Abstract
More than 50 years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, what has become of his call for social, political, and economic equality for African Americans? How do we equip a new generation with knowledge, techniques and strategies of past activists, and assessments of the policies that were implemented and/or defeated in the struggle for justice and equality? How do we measure our progress toward a more just and equal society? The Measuring the Dream (MTD) project informs, enables, and inspires a diverse audience to understand the history of the journey toward a more equal society. To quantify national changes in equity since the 1950s, the project’s MTD Index identifies six arenas in which the struggle for equal justice has taken place and can be objectively traced. Data within each area are cataloged and then combined to calculate a MTD Index score from pre-1950–2016. No single index exists with this set of indicators that provides the scaling and longitudinal framework necessary to assess America’s strive towards prosperity and equality for all. This chapter describes the importance of a national equity measurement, the process to select indicators, the challenges of historical data, and construction of the MTD Index.
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We would like to thank Open Society for the grant support of the Measuring the Dream from Brown to Black Lives Matter project.
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O’Connell, K., Young, A., Botchwey, N.D. (2020). Measuring the Dream for an Equitable and Sustainable Future. In: Ridzi, F., Stevens, C., Davern, M. (eds) Community Quality-of-Life Indicators. Community Quality-of-Life and Well-Being. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48182-7_4
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