Is America fulfilling the promise of the Civil Rights Act 60 years later?
The National Urban League explores this question in its annual State of Black America report. The conclusion? Well, it’s complicated.
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Welcome back to Once Upon a Hill. Thanks for spending part of your evening with me.
It’s Tuesday, March 5. In tonight’s column, you’ll find highlights from the National Urban League’s State of Black America report. But first, it’s not just any Tuesday—it’s Super Tuesday, the day several states hold their primary elections.
We should know by morning if former President Donald Trump has received enough delegates to be the official Republican presidential nominee or if his former UN ambassador Nikki Haley survived the night to live on another day.
We’re also two days away from the State of the Union, the backdrop of what will likely be the most important speech President Joe Biden will give ahead of the one he’ll give in August to accept the Democratic nomination for reelection. He’s got a record to be proud of, but one most people are unaware of. He’s dogged by concerns about his age exacerbated by an administration and campaign that won’t “let Joe be Joe,” as his allies often put it. And he’s had to every bit of his several decades of foreign policy experience as two wars—one in Ukraine, the other in Gaza—teem with legacy-defining implications. I’ll have a fulsome preview of the speech in Thursday’s issue.
In the meantime, once the House wraps up fly-in votes in about an hour, I’ll turn my attention for the night to a few primaries:
TX-18: Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is in the fight of her career against her former intern and Houston city council member Amanda Edwards, who hopes to give her city new representation for the first time in three decades. Jackson Lee has the backing of the Democratic establishment who was in H-Town in full force over the weekend, proof that incumbency is a powerful weapon. But if anyone can pull off the upset, it’s Edwards—a candidate who respects her former mentor but is unafraid of her.
AL-02: This seat is intriguing because of the rare circumstances: It’s a new Black opportunity with no Democratic incumbent because it’s been in Republican hands for so long. A winner is unlikely to emerge from the crowded field tonight, so the southern Alabama community could be in for a runoff next month (keep reading for more on this race below).
California Senate: We’ll also learn if Rep. Adam Schiff’s gamble to help his Republican opponent at the expense of his Democratic competitors Reps. Katie Porter and Steve Garvey will pay off in the race to succeed the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Schiff’s bet: The general election will be a glide path to the upper chamber in a race against a GOP candidate in the deep-blue Golden State.
Send me a message with your Super Tuesday or State of the Union questions—or anything else about congressional politics—and I’ll hit you back.
Thank you for being you,
Michael
AL-02 update: Following my scoop last week on the Republican operatives who hosted fundraisers for Alabama House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels’s campaign to represent the newly redrawn 2nd congressional district, Once Upon a Hill obtained a letter to Alabama Democratic Party chair Randy Kelley from Joe Reed, the chair of the Alabama Democratic Conference, calling into question whether Daniels should remain in the race. “The United States Supreme Court ordered Alabama’s legislature to draw a district that Blacks could win,” Reed wrote. “It certainly did not order that there be drawn a district for Republicans to buy or steal or for Blacks to sell!” Reed’s letter also referenced a report that accused former Justice Department official Shomari Figures of receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from a cryptocurrency-focused outside group with a history of attacking Democrats. The ADC announced its support last month for Democratic state Rep. Napoleon Bracy in Alabama’s primary election, which is being held today. In other words, the odds of Reed’s preferred candidate would spike without Daniels or Figures in the race, which could partially explain the motivation of the letter. If no candidate wins at least 50 percent of the primary vote, a runoff will occur next month between the top two.
Sinema out: The race to be Arizona’s next US senator will come down to Democratic Phoenix congressman Ruben Gallego and Republican Trump ally Kari Lake this fall after Kyrsten Sinema announced she won’t run for reelection. “I believe in my approach, but it’s not what America wants right now,” the one-term senator said in a three-minute video. The decision sets up a head-to-head matchup between Gallego and Lake for a seat that could determine the balance of power in the Senate and the outcome of the presidential election. It also saves the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm from a tough choice between whether to support an unpopular incumbent who left the party in 2022 while still voting with the caucus the majority of the time in Sinema or her progressive challenger who would force the party further to the left in Gallego. (Senate leadership quickly endorsed him after her announcement.) Sinema will leave behind a complicated legacy. Critics cite her reverence for institutions like the Senate filibuster and coziness with big corporations as impediments to progress on voting rights and increasing the federal minimum wage. But her departure will be the latest of several in the past two election cycles that have hollowed out a bipartisan bloc of deal-making pragmatists at the heart of Congress’s legislative achievements during the Biden administration
Lee opponent switches to GOP: Laurie MacDonald announced on Monday she will challenge Democratic Rep. Summer Lee (D-Penn.) as write-in Republican candidate for Pennsylvania’s 12th congressional district. MacDonald—the president of Center for Victims, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit organization serving victims of crime—withdrew her candidacy for Democratic nomination amid concerns about the validity of the signatures collected by her campaign. “I look forward to working with voters to present moderate voices to our community. We must present voters with alternatives to the corrupt politicians like Summer Lee and [Edgewood Borough Council Member] Bhavini Patel.” Lee, the first Black woman to represent Pennsylvania in the House, was endorsed by the top three House Democrats in January, a significant show of support as her reelection bid faces fierce opposition from AIPAC, a pro-Israel group that has hinted it could spend millions to unseat Lee and other progressives of color who support Palestine and are critical of the Israel-Hamas war. A spokesperson for Lee’s campaign declined a request for comment.
