In 2015 two economists at Harvard University reported on an extensive study they conducted on five million IRS records of anonymous families with children. The study showed that poor children who grow up in some cities and towns have sharply better odds of escaping poverty than poor children in other places.
Among the 100 largest cities, children growing up in Baltimore face the greatest odds of escaping poverty. Of 2,478 localities analyzed from this study, our small city, Roanoke, is in the bottom 10 of the worse cities for a child to grow up. The Roanoke Times, the major daily, reported on these issues in last Sunday’s paper. In announcing the beginning of a series on poverty issues in Roanoke, this newspaper made an apt, but nevertheless surprising, confession. I repeat it here:
“For much of its earlier history, the [Roanoke Times] newspaper played a part in perpetuating segregation through biased practices in reporting on racial and ethnic minorities, and by editorially endorsing residential, institutional and school segregation and the destruction of black neighborhoods by urban renewal.”
Many African Americans know this to be true in cities across the country and have heard this said before, but not usually from a major regional newspaper. I applaud the Roanoke Times, and I wish more institutions would confess, not about slavery, but about more recent times and circumstances.
On the other hand, such a confession was made before—and on a larger scale. In 1968 the Kerner Commission Report indicted the country for its racism. President Lyndon Johnson had established this Commission and charged it to investigate and determine why the riots of the mid-1960’s had occurred. Surprisingly, this Commission, made up of establishment moderates, came back with the following answers (in the language of that era):
“White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.”
“Pervasive discrimination and segregation [are the culprits]. The first is surely the continuing exclusion of great numbers of Negroes from the benefits of economic progress through discrimination in employment and education, and their enforced confinement in segregated housing and schools. The corrosive and degrading effects of this condition and the attitudes that underlie it are the source of the deepest bitterness and at the center of the problem of racial disorder.”
“What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.
Yes, the Kerner Commission said all this nearly 50 years ago, and two million copies of the 600-page report were sold; however, the debate about these facts was aborted with the assassination of Martin Luther King one month later and the resulting riots in over 100 cities across the country. Sadly, we have not returned to the point of having a national discussion about how things got how they are—something that was carefully laid out in the Kerner Commission Report. Let’s hope the Roanoke Times’ confession is one of many future steps in that direction.