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What is the plan for our nation’s cities? Are they simply to simmer with a growing divide between the affluent financial district and the impoverished slums? Will another generation be lost while we wait for the inevitable explosions? The gulf between the realities of our cities and the foolishness of our politics has seldom been wider. Consider gun violence. Over the Fourth of July weekend, Chicago surpassed 200 homicide deaths for the year. On that weekend alone, 10 people were killed and several dozen wounded in gun violence, including 5- and 7-year-old boys. The only grim salvation in the savage …

On this day, 48 years ago, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, announcing, “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, as individuals, control over their own destinies.” With Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks at his side, he pledged that the act would be enforced. No longer would anyone be excluded from exercising the right to vote because of the color of his or her skin. This February, in his fourth State of the Union address, a newly re-elected President Obama earned fierce applause when he declared: …