Equality.

The word represents the essence of the American ideal, and of the vision that has inspired African Americans during their centuries-long struggle to gain their full measure of citizenship in their native land.

However, African American’s striving for equality continues to be shadowed by an unsteadiness that has always cloaked the progress African Americans have made in an extraordinary complexity.

That is, the progress African Americans forge, whether through the accomplishments of individuals or of large segments of the entire group, has always been shadowed by two things.

One is their awareness of the substantial challenges yet to be overcome.

The second is their awareness that a significant reversal of fortune could, in group terms, completely erase such gains.

One way to describe this condition is by the words of an old folk saying: Black Americans feel they are "Standing on shaky ground."

A more formal way would be to say that black progress is precarious and complex.

A third way is numerically, via an indexing of the status of Black America’s pursuit of parity with White America.

This week, in the 2004 volume of its annually published journal, "The State of Black America," the National Urban League is unveiling is "Equality Index" to underscore the continuing "precarious and complex" quality of Black progress today.

What our Equality Index has determined is that Black Americans stand at less than three-quarters do—73% do—to be exact—of where White America stands.

Thus, one can rightly say that more than two centuries after the Constitutional Convention created an infamous concept of measurement—three-fifths of a person—to define the value of the enslaved Africans and African Americans who were doing more than their share to build the American nation, Black Americans have progressed—

However, they still stand on shaky ground.

By no means do we discount the progress. Indeed, we celebrate it, whether it be the notable achievements of individuals in business, or education, or science, or sports; or the broad advance of African Americans as a group—as when the rush of the Black poor to a, for once, welcoming labor market in the late 1990’s drove the Black unemployment rate down to its historic low of seven percent.

But we cannot ignore the measure the Equality Index, drawn from examining the status of Black Americans in the five areas of education, economics, health, social justice and civic engagement, takes of the "equality gap"—the progress that has to be made before one can declare that Black Americans and White Americans live in a society in which race produces no negative accounting.

In addition, the collection of provocative essays and, another new feature, op-ed articles we’ve gathered provided powerful resonance to the data limned in the National Urban League Equality Index and the National Urban League Poll.

That Black Americans should be such a long way from parity bears powerful witness to the continuing affect of America’s long past of racial discrimination and the defining characteristic of the African American Experience—the complexity of Black progress.

So, even as America this year prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark "Brown" school-desegregation decision and all the progress that produced, we cannot forget the fact that our Equality Index shows the economic status of African Americans is but 56% that of Whites.

Or that, once the economic recession hit, the unemployment rate of African Americans soared back above 10%, twice that of White Americans, and has stayed there.

Our index provides plenty of further evidence of this sharp split in the equality of life for African Americans, and evidence via our National Urban League poll, which also appears in "The State of Black America 2004," that African Americans themselves are intensely aware that they are standing on shaky ground amidst the physical peril of a global war that follows no rules and has no boundaries, and amidst a national economic "recovery" that for millions and millions of Americans seems scarcely different from the preceding recession.

As those latter words indicate, African Americans are hardly alone in their sense of anxiety about the present and the future.

The difference, however, is that this predicament has always been so for African Americans, and, at this critical juncture, history may be repeating itself—with consequences that could widen even further the "equality gap" between Black America and White America.

There are many lessons to be drawn from the scholarship and statistical indices in "The State of Black America 2004," lessons that the Urban League intends to help America as a whole discuss throughout the year.

But certainly the most important lesson is understanding that closing the equality gap is a challenge not just for African Americans and other people of color, but for White Americans, too, if America is to maintain its position as the economic power and moral leader of the world community.