This editorial first appeared in USA Today.
The only place most Americans see "Whites Only" signs these days is in movies or old photos, but when the Rev. Martin Luther King gave his "I have a dream speech" 50 years ago Wednesday, they were strewn across the South - water fountains, movie theaters, churches, swimming pools, libraries, even ambulances.
Being in the wrong place could land a black person in jail; giving someone the wrong look could be punishable by death.
Such casually brutal racism is hard to imagine for anyone who never lived through it and hard to forget for those who grew up burdened by it, officially second class.
For all its power, King's remarkable speech wasn't the beginning of the end of this shameful system. By then, the Supreme Court had ruled that separate schools for blacks and whites were unconstitutional, and nonviolent protests had been going on for years across the South, at lunch counters and in city streets.
The reaction was often violent. Just three months before the speech, Bull Connor's police in Birmingham, Ala., beat protesters and turned fire hoses and dogs on them. In June, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was shot to death in the driveway of his Mississippi home. A little more than two weeks after the speech, one of the many bombings that targeted blacks in Birmingham ripped open a church and killed four girls.
Measured against the awful system of the day, race relations have come a remarkable distance. King's speech and the events that inspired it led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination in public facilities. In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which began to stamp out the measures used to keep blacks from voting.
Many markers of progress have followed, punctuated by the election of a black president in 2008, something hard for even King to dream of in 1963.
Of course, there is a "but." The racism of 2013 is nothing like the American apartheid of 1963. Yet it persists. King said in 1963 that blacks lived "on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity." And while that's less true today, economic disparity remains the defining difference between black and white Americans.
Blacks are three times as likely to live in poverty, and the median net worth of white households is 14 times that of black ones. Black unemployment is twice that of whites, and black family income is only about two-thirds that of white families.
The strongest have escaped, creating a thriving black middle class, but King would never have settled for so incomplete a triumph. He aspired to a fuller equality not yet attained.
Were the great orator alive today, he would surely celebrate the moment. But he would still be looking forward to the day when the final bonds of racism have been broken and all Americans are "free at last."