A gathering to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Sunday at Washington National Cathedral will be live streamed.
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Ms. Cathy Hughes, founder and chairperson of Urban One, the largest African-American owned and operated broadcasting company in the nation, will be a special guest at the event that features performances from Howard University Choir, Children of the Gospel Choir, and dance by Andile Ndlovu of the Washington Ballet, reported Woldcnews.com, which will also live stream the event.
The tribute to the civil rights giant centers on his 1967 speech at Stanford University in which King famously highlighted that “there are literally two Americas.” One of them is prosperous with almost limitless opportunities for some Americans.
“But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the ebullience of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist. In this America millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America people are poor by the millions. They find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity,” King said.
Decades later, not much has changed, wrote John Light for the Bill Moyers Report.
“Take a look at these charts about American poverty from King’s day through today using data from the U.S. Census Bureau,” Light said reflecting in 2013 on King’s analysis conditions in 1967. “When King delivered his Two Americas speech, a household in the top five percent income bracket was at least six times wealthier than a household in the bottom twenty percent. Since the late 1960s, the rich have been growing wealthier far more quickly than the poor.”
A 2017 Washington Post report on Federal Reserve data found that Black families and Latino families made significant economic progress from 2013 to 2016, compared to other demographic groups during that three-year period. However, that didn’t mean that minorities closed the wealth gap.
Federal Reserve economists explained that the wealth increase for Blacks and Latinos stemmed from the fact that they had far less wealth compared to Whites. Consequently, even small increases in minority wealth appeared disproportionately large. The median net worth of White households was $171,000. For Black and Latinos households, the median net worth was below $21,000.
View the online stream on Jan. 20 at 4 p.m. EST by visiting the radio station’s website at Woldcnews.com
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