When President Barack Obama spoke at the Lincoln Memorial on Wednesday to commemorate the 1963 March on Washington, he symbolized part of the complicated story of America's racial progress in the past half a century. Can there be more convincing testimony to the breathtaking advancement of African-Americans than a black president?
Yet even as racial barriers have been toppled and the nation has grown wealthier and better educated, the economic disparities separating blacks and whites remain as wide as they were when marchers assembled on the Mall in 1963.
Between 1959 and 1972, the black poverty rate dropped from 55.1 percent to 32.2 percent. But since then, progress has been slow. In 2011, 27.6 percent of black households were in poverty — nearly triple the white rate, according to the Census Bureau.