On MLK Day, a look at black and white America
Nearly 47 years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, blacks and whites in the United States in many ways continue to live starkly different lives.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Nearly 47 years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, blacks and whites in the United States in many ways continue to live starkly different lives.
America is in the midst of two major changes to its population: We are becoming majority non-white at the same time a record share is going gray. Explore these shifts in our new interactive data essay.
The historic moment may not have come as a surprise to many. Twenty years ago, about half of Americans (54%) thought the chances were good that we would have a black president by now, according to a 1993 Gallup/CNN/USA Today survey of U.S. adults, while 45% thought the chances were slim.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech 50 years ago today on Washington D.C.’s National Mall and Memorial Parks has become one of the most famous, and quoted, pieces of oratory in U.S. history (though that wasn’t apparent to everyone at the time). But how well have the aspirations King so memorably expressed been realized? We ran […]
A recent Pew Research Center survey asked Americans of all races how black people are treated relative to whites by the police, the court system and other institutions in their community. The results show a large and consistent black-white gap in perceptions, with blacks far more likely than whites to say African Americans are treated […]
Five decades after Martin Luther King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., a new survey by the Pew Research Center finds that fewer than half (45%) of all Americans say the country has made substantial progress toward racial equality and about the same share (49%) say that “a lot more” remains to be done.
As a group, African Americans attracted relatively little attention in the U.S. mainstream news media during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency — and what coverage there was tended to focus more on specific episodes than on examining how broader issues and trends affected the lives of blacks generally.
The topic of racial identification on census forms has a long, fascinating history, which has generated fresh debate as the 2010 Census begins.
Assessments about the state of black progress in America have improved more dramatically among blacks during the past two years than at any time in the past quarter century.
It may surprise anyone who has been following the charges of racism that have flared up during the debate over President Obama’s health care proposals, but the American public doesn’t see race as the source of the strongest social conflict in the country today.
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