Strike a bargain: The White House announced a new strike force to crack down on unfair and illegal pricing as part of a broader push across the administration to end corporate rip-offs and other tactics businesses use to maximize profits. For example, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced a final role to lower the typical credit card from $32 to $8 by closing a loophole in a 2010 regulation. CFPB estimates the change will save families over $200 individually or $10 billion collectively yearly. Americans paid $130 billion in interest in fees on their credit cards, of which late fees were a big chunk. In comparison, credit card companies collect $14 billion in late-fee revenue, more than five times the companies’ associated costs. An administration official said the strike force would turbocharge the efforts of President Biden’s Competition Council to coordinate administration efforts to lower costs in key sectors like food and prescription drugs and transportation. Expect President Biden to discuss corporate greed during Thursday’s State of the Union address.
Now back to the State of Black America report:
In the almost four years since the short-lived season of solidarity that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the US has seen rapid corporate and social backsliding so fierce that the Civil Rights Act, a 60-year bulwark against discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin, is under the most acute threat in its history.
That’s the main takeaway from the National Urban League’s State of Black America report, an annual snapshot of racial equality in the US. The 2024 installment examines the impact of the landmark civil rights law former President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law six decades ago as the struggle for a more just and equitable has extended well into the 21st century.
“What we’ve seen is a concerted effort that involves state legislatures across the nation who are seeking to ban [diversity, equity and inclusion],” Marc Morial, president of the Urban League, the oldest and largest group of its kind, told me in an interview this morning. “We already have the state of Florida that has forced the closure of the DE&I offices and all of its colleges and universities is a front assault on the notion that you have an office that focuses on equal opportunity.”
Morial also pointed to the attack on voting rights in the form of more than a thousand proposed laws in half the states in America to make it harder for people, particularly those who are Black, to vote, in addition to recent Supreme Court decisions that weakened the Voting Rights Act and overturned affirmative action in higher education.
“When you take all of this together, we’ve not seen this kind of concentrated frontal assault and attack on the kinds of things that represent the progress that the civil rights era brought about at any one point in time in the last 60 years.”
The report reconstructs what life looked like before the Civil Rights Act, including the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that made segregation the law of the land in 1896, the repeal of the 1875 Civil Rights Act eight years after its passage and the failure of two anti-lynching bills to become law. It also spotlights recent landmark Supreme Court decisions and pending cases that threaten the Civil Rights Act.
If you’re too pressed for time to read the full 28-page document, the state of Black America can be summarized by one number: 75.7 percent, which represents how well Black people fare compared to white people when it comes to their economic status, their health, their education, social justice, and civic engagement. (The Urban League says it uses white people as the benchmark because the history of race in America has created advantages for whites that continue to persist in many of the outcomes being measured.)
“The equality index points the way forward because disparities are wider when it comes to economics and criminal justice. They are narrower when it comes to education,” he said. “So knowing precisely where the gaps are widest I think helps anyone that wants to be a change agent.”
Looking forward, the group will focus on what Morial described to me as the three Ds: Defend democracy (voter registration, advocacy for voting rights legislation and voter education), Demand diversity (promote workplace equity, fight against anti-DEI initiatives, diversify local school systems) and Defeat poverty (donate to groups like the Urban League and lobby members of Congress to expand provisions like the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit, to raise the minimum wage, and to close the Medicaid coverage gap.
The Urban League also evaluated President Biden’s Black agenda. It provided a progress report on his accomplishments (a diverse cabinet and senior staff, equitable economic investments, expanded access to health care and education, and affordable housing) and the unfinished business (additional student loan cancelation, federal voting rights reform, deeper partnership with civil rights groups) that makes the case for a second term.
It’s worth noting that much of the president’s uncompleted agenda is due to the congressional gridlock I cover daily on Capitol Hill. For younger generations and communities of color who are disproportionately affected by the gaps that remain due to federal inaction, this year’s election is a reminder of the significance of down-ballot races as well.
“We have a multidimensional government in this country. No level of government is all-powerful. No office is all-powerful,” Morial told me. “The president’s power is checked by the Congress. The president’s power is checked by the Supreme Court. The powers of the federal government are limited by the Constitution. State governments have enormous power. City governments have enormous power.”
He continued: “We have to be civically educated to understand that if you ignore those down-ballot races, you are disarming yourself. You are self-silencing our voices. Those positions—councilmembers, county commissioners, mayors, governors, state legislators—are crucial in terms of how they legislate around the quality of life in our communities.” (Morial was the mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002.)
As he reflects on the past 60 years, Morial has one hope for the next six decades: Parity.
“Parity does not mean perfection. But if we can achieve parity in the field of economics, I think everything else will flow,” he said, pointing to narrower disparities in health care, education and homeownership for Black people with greater economic well-being. “So closing the economic gap and making significant progress would be a goal and hopefully our aspiration.”
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