STEVE HILTON Says Sixty years After the “I HAVE A DREAM” SPEECH, the Unifying Vision of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. For America Has Been Betrayed and Hijacked by BLACK LIVES MATTER (BLM) and Their Ilk

As he described the ‘great beacon light of hope’ that the abolition of slavery represented 100 years earlier, he also pointed out that not only were black people in America ‘still not free’, but ‘100 years later, the negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity’. He was absolutely right.

Tragically, however, despite the civil rights laws prompted by his speech, along with all the campaigns launched in its wake and the trillions of dollars spent in pursuit of racial justice since then – I fear none of it fundamentally altered the landscape he described so vividly.

That island of poverty in an ocean of prosperity is still with us.

Of course, black people in America are no longer systematically refused service at lunch counters. They participate in elections on equal terms with everyone else.

But over the past six decades, when it comes to wealth, opportunity, social and economic progress, King’s ‘fierce urgency’ not only failed to spur the kind of transformational improvement that was achieved on civil rights, in many ways things have got worse.

A survey of the historical data on racial inequality, summarised recently by two leading American social scientists, concluded shockingly: ‘In terms of material well-being, black Americans were moving toward parity with white Americans well before the victories of the civil rights era. What’s more, after the passage of civil rights legislation, those trends toward racial parity slowed, stopped and even reversed.’

In today’s America, black people are shamefully over-represented in the ranks of the poor, the sick and the incarcerated. On everything from life-expectancy to home- ownership, educational attainment to income, things have moved in the wrong direction since ‘I have a dream’ electrified the world.

So what went wrong?

Some black conservative scholars claim the main culprit is too much government intervention – specifically the welfare state and failing schools. According to this analysis, the expansion of welfare schemes initiated by President Lyndon Johnson in his War on Poverty in the 1960s incentivised behaviour that hurt black Americans’ chances of climbing the ladder of opportunity.

They point to the huge rise in family breakdown and absent fathers, from around 25 per cent in the 1960s to more than 75 per cent now. More than three quarters of black children are born without a stable family. Study after study shows that strong family structures are one of the most important building blocks of a successful life.

Years ago, when such things were still sayable by politicians on the Left, even Barack Obama admitted: ‘We all know the statistics. That children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.’

Education was supposed to rescue impoverished children from these grim outcomes. Instead, the American school system, dominated by militant Left-wing teacher unions, has multiplied the disaster. In my home state of California, in vital subjects such as maths, test scores have shown the average black pupil is four years behind white pupils.

You might think that with the devastating evidence, accumulated over so many years, of the failure of Left-wing policies to lift black Americans into King’s ‘promised land’, campaigners for racial justice – or ‘equity’ as we are now told to call it – would change course.

Perhaps they could use their evident cultural power to help black faith leaders in their quest to change attitudes on family, marriage and parenting? Maybe join the black community leaders pushing for educational choice, enabling parents and pupils to escape the calamitous dysfunction of many inner city government-run schools?

Not a chance.