The civil rights movement of the 1960s raised high hopes among African American citizens that they were at last on the road to true equality with the opportunity to share fully in the nation’s prosperity.

Now, nearly a half century later, there are big questions about just how far we have come to meet those high hopes, particularly in the economic arena. Yes, there has been progress, but for many minority citizens the advances have been painfully slow.

This has been brought home dramatically in a new study to be released by the National Urban League on The State of Black America 2004. The League has compiled an “Equality Index” which provides a statistical measurement of the disparities which exist between African American and whites in economics, housing, education, social justice and civic engagement.

The League describes its index in this manner: “Over 216 years ago, the authors of the U. S. Constitution counted, for tax purposes, enslaved African Americans as 3/5 or 60 percent of a white citizen. According to the total of the 2004 Index, the status of African Americans is 73 percent when compared to the conditions of their white counterparts.”

The League’s study found a high level of discouragement among African American citizens about the lack of progress. Fifty-four percent feel that things will “remain the same” or “get worse.” Forty percent of the African American respondents to the League’s survey feel “very little or no improvement” has been achieved in essential indicators for economic and social mobility.

Among the statistics noted by the study were:

Fewer than 50 percent of black families own their homes versus 70 percent for whites. Blacks are denied mortgages and home improvement loans at twice the rate of whites.

On average, blacks are twice as likely to die from disease, accident, and homicide at every stage of life, with life expectancy for Blacks at 72 years versus 78 years for whites. On education, teachers with less than three years experience teach in minority schools at twice the rate of those who teach in white schools. For every ten whites who graduate with a college degree, only 6.3 blacks do. The 2000 census found that 91.8 percent of white students graduated from high school compared with 83.7 percent of black students.

Citing the disparity in social justice and equality before the law, the Urban League found that a black person’s average jail sentence is six months longer than that of whites charged with the same crime. It also found that blacks who are arrested are more than three times as likely to be imprisoned than whites.

Much of the Urban League’s findings are supported by statistics published regularly by the federal government which are rarely noted by the media and even less by the Congress or the Bush Administration.

There is no more dramatic evidence of the economic disparities than in the monthly employment figures published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the national unemployment figures stood at 5.6 percent last month, the racial breakdown of the figures is startling-and disheartening.

For white workers, the unemployment was at 4.9 percent, but for African Americans the figure stood at 9.8 percent in February and hovered between 10 to 11 percent through most of 2003. Imagine the outcry-the demands for action-if 11 percent of the white work force was without jobs.

Many of the sub prime-predatory lending scams are aimed at African American homeowners. Particularly pernicious have been refinancing schemes which carry high fees, high interest rates and balloon payments. Many of these predatory practices have forced African American families into foreclosures and bankruptcy. A study conducted by ACORN, a grassroots community organization, found that 51 percent of the sub prime refinancing was in African American neighborhoods and only nine percent in white communities.

African Americans are 500 percent more likely than whites to find themselves in bankruptcy. And what is Congress doing about it? It is actively pushing for a punitive bankruptcy law, sought by car dealers, credit car companies, banks, finance and mortgage companies. If successful, many borrowers will be forced into virtual debtors’ prisons for life without a second chance to resume their lives as productive citizens. As the surveys have shown this will fall inordinately on African-American citizens.

As the National Urban League points out, 2004 marks two important anniversaries for the civil rights movement. It is the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education and the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.

It is time for the nation to live up fully to the promises and hopes of these landmark efforts. Progress has been too slow and too uneven. We can do better and we can do better faster. Basic human rights are not something to be postponed.

A book came out last year which should have gotten more attention had the nation’s news media not fallen in the obsessive trap of the Iraq-obsessive President. It is called “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke”(Basic Books).

Written by Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren, an expert on consumer bankruptcy, and her Wharton M.B.A. daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, this volume provides insights not normally revealed by aggregate economic data. It is about real earnest people in financial trouble.

The Warrens stimulated my recollection of growing up in a New England mill town in the late Forties, where one breadwinner could provide a family with a middle-class living standard as then defined. Even in the Seventies, the authors report that most families could do fairly well on one income. An average family paid 56 percent of its only breadwinner’s wages for housing, health insurance and other fixed costs.

Today that family, notwithstanding the availability of two incomes, pays 75 percent for these necessities and has 25 percent left over for discretionary purchases. It gets worse of course for single parents who have only 4 percent of income after fixed costs.

Compared with the Fifties, the share of family income going to housing now is much higher. You think interest rates on mortgages are low today, between 5.5 and 6 percent? Fifty years ago, the interest rates on fixed mortgages were under 3 percent and better yet with a VA housing loan.

There were millions of veterans then.

With the decline of the extended family and the shattering of the nuclear family for many, the ever-longer commutes, costs of getting to work and placing the children in day care all take a sizable chunk of the paycheck. Less time for comparison shopping increases the consumer dollars spent on items. Then come the charges, fees and penalties associated with an overextended credit card economy. Credit has a million pushers - subprime predatory lending rates, pay day loans, rent-to-own rackets.

The lending industry has been all over Congress in recent years to pass legislation making it even more difficult to go into bankruptcy. To gain more influence on Capitol Hill beyond their buying and renting of lawmakers, these lobbyists spread the myth of immoral borrowers exorbitantly dining out and buying too many fancy clothes. An intensive study of 2000 families who fell into dire financial straits, if not bankruptcy shows a different real picture. Warren says “it’s about homes in safe neighborhoods (which raises prices).” She gives many more examples of the “two income trap.”

A major study is needed on the costs associated with two spouses going to work, in addition to day care which now can cost $500 a month or more. For instance, another used car, another auto insurance policy, repair and maintenance expenses, and parking fees add up to real money.

Consumers ought to spend some time netting out what is left after these and other expenses. Of course, there are expenses from the consequences of children being without their parents for hours during the day - delinquency, guilt-based expensive gifts to the children (Nintendo games instead of quality playful time), and the credentialed counselors who now take the place of aunt, grandma or uncle.

Much of economic growth in recent years has come from the commercializing of family functions once provided free. The time pressures on working parents leads to this need to pay for what the family formerly provided cheaper or free.

The Warrens recommend re-instating the usury laws which protected consumers from staggering interest rates that amount to a debtors’ prison without walls. Learning how to control some of these traps through financial knowhow also helps.

The basic problem is that with the inflation-adjusted twenty to twenty-five fold increase in productivity per capita since 1900, why don’t we have an economy where one working person per family can sustain a middle-class standard of living? Why indeed are there any working poor families in our country? Where is this massive increase in per capita productivity going, in addition to sharper disparities of wealth between the few at the top and the rest of America?

Those questions may become the next stage of research by the Warrens and other scholars sensitive to economic injustice.