April 4, 2018 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King is perhaps most remembered today for his “I Have a Dream” speech (held on August 28, 1968), in which he outlined his dream of a future American society which did not judge people “by the color of their skin but rather by the content of their character." Has Dr. King’s dream come true in the United States?

Regrettably, you'd have to say no. Despite the enormous strides made by the civil rights movement, the United States remains deeply divided along racial lines. Although formal desegregation has long since been outlawed, the existence of exclusively white and black neighborhoods up and down the country would appear to suggest a more insidious social system of segregation at work.
In recent years, activists in the Black Lives Matter movement have drawn attention to the number of unarmed African Americans shot and killed by police officers. In such situations, they argue, the police officers most certainly did not judge the people they killed by the "content of their character"—only by the color of their skin.
Then there are persistent inequalities in relation to the criminal justice system, where levels of incarceration among young African American males have reached epidemic proportions. Scholars such as Michelle Alexander have argued forcefully that this is a revival of the infamous Jim Crow laws, the legal system of segregation that lasted for the better part of a hundred years after the abandonment of Reconstruction. The full title of Alexander's book—The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness—is meant to indicate just how far society has fallen short of realizing Dr. King's noble dream.