Depending how you look at it, African-Americans' glass in the 1990s is half-full or half-empty. On the positive side, African-American life is vastly different from what it was at the end of the Depression in 1940. Blacks' civil rights have been transformed, even if not equalized in practice. Their voting rights have brought them fuller political participation, even if not a full measure of political power. And their economic rights – their access to decent jobs and wages – have also taken a giant step, even if they remain a far cry from equal opportunity. Blacks are included in the economic mainstream today in ways unheard of fifty years ago. They work at much more challenging jobs than those they held then, and they earn much higher incomes, both in absolute terms and compared with those earned by whites.

On the negative side, many blacks still live in poverty, in slums, and face a much greater threat of physical violence than they did back in the 1940s in the rural South or Harlem – a violence that now comes almost entirely from blacks themselves. These conditions are at least partly, and maybe mainly, the outcome of our national development in the past twenty years. Gains in economic and social inclusion for blacks have all but come to an end, and have done so a long way from the equal treatments in schools and workplaces that seemed so achievable a generation ago.