UNITED NATIONS  - 22 July 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com / --  For all the hospitality we enjoyed from our host city of Detroit, the National Urban League’s Annual Conference convened July 21 for four days under what seemed like wartime conditions.

I don’t mean that in physical terms, of course:  there were no tanks in the streets.  The feeling was purely psychological.

But that didn’t mean our sense of urgency about the present and future of the country is any less real.

That is because, despite the comforts we Americans enjoy, we cannot—we must not—forget that in fact the United States is now engaged in a two-front war.

The obvious war is the one we and all the decent peoples of the world are fighting against the forces of terrorism.  

Although the terror has not struck on these shores since the horrible day of September 11, 2001, we all know we cannot relax our vigilance.  

Indeed, we must increase it—while ensuring the protection of the civil liberties that make America America.

The less obvious war the United States is fighting is the one that we at the National Urban League have turned more and more of our attention to in recent years: the war against the “equality gap” in America.

In our minds, the fact that both President Bush and his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry, chose to make the Urban League Conference a stop on their respective campaign trails underscores the work the League has always done to help Americans bridge the gaps between blacks and whites.

Ironically, the considerable progress African Americans as individuals and as a group have forged in the four decades since the civil rights victories of the 1960s is one reason the gap between the haves and have-nots is sharper in our minds.  

We can’t afford to leave anyone behind.

This war itself has many battlefronts—unemployment, education, and health care are just a few—and its casualties and “collateral damage” are often not classified as “war-related.”  

But that doesn’t make our domestic “war” any less serious.

Exactly a century ago, in The Souls of Black Folk, his groundbreaking rumination on what it meant to be a black American, the great scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois presciently declared that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”  

That is, that America would ultimately not be able to advance as a nation until it acknowledged the right of African Americans to the full measure of their American citizenship.

That governmental and societal acknowledgement wasn’t secured until the civil rights victories of the 1960s.

But now it’s clearer than ever that America must still grapple with a civil rights challenge—the challenge underscored by what we call the equality gap.

Illuminating and quantifying that gap was the major focus this year of our scholarly journal, The State of Black America 2004.  

We inaugurated in it the National Urban League Equality Index to annually chart the status of African Americans in American society.

The Index’s most alarming finding was that, in terms of economic parity, black Americans stand at just 56 percent of where white Americans are.

That figure was just part of a cascade of worrisome economic news that continues. 

For example, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert noted, a Northeastern University study has found that by 2002 one of every four black males in the U.S. was idle all year long—a rate twice as high as that of white and Hispanic males.  

Herbert’s and the study’s authors’ grim assessment of this fact as “evidence of an emerging catastrophe” only begins to do it justice.   

That’s why the work of the Urban League is so critical.  

Our affiliates in more than 100 cities across the country, our front-line fighters in this war, serve nearly two million people.  

They have connected 25,000 people to both blue- and white-collar jobs.  

They serve 700,000 young people in early childhood and after-school and mentoring programs.  

Via other programs, they help first-time homebuyers navigate the maze of what is likely to be their most important purchase in life.

Increasingly, they are becoming a conduit for African-American entrepreneurs to gain access to much-needed financing to begin or expand their businesses.

But, of course, the Urban League can’t do it alone.  

It and all the others working in the field need help from both the private-sector and the public sector.

That’s another reason it’s so important to have the two candidates for the most important job in the public sector, the Presidency of the United States, speaking to us, and through us to the American people.

Their respective remarks we will evaluate as all Americans will.  

But no one should doubt that their very presence affirms the fact that closing this society’s equality gaps, empowering communities and changing lives is the work for all of America in the 21^st century.

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