Urban League asks: ‘Is the American Dream dead?’ In Kansas and US, obstacles look overwhelming.

The National Urban League, in its latest and 50th edition of the State of Black America, asks a haunting question: “Is the American Dream dead?” This question has a particular resonance with Black Americans as the nation marks its 250th birthday, but also a particular answer.

American enslavement lasted some 246 years. Segregation, another 89, and that just takes us to 1954. Racists killed teenager Emmett Till in 1955. Also that year, Rosa Parks and other Black citizens in Birmingham, Alabama, began boycotting city buses.

The Urban League’s State of Black America highlights a nation still finding its footing in its climb toward a just society. Violence seemed the predominant weapons of the past, whereas today, the cudgel is economic. Consider the report’s findings.

From November of 2025 to February of 2026, 567,000 Black men and 250,000 to 300,000 Black women lost their jobs. Since then, the number of Black women who lost their jobs has jumped to that roughly 600,000 number.

Those losses amount to a loss in Black households of a staggering $87 billion. Black America finds itself in recession-like conditions, namely, surging unemployment, sector-specific contractions, and policy-driven shocks.

The report noted that Black households had 15 cents for every dollar owned of a white household.

The report described stalled progress: “Policy changes under the present administration have pushed the American Dream further out of reach for Black Americans than at any point since the Civil Rights Movement.”

Those policy shifts didn’t just impede progress; they rolled back gains won over decades.

“While the 2021-2024 period saw historic lows in Black unemployment and poverty rates, subsequent shifts in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and federal civil rights oversight have reversed or erased much of that momentum,” the report reads.

The current administration has launched explicit attacks on Black workers, Black history, and Black institutions.

I’m pointing now to the firing of Black military leadership; the temporary scrubbing Jackie Robinson from a government website; firing Carla Hayden, then the Librarian of Congress, via email and doing so by addressing her by her first name.

Two great Black intellectuals saw this coming decades ago.

One of those men, noted political science professor Ron Walters, wrote about this subject in his 2003 book, “White Nationalism, Black Interests.”

Walters, a Wichita native and an architect of the Congressional Black Caucus, said extremists began pursuing “a more explicitly white nationalist agenda,” after the 2000 election.

“We appear to be living in an era when a dominant sector of the white majority seems to have lost confidence in the promise of a liberal democratic state (and) is proceeding to concentrate economic and social power within its own group, using control over political institutions of the state to punish presumptive enemies,” the late-Walters wrote.

This wasn’t a pendulum swing, he wrote, but rather a “several-decades-long white nationalist movement committed to reinstating and strengthening racialized hierarchies of power and privilege.”

Noted historian John Hope Franklin referenced this subgroup in 1969. Franklin described the tendency to ignore or omit Black history as “uninformed, arrogant, un-charitable, un-democratic and racist history.”

Continuing, he said, “It has thus spawned and perpetuated an ignorant, self-seeking, super-patriotic, ethnocentric group of white Americans.”

 The report speaks to its deja vu findings.

“For the 50th anniversary edition of the State of Black America … we examine how this pattern has repeated across 250 years of American History. We document how each attempt to guarantee every American the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has been met with racism, social violence, and political retrenchment.”

Still, hopefulness shapes the report.

“We also chart a way forward,” it reads. “America is changing racially, culturally, and economically, and a new technological revolution is reshaping what is possible. We believe the future holds real promise, if we demand it.”

It poses another question as haunting as its title: “What becomes of an America where millions support policies that threaten individual freedom and physical safety rather than securing every person’s right to a full life?”

That question shadows a history long in sacrifice but short in appreciation. It spans the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, two world wars and today. In each theater, the nation’s Black inhabitants bet their lives that America might finally reward their allegiance and patriotism.

The past decade has revealed, however, that fully a third of the nation pines for a pre-civil rights America.

The Urban League asks if the American Dream is dead.

Black America might respond with a question of its own: “How can the American Dream be dead for those of us who embody it, who forced it to live up to its ideals, and who loved it when it hated us? How can it be dead, when it has always been alive in us?”

Mark McCormick is a journalist and a nonprofit executive. He’s also the author of four books including “Barry Sanders: Now You See Him” (a New York Times bestseller), “Some Were Paupers. Some Were Kings: Dispatches from Kansas,” and his latest, “Kansas Matters: America’s Social Faultlines.” Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.