Today is Martin Luther King Day, celebrating the words and activism of bapist priest Martin Luther King who advocated for social justice for African Americans in a largely peaceful way. His life is remembered unlike some of his counterparts in part because of his non-violent tactics.

Many activists made the civil rights movement possible. We can't only thank those who happened to be non-violent or even those who were African American. People like Malcolm X, Stokey Carmichael and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee were as important if not more important then Martin Luther King and the much overplayed story of Rosa Parks.

The Civil Rights advocates got a lot of their agenda passed. They saw multiple civil rights bills, and more importantly more awareness of the issues that blacks faced in their every day lives. Some African Americans even got farther along, while numerous others slipped farther into poverty and became increasingly segregated from white society.

It is particularly disturbing to see the steps backward our northern cities have made since the 1960s with race relations. There are more blacks then ever in our cities, and the vast majority of them live in the most horrific conditions in the worst imaginable neighborhoods. And we've simply given up on trying to change things.

Instead, we fight to keep black people down. We create whole criminal codes to turn blacks into defacto inferior people, even while we pretend to preach equality. For one black person convicted of even a minor crime is forever a bad person that is legal and legitimate to discriminate against. White people do not have this problem.

This system is not fair and it destroys our cities. We must do something turn around our troubled neighborhoods, and it must be done regardless of the high initial costs. We can not afford to have an entire underclass, nor can we afford to have blacks as second class citizens. We must do more.