sector employment for a number of reasons. Firstly, politicians serve as employers in the former, but not the latter, domain. Patronage exemplifies this distinction — politicians can directly distribute jobs in exchange for votes. US politicians have long exercised their role as public employers to accommodate new voting blocks, through both explicit patronage systems and less explicit social mandates (e.g. Clark, 1975). The growth of black public employment at both the federal and local level reflects these attempts by politicians, black and otherwise, to secure the growing urban black vote (Brown and Erie, 1981; Eisinger, 1982a).

In particular, the Chicago machine was exceptionally adept at incorporating the black vote through patronage throughout much of the twentieth century (Grimshaw, 1992). Eisinger (1982b: 754) has described the reciprocal reinforcing effect between politics and public employment for blacks in which black political power creates access to public jobs and public jobs function ‘as a path to power’, increasing access to jobs further.

Secondly, the political process directly bears upon the demand curve for labor in the public sector, whereas politics indirectly influences the demand curve for labor in the private sector. In the former case, politicians can decide to directly expand or contract the public sector workforce. City officials may increase the size of the police force or slash the number of teachers. By contrast, politicians indirectly influence the size of the private sector workforce through contracts, tax incentives, and other policy mechanisms. Though such policy actions strongly influence economic outcomes, they are indirect, and less visible, than political actions that affect the size and working conditions of public sector employment.

Thirdly, in its capacity as an employer, government can directly hire and set wages according to social agenda goals, such as inequality reduction, and other nonmarket considerations (perhaps patronage of another from, but not as narrowly instrumental as explicit patronage). This ‘social equity function’ is peculiar to public employment (Lobao and Hooks, 2003: 520). Thus, government employment can contribute to the racial equity agenda by hiring more black workers at comparable wages to whites, as it did aggressively at the federal level during the 1960s and 1970s.

But government can pursue alternate social agendas through its treatment of public employment, as the 1980s attest. Under the Reagan administration, prior political norms and practices that had facilitated the advancement of minority public employment were abruptly abandoned, and public employment became the target of severe cutbacks and restructuring policies that impacted black workers disproportionately. Minorities were laid off at a rate of 50% greater than white federal employees (Landry, 1987: 212), and black federal workers who managed to keep their jobs experienced increased racial wage inequality (Zipp, 1994).

Lastly, the government’s role as employer also positions unionization issues within the public sector as more proximate to the political process than in the private sector. Not only are public sector unionists’ bread-and-butter issues inextricably linked to decisions regarding state policies and funding, politicians negotiate such issues with public sector unionists simultaneously as their employers and as their elected representatives. To put the emphasis differently, public employees exert influence at the bargaining table as both workers and voters.

As Freeman (1986: 42) has argued, ‘public sector unions, more so than private sector unions, can influence employer behavior through the political process . . . Private sector unions . . . do not in general help elect the board of directors of companies or top management’.

This relationship has been especially important in efforts to win collective bargaining rights for government employees.

An example from Chicago highlights the implications of black political power for public sector unionization. Before 1983, multiple attempts to pass public sector collective bargaining legislation in Illinois had foundered on opposition from Chicago’s mayors who feared collective bargaining would undermine patronage (e.g. contract rules would disallow politically motivated transfers, promotions and dismissals; Saltzman, 1988: 53).

Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, reversed this political trend. Immediately upon winning the Democratic primary in 1983, Washington committed strong political support to the legislative effort, largely on behalf of his black public sector constituency (Saltzman, 1988). Passage of the legislation quickly followed, extending collective bargaining rights to segments of Chicago’s heavily black municipal workforce that previously had been barred from bargaining.

To summarize, blacks’ disproportionate representation in government employment and the latter’s proximate relationship to the political process render black public employment especially sensitive to politics and policy...

Obama and the Government Employees

Federal workers now earn, in wages and benefits, about twice what their private sector equivalents get paid. They often have Cadillac health plans and retirement benefits far above the private sector average: 80 percent of public-sector workers have pension benefits, only 50 percent in the private sector. Many can retire at age 50... Merely rolling federal employee pay back to where it was in 1998 relative to the private sector, and shifting state and local government pay back to 2005 relative levels, would save $116 billion annually from government costs.

February 12, 2010

American Thinker - Barack Obama may not have learned much at Harvard regarding the Constitution, but he did learn in Chicago how politics works: the Chicago way. Reward supporters, and keep the bribery as opaque as possible. Chicago mores have been brought to Washington.

