Today is Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, and we’ll be celebrating his legacy on MLK Day on Monday. This is an important time to reflect on how right now, nearly 60 years after Dr. King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream Speech" on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Black workers are still facing stark levels of racism and economic inequality—inequalities the pandemic has made even starker.
 
This EPI chart comparing the unemployment rate in December 2020 to the same month the year before shows devastating job losses caused by COVID-19, and it makes very clear how those losses have hit Black and Latinx workers especially hard.

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.