Sixty years after the March on Washington, 2023 is another point along the justice-seeking arc of the moral universe.
Coalition, a growing network of students, parents and community leaders leading the fight for fair and equitable school funding. Despite the state’s adoption of an evidence-based funding formula that explicitly recognizes the need for more resources to meet even minimum education standards, Illinois continues to underfund the formula by more than $7 billion. At this rate, many districts will not be fully funded until 2054 with Black and brown students disproportionately affected.
In the housing field, the story is, sadly, an old one: Entrenched racial and economic housing segregation in our city affects almost every indicator of quality of life and opportunity.
One of the “promises of democracy” of which King spoke was securing and protecting the voting rights of every American. In Illinois, that fight continues in the work of theto reenfranchise nearly 30,000 individuals, 55% of whom are Black, who cannot vote due to their incarceration. Disenfranchisement by incarceration is a Jim Crow relic, implemented along with Black codes in the South during Reconstruction to strip Black Americans of their ability to engage in the democratic process.
King understood 60 years ago that a society benefiting some at the expense of others would fall short of true freedom. He knew that shared humanity means that an individual’s freedom is inextricably bound to everyone’s ability to be free. That August day in 1963, Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers, called the civil rights movement a “struggle for every American to join in.”
We would be wise to embrace the wisdom of King and Reuther and recognize that the continued efforts in the decades ahead demand collective responsibility as Americans to work toward a greater good that can envision freedom and equal opportunityAneel Chablani serves as chief counsel at Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, an organization working to secure racial equity and economic opportunity for all for more than 50 years.
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