Half of Americans are economically insecure. What are we going to do about it?

Here is a number that should stop us cold: 64 percent . That is the share of Black families in America who, right now, lack the income and resources needed to meet the true cost of economic security. Not poverty or survival, but genuine stability.

On the heels of the 63rd anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, that number tells us how far we have to go.

Sixty-three years ago, hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered in Washington to demand jobs and freedom. The name itself reflected a fundamental understanding at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement: Economic security is a core element of freedom. What does freedom actually require? And what happens when a nation grants liberty but withholds the economic conditions that make liberty real?

It demands that we stop designing policy around acute deprivation and start designing policy around what it takes to thrive. It demands, most fundamentally, that we go from sustaining people in poverty to lifting people into a decent standard of living, one that reflects the true cost of economic security.

My father, Reverend Dr. William Augustus Jones Jr., a close confidant of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., spent his life insisting that economic justice was an unfinished business of civil rights. He understood that freedom required an economy that served all people, and that the fight for civil rights could not be separated from the fight for economic opportunity and security.

For decades, America has been governed by a poverty threshold , a measure designed in the 1960s that tells us only who is in the most acute distress. It says nothing about what it costs to thrive — nothing about what it takes to save for an emergency, pay off debt, afford childcare or plan for retirement. Nothing, in other words, about what it actually takes to be economically secure in 21st-century America.

That measure tells us that almost 11 percent of Americans are living in poverty. But the True Cost of Economic Security, a groundbreaking new standard developed by the Urban Institute and commissioned by the National True Cost of Living Coalition, tells a radically different story. One that better captures the lived experiences of millions of Americans by capturing the full range of what families actually need: housing, food, healthcare, childcare, transportation and savings for the future. It asks not just whether you can survive today, but whether you can build toward tomorrow.

By the True Cost of Economic Security standard, 49 percent of all Americans — nearly half the country — lacks the resources they need to be economically secure. Economic insecurity cuts across racial lines, affecting families of every background and in every part of the country.

This isn’t about the margins of society: We are talking about America.

A new analysis from my organization, the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, also provides a sobering reminder of the dreams and promises from the 1963 March on Washington that have yet to be realized — particularly, for Black people. The racial wealth gap has worsened since 1963, ballooning to a median white net worth of $296,200 and just a $37,600 median net worth for Black families . Nearly one in four (23.8 percent) Black people have a net worth that is zero or negative.

Even though Blacks have earned college and graduate degrees at significantly higher rates today than in 1963, discrimination in the workplace and systemic factors like occupational segregation means that they still suffer higher unemployment rates and lower wages than white people. Black women in particular reap fewer rewards for the higher educational attainment they were told would afford them economic freedom. Those with advanced degrees earn about as much as White women with bachelor’s degrees.

In too many ways, we are moving away from the promise carried by those who marched in 1963.

In a time where federal policies are rolling back the hard-fought advancements of the Civil Rights Movement, now is the moment to confront the structural inequities that continue to deny too many communities the full promise of freedom. Shifting those structures demands that we treat childcare, healthcare, housing and savings not as luxuries but as the building blocks of economic security that every family deserves.

Sixty-three years after the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, we have the data, the mandate, and the unfinished work before us. What we need now is the will to act on it.

Jennifer Jones Austin is the CEO and executive director of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies.