Word: Creating black poverty, crisis and conflict

Keith Ellison, Guardian - During nearly 250 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow segregation, the US government and big corporations cut African Americans out of the economy. In the last 30 years, led by President Reagan and the Gingrich Republicans, something just as harmful happened: the systematic economic abandonment of black neighborhoods. The number of low-income people in Ferguson doubled in the last 10 years. Unemployment in Freddie Gray’s neighborhood was over 50% between 2008-2012. The inequality ratio, a number measuring income distribution, in Tamir Rice’s Cleveland grew at a faster pace from 2012 to 2013 than in any other major city.

Leaders in Washington and around the country should have responded to the growing crisis in African American neighborhoods by creating jobs, repairing infrastructure, avoiding bad trade deals that offshored good-paying jobs in many urban areas and investing in our kids. Instead Congress and state legislatures built prisons, passed trade agreements that sent jobs overseas, gave police weapons designed for warzones and passed laws that increased de facto