WE MUST END AMERICAN APARTHEID: Americans have paid much homage to Martin Luther King’s dream of a society where people would be judged only by the content of their character – even as they have yanked children out of schools when a delicate racial balance tipped, or planted themselves in neighborhoods determinedly monochromatic, or fought programs that would provide housing for poor blacks outside of the slums. There is something fundamentally incongruous in the idea of judging people by the content of their character and yet consigning so many Americans at birth to communities in which they are written off even before their character has been shaped.
Ellis Cose
November 24, 1996, Newsweek