In Brooklyn, Myrlie Evers Williams, the former head of the NAACP and widow of slain activist Medgar Evers, decried the wrongful purge of Florida voters on the grounds they were felons. Sen. Hilary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., took the same stage to echo her husband's call for a new, controversial policy: that all felons who have served their time be allowed to vote once more.

Smart sentiment; late timing, at least for the Democratic Party. America's policy on felons and voting is a mess -- a racist mess at that. Had the Clinton-Gore administration sought to remedy the situation during its two terms, Vice President Gore likely would have won the presidency.

Here's the situation across the nation: Most states allow felons to vote once they have served their time (and four actually allow them to vote from prison). But 10, mostly Southern states with large African-American populations, permanently disenfranchise felons. Many of these states, including Florida, passed their ban on felons' voting shortly after the Civil War, and added a series of more minor offenses to the felony list to boot. Today in Florida, nearly one-third of black men cannot vote because of the state's ban on felons going to the polls.

President Clinton delivered a broader policy agenda on race to Congress that included a call for eliminating racial profiling and improving access to health care. But the call to restore felons' voting rights might well be the most controversial. Why else would Clinton have avoided championing the issue earlier?

Most politicians have been too afraid of seeming lax on crime to speak out forcefully about racial discrepancies in our criminal justice policy. White Americans often go free for offenses that get black Americans hard time. According to federal statistics and outgoing ``drug czar'' Barry McCaffrey, twice as many whites in raw numbers as blacks use crack, yet fully 90 percent of those incarcerated for crack cocaine possession or sales under federal law are black.

This type of discrepancy in prosecution and sentencing also leads to a gap in participation at the polls. Today, African-Americans are five times as likely as whites to be disenfranchised under felony voter laws. And if people lack the right to vote, they become even more disconnected from the society they live in and the government with which they interact. That, above all, should help motivate us to reconsider our policy.

Of course, at the same time our outgoing president has put the felony issue back in the news, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has started investigating the disenfranchisement of nonfelons in Florida. Voters mistakenly listed as felons, including one county elections chief, testified before the commission during a series of hearings in the state's capitol. One local pastor had to threaten to bring a lawyer to the polls before being allowed to vote. A Republican-led Texas firm helped purge the Florida rolls of felons, and ended up excluding 8,000 voters who had committed no such crimes.

In recent years, a number of revisionist tomes about race have chided black Americans to get over the civil-rights era and move into the 21st century. And while a new day has unmistakably dawned, Martin Luther King Day still requires that we actively work toward equality in America's schools and courts and at the polls.

This country is much better at sprints than marathons. We love fixing disasters and don't necessarily like social problems that require the long haul. But as the 2000 elections have evinced, equal access to the ballot -- a cornerstone of the civil-rights movement nearly a half century ago -- remains a critical issue today.

Chideya is a New York journalist and the editor of PopandPolitics.com. Distributed by Tribune Media Services.

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