My formative years coincided with an explosion of activism in the civil rights movement. I graduated from high school in 1957, the year Dr. King helped to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Of course, much of the impetus for the founding of the SCLC came from the Dec. 1, 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. Ms. Parks’s arrest sparked the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott organized by the Montgomery NAACP chapter and led by Dr. King. The activism continued to grow into the ’60s and was joined by parallel streams of activism in the women’s movement and the peace movement.

These movements, and the ideas expressed by Dr. King, did a great deal to shape my views of social justice, to deepen my concern and outrage over poverty, discrimination and depravation, and to forge my views of how to change the injustices I perceived around me. It was a time of great awakening for me. I had not been exposed to much thought about how to change the environment I had grown up in and, for me, this was a great and glorious time.

My classmates and I attending what is now known as the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff were filled with excitement, with visions of hope, with inspiration over how we could remake the world. Looking back, I can see the seeds of pessimism as well as optimism. It has taken us so much longer to get to where we are than we imagined, and still the disparities continue to exist.

According to the most recent statistics on infant mortality in Chicago (2004 is the latest numbers we have), the mortality rate for black babies was 14.7 percent, and for white babies it was 4.6 percent. For that same year, 100 percent of the maternal mortalities were black mothers.

In 2004 not a single African American earned a Ph.D. in astronomy or astrophysics. African Americans earned only 10 doctorates (one-tenth of one percent of the total) in mathematics.  Blacks earned about 1 percent of the doctorates in physics; in computer science, about seven-tenths of one percent.

The income gap between black and white families has actually widened in the past three decades. Incomes for both black and white families have grown — mainly because more women are in the workforce — but the gain is greater among whites.

Incomes among black men have actually declined when adjusted for inflation. Those were offset only by gains among black women. In 2004, a typical black family had an income that was 58 percent of a typical white family. In 1974 the median black family income was 63 percent of a white family.

Still, African Americans have made tremendous progress. And for me, the optimism and hope of those early years still shape my outlook. Even though Dr. King is gone, the lessons of how movements can bring about fundamental change remain as fresh and as relevant as ever.

I believe we may be on the verge of plowing some new ground, creating some new paths, electing some leadership. Dr. King’s voice seems to echo across the years: We need to keep on dreaming if we are to turn hope into reality.

Davis is secretary of the Congressional Black Caucus.