Blueprint for Progress - Brief Article

`We consider the 2000 election to be a referendum on whether America is serious about making the American dream truly accessible to all. Vote for candidates who commit to closing the opportunity gap.'

As the National Urban League celebrates its ninetieth anniversary at its annual conference in New York City this month, what better time to reflect on how far we've come and where we're headed as African-American people.

A century ago, Black folk who migrated from southern farms to cities often lived in squalor. Our men were denied decent jobs and steered into menial labor. Teenage girls were lured to the big city with bogus promises of work, only to be forced into prostitution, destitution and servitude. The National Urban League was founded in 1910 to lead the struggle for social and economic opportunity for urban Blacks.

In the nineteenth century, we shed the shackles of slavery. In the twentieth century, we whipped Jim Crow segregation in many realms of American life: We won the right to vote, the right to eat and shop wherever we wanted, the right to live and attend school anywhere we could afford.

In the century ahead, the primary task facing our nation is to transform America's have-nots into haves and close what we call the opportunity gap. As documented in the League's hallmark annual publication, The State of Black America, despite the progress we've made, African-Americans continue to trail Whites in every indicator that matters--from academic achievement to employment to home-ownership rates.

We consider the 2000 election to be a referendum on whether America is serious about making the American dream truly accessible to all of us. This campaign season we should judge the candidates for president--and every other elective office--by how serious they are about closing the opportunity gap.

As a blueprint for transforming have-nots into haves, the National Urban League advocates the following Ten Opportunity Commandments for the twenty-first century. They can also be used as a basis by which to judge any political platform and/or candidate. Vote for candidates who will actively push for these policies:

1. Offer quality preschool education to children whose parents cannot afford it.

2. Provide affordable health care for the more than 40 million Americans who are uninsured.

3. Ensure that every public school serving poor children equips them to be self-reliant.

4. Vastly increase support for proven programs to get the estimated 12 million high-school dropouts back on track.

5. Guarantee access to affordable higher education.

6. Implement national economic policies that promote high employment and economic growth in communities that have so far missed out on the good times.

7. Eliminate the "digital divide" by increasing free public access to computers and the Internet.

8. Ensure full participation of African-Americans and other people of color in higher education, employment and public and private business contracting opportunities.

9. Eradicate the home-ownership gap along ethnic lines by making affordable financing widely available for creditworthy working families of color.

10. Eliminate discriminatory business-loan practices holding back entrepreneurs of color.

The odyssey of Black people from subjugation to liberation the world over is the most inspiring freedom ride in the history of humankind. We've come a great distance since slave ships arrived on these shores. After the Emancipation Proclamation, it took our people a century and a half to make our way through a forest fraught with darkness and danger. Today, at the dawn of a new century, we finally see the clearing as we begin our final leg of the journey. Our goal is the American Dream--nothing less--and these Ten Opportunity Commandments represent a road map that can take us all there.

Hugh B. Price is president and CEO of the National Urban League.

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