When I was growing up in Chicago in the 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a towering figure in my life. In fact, my childhood address was just a few miles from where Dr. King and his family temporarily relocated in 1965 to lead a civil rights charge in our city.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted preexisting economic, social, and health inequities in the United States and has exposed the nation’s deficient public health and health care infrastructure.

The extraordinary life of a prominent Black man and the painful deaths of too many other Black Americans over the past year serve as a stark reminder of the conflicting state of race relations in our nation.

Katrina, a 47-year-old Black woman participating in a December 2019 focus group of Black middle-class women in Wichita, summed up her feelings about the violence and inequality that Black people face in the U.S.

Despite the wide-ranging devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly within communities of color, we feel a sense of optimism that we have not felt in over a year.