There has recently been a flurry of critical columns examining the devastation done to our nation's fiscal health by government workers. Our cities, states, and federal government are in critical condition. Cities have begun declaring bankruptcy, and states such as California and Illinois are tottering. The federal government, which supplied a big chunk of stimulus dollars merely to keep states on life support, is running massive deficits and accumulating debts as far as the eye can see. What caused the problems?

There are two sides of the ledger responsible. Declining state tax receipts (considered "earnings" by government) played a role (the receipts side). But the real scourge has been on the expense side of the ledger: salaries and pension benefits given -- and I do mean given -- to government workers.

Public-sector unions have amassed great power to extract taxpayer dollars from politicians. Politicians reward government workers with our dollars, and they in turn are rewarded at election time by donations, free labor (phone banks, people who pass out flyers), and votes.

"Fully one-third of the 'stimulus' money went to state and local governments -- an obvious payoff to public employee unions that contributed so much to Democrats," as Michael Barone noted.

Barone describes the corruption at the core of this dealing:

Public-sector unionism is a very different animal from private-sector unionism. It is not adversarial but collusive. Public-sector unions strive to elect their management, which in turn can extract money from taxpayers to increase wages and benefits -- and can promise pensions that future taxpayers will have to fund.

The results are plain to see. States such as New York, New Jersey and California, where public-sector unions are strong, now face enormous budget deficits and pension liabilities. In such states, the public sector has become a parasite sucking the life out of the private-sector economy.

Obama and the Democrats have been well-rewarded for their patronage. Unions contributed up to 400 million dollars to Democrats in 2008 and engage in skullduggery to advance their aims. The latest revelation: a union-funded slush fund secretly targeting GOP candidates through the use of money-laundering and front groups. Unions have funded all sorts of political activity -- undoubtedly the major reason Obama, in one of his first acts as president, ended union disclosure rules requiring them to report how their members' dues were being spent. So much for transparency.

This is one reason why the recent Supreme Court decision leveling the playing field, allowing corporations to exercise their First Amendment rights by contributing to candidates, inflamed unions and President Obama. He violated precedent by attacking the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address. Maybe the title should be changed to State of the Unions.

Franklin Roosevelt, of all people, was alert to the danger of this collusion between politicians and unions. He maintained that "the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service." Yet it has been transplanted; today, a majority of union workers for the first time work for the government. And the government has brought good things to them.

Government work is one sector of our economy that is booming (besides pawnshops and bankruptcy lawyers). Rich Lowry noted the paradox: We suffer, and government workers prosper.

For most Americans, the Great Recession has been an occasion to hold on for dear life. For public employees, it's been an occasion to let the good times roll.

The percentage of federal civil servants making more than $100,000 a year jumped from 14 percent to 19 percent during the first year and a half of the recession, according to USA Today. At the beginning of the downturn, the Transportation Department had one person making $170,000 or more a year; now it has 1,690 making that.

The New York Times reports that state and local governments have added a net 110,000 jobs since the beginning of the recession, while the private sector has lost 6.9 million.

The gap between total compensation of public and private workers has only widened during the downturn, according to USA Today. In 2008, benefits for public employees grew at a rate three times that of private employees.

Nor does the boom look likely to end anytime soon.

The President's new budget can be symbolized by the old wartime poster: Uncle Sam Wants You. Until Barack Obama came into office, the number of federal employees had held relatively constant. But that was so 2008. That number jumped from 1.875 million in 2008 to 1.98 million in 2009, and it looks to jump a farther in 2010 -- a 14.5% leap in two years. (And the boom is in federal agencies, not the military; hiring at the IRS, EPA, and the Justice Department is a big portion of the increase. Big Brother is getting bloated -- maybe we can get Michelle to work on this obesity problem.)These jobs come with munificent salaries and benefits.

Federal workers now earn, in wages and benefits, about twice what their private sector equivalents get paid. They often have Cadillac health plans and retirement benefits far above the private sector average: 80 percent of public-sector workers have pension benefits, only 50 percent in the private sector. Many can retire at age 50.

