with us now, president and ceo of the national urban league and former mayor of new orleans, marc morialeek the national urban league. >> good morning. >> good morning. kicks off its annual pass to power conference. looking forward to hearing how that goes. marc, thanks for joining us. this big year of diplomacy scheduled for tonight, has everyone talking. i want to look at a poll. this is put together by nbc news and the "wall street journal." as sort of cooler heads prevail in terms of what happened there. who's to blame right now. this is the answer that people are giving. 27% say professor gates. 11% say sergeant crowley, but look at this. 29% say both at fault, and 31%, i think i would put myself in that category, don't know. which i think is fair. let me read to you from "the washington post." stop the racial score settling. obama trying to make the case for universal health coverage. for the largest step towards greater associate justice since civil rights and medicare and took a single word stupidly to send everyone scurrying back to that infinite score settling. sergeant crowley

marc morial joins me now, a former mayor of new orleans. great to see you, thank you so much. we know you're busy with your conference. thanks for taking the time to join us today. >> thanks for having me. >> let me ask you about the state of black america. you issued your report back in march, but you're there at your conference today. as you gather this week in new orleans, and we've had this huge eruption of, or, rather, in chicago, we've had this huge eruption about race in america. what is your take on where we stand in america today? >> well, america's made enormous progress. we need to congratulate ourselves on that, great progress has been made. but there's a distance to go. there's work to do. we're focusing here in chicago on solutions, and we just heard from vice president biden, who i think did a good job in calibrating and providing us with information about the president's economic plan and his stimulus objective. and how it's affected urban communities by protecting the jobs of police officers, firefighters, and teachers and by helping people, who otherwise woul