What King Would See Today

Wrote one successful charter school operator this week: "These kids today are the children of parents whom we failed. This is the group of students that [D.C. public schools] turned out last year on social promotion because they changed their structure to eliminate junior high schools. We had 40 kids who registered in our school who had straight Fs."

Policy changes in the works by school officials and Wilson's school restructuring team may bring conditions back to normal. But they won't eliminate problems rooted in conditions beyond the walls of Wilson and other D.C. public schools.

King, reading the works of Harvard historical and cultural sociologist Orlando Patterson, would be saddened by the extent of instability in black families and by the self-destructiveness of young black men four decades after his death.

He would be stunned that school dropout rates are so high; that jobless young black men are becoming fathers without the means to support their children; that 70 percent of black babies are born to single mothers; that young black men are murdering each other at nine times the rate at which white youths kill each other; and that one-third of African American men in their 30s have prison records.

He might look at a black presidential candidate, two black governors, black legislators galore, black corporate executives and a growing African American middle class, and then look at the chasm separating them from poor blacks left behind and ask what happened to his call for unity.

"Be concerned about your brother," King told the Memphis rally. "Either we go up together or we go down together. Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness."

Forty years later, we're not there, either.

kingc@washpost.com