The pensions are manipulated upwards and gold-plated, too, as I noted in "Taxpayers: Eat your hearts out, suckers." Many others have begun to notice the drain on public finances by pensions for government workers, and the public pension tsunami has just begun. This is the engine driving our ballooning deficits and public debt. Merely rolling federal employee pay back to where it was in 1998 relative to the private sector, and shifting state and local government pay back to 2005 relative levels, would save $116 billion annually from government costs.

We know this will never happen as long as Democrats are in power. They like this perpetual motion machine. A government bureau, Ronald Reagan quipped, is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on earth. But we can try, and there is certainly potential for Republicans to seize on this problem as it begins to gain traction in the public mind. The issue seems tailor-made for Tea Partiers.

Meanwhile, Big Brother, like many big brothers, has become a bully. The Internal Revenue Service is on a hiring binge to crack down on taxpayers; fees on candy, plastic bags, iPod downloads, sugar, and many other things that make life fun are going up and up; our tax rates are inflating; and studies show that there has even been an explosion in parking tickets and fines for every picayune sort of "violation" that the bureaucrats can dream up in all their spare time -- phantom taxes, they have been called. The leviathan must be fed.

The massive debt accumulating will be our responsibility to pay in the decades ahead. Obama blames Bush for the problems he inherited, but we know whom to blame for the problems our children and grandchildren will inherit. This debt will be an albatross around the neck of our economy. Our taxes will go toward these pensions and debt repayment instead of investments that will help our economy grow.

But even this good deal is not good enough for Barack Obama. He is a very mischievous man whose Modus Operandi is to distract and defame and engage in a great deal of sleight of hand. If he truly is a "sort of God" (as one of his adoring Newsweek pundits characterized him), that God would be Janus of two faces. While he talks the talk about the deficit and freezing discretionary spending, Obama engages in a spending binge that would make Imelda Marcos proud. But look what else the Magician-in-Chief is doing: giving even more money and benefits to government workers, and doing it in a very untransparent and sneaky way.

Barack Obama is planning a major overhaul of the Federal government pay system that would boost pay for government workers while loosening scrutiny on how they do their jobs. When he released his budget, there was a section titled "Improving the Federal Workforce." Sounds good, right? But watch what the man and his minions do, not what they say.

First, the document tries to justify the high salaries government workers are paid (responding to the mounting criticism).

But then comes the trickery, disguised as "reform" and "refreshing" the system. This team is addicted to euphemisms (and their thesauruses are well-thumbed).

John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management, is engaged in a major effort to overhaul the G.S., or General Schedule, classification and pay system that began in 1949. Change is coming, and it will gladden the hearts and fill the wallets of government workers. In a Washington Post interview:

Berry mused about eliminating the first two ranks of the 15-grade GS system and adding grades 16 and 17. Berry did not explicitly advocate a pay raise for federal workers during the interview, but those in the added grades presumably would be paid more than the current top rate.

Berry made noises about tying pay to performance (consider this chaff to deflect observation and criticism), but then he tipped his hand:

"I'm a strong proponent of breaking the chain to the desk and breaking the chain to the time clock," he said. He wants government to "move in a direction to empower and trust our employees to get the job done ... and not focus so much on where they're sitting and what hours they're sitting there."

Does that sound like a plan to increase efficiency of government workers? Give them higher pay, but allow them to set their own hours and work from...where? Starbucks? Home? The zoo?

And how is this "reform" going to happen? Are the people or our representatives going to have a say in how our money is spent? Need one ask?

The plans are in the final stages and will be put in place by a presidential memorandum or executive order. In other words, they'll be implemented by presidential fiat. This is the form of government we have now -- or at least did, before Scott Brown was elected.

Government work...our growth industry.

Research Brief: Black Workers and the Public Sector

According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research: "If the trend to eliminate public sector workers’ collective bargaining power spreads to other states, the bills will have a disproportionate affect on families of color -- nationally, more than one in five black workers are public sector employees, compared to 17 percent of white workers." African Americans are twice as likely as whites to work for city, state, or federal government. The public sector is a critical source of decent-paying jobs for black workers: For both men and women, the median wage earned by black employees is significantly higher in the public sector than in other industries.

April 5, 2011

UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education - Since January 2009, state and local governments have laid off 429,000 public workers. As governments contemplate additional layoffs, it is important to note that few commentators have examined the racial implications of this reduction in government employment. This is an important question to address because often policy prescriptions that are race-neutral on the surface can have decidedly racial impacts. This research brief explores the issue by analyzing the nature of Black employment in the public sector.

The results of this study are striking:

• The public sector is the single most important source of employment for African Americans.


• During 2008-2010, 21.2 percent of all Black workers were public employees, compared with 16.3 percent of non-Black workers. Both before and after the onset of the Great Recession, African Americans were 30 percent more likely than other workers to be employed in the public sector.


• The public sector is also a critical source of decent-paying jobs for Black Americans. For both men and women, the median wage earned by Black employees is significantly higher in the public sector than in other industries.


• Prior to the recession, the wage differential between Black and white workers was less in the public sector than in the overall economy.

According to Communications Workers of America:

As California Progress Report writes:

For blacks and others, “the best anti-poverty program is union organizing,” the UC Berkeley Labor Center notes on its website.”

And so moves by Republican governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin and John Kasich in Ohio to shred the ability of public employees to bargain for a decent middle-class life are also specifically targeting the ability of women and black workers to remain in the economic mainstream.

According to Classic Term Papers:

Today, about 86 percent of African Americans from 25 to 29 years of age have graduated from high school, a rate comparable to that of whites. In 1980, 8 percent of African Americans were graduating from college, still less than half the white rate of 17 percent. Today, about a third of black high school graduates attend college and 13 percent graduate. Although the gap is narrowing, white students attend college at a higher rate (about 42 percent) than African Americans, and about 23 percent graduate.

As a result, African Americans hold a wide range of jobs. They have been particularly successful in securing middle-income employment in the public sector. African Americans are twice as likely as whites to work for city, state, or federal government.

• Robert L. Harris JR, February 1999, “The Rise of the Black Middle Class”

• Anne Field, May 1, 2006,”Twilight of the Middle Class”

• Jim Emerson, September 1, 2001, “African Americans”

• Fred Tannenbaum, February 25, 2005, “An emerging middle class”, Charlotte Business Journal

GOP Austerity Plans Will Widen Racial Economic Divide, Report Says

January 19, 2011

In These Times - ...The Great Recession caused the longest period of high unemployment since the postwar, and minority communities were hit especially hard. As of December, jobless figures for African Americans and Latinos are still in the double digits at 15.8 percent and 13 percent respectively, while white unemployment is 8.5 percent.

But those unemployment numbers could rise as the result of the increasing calls to reduce public sector workforce. African Americans are 30 percent more likely than the overall labor force to work as civil servants, and are 70 percent as likely to be a federal employee. Thus, the policy ramifications will disproportionately affect African Americans, the report says.

In fact, the public sector has been an area where minorities have been offered better wage and career prospects than the private sector. Public labor unions have been falsely maligned for straining budgets, but the report says it is exactly the high union representation that has helped to reduce income inequality.

Unlike the private sector, where minorities face a glass ceiling for promotions, the public sector also ensures protections to guarantee hiring is merit-based. The report lays out how public sector jobs have improved the standard of living for minorities and women:

The median hourly wage of Black and Latino workers in the public sector is closer to the median hourly wage of white males in the public sector than it is in the private sector. In the professional and business services sector, Black males earn 57 cents to each dollar of White male earnings. By comparison, Black males earn 80 cents to each dollar of White male earnings in the public administration sector.

This trend of greater parity in public administration jobs also is also true for Black females, Latinas, Latinos and White females.

The elimination of social safety nets like social security is another source of income that many African Americans and Latinos depend on. Older whites tend to have relatively more diverse sources of income and more net wealth.

In contrast, the lack of assets in minority communities will make any cuts to public assistance programs more sharp. Programs like social security has helped to reduce the poverty level down to 20 percent and would have hovered near 50 percent for the aforementioned communities if the program did not exist, the report says. Meanwhile, the report adds the recent tax initiatives have mostly benefited high income whites, who are more likely than minorities to earn at least $250,000 a year.

Cutting public programs reflects an ongoing global trend. Austerity plans have gained steam in places like Europe, but the policies have been criticized by unions and labor groups for hampering job growth. The International Labour Organization, a United Nations body, reported in September that it will take until 2015 for jobs to return to pre-crisis levels if austerity programs continue—two years later than previous estimates.

Protecting public employees; preserving social safety nets; creating jobs through infrastructure investment; and restoring the progressive tax system are just some of the recommendations the report makes to eliminate racial economic disparities. More than 40 years after Dr. King’s death, can policymakers live up to his dream of closing the great racial divide?

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