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Being born in the 1980s I was curious to see what the American Black population's poverty rate was in the 1980s. To my surprise it was as high as 35% [1].

1. https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/visualizations...

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50% around 1959... wow

Not really surprising given that was a deliberate policy objective of lots of places in the pre-civil rights era?

Even as late as 1985 the police could carry out what in any other country would be described as a terrorist attack, leaving a number of people dead and burning down 65 houses, without serious consequences to themselves. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/05/18/407665820...

I feel like folks have a bit of a skewed perspective on the timeline of the civil rights movement because of the way we teach it. For example, Brown v. Board was decided in 1954. We teach it as a culmination of a process (because it’s more dramatic that way). But Brown was just the start, rather than the end, of school desegregation. For the most part, the south simply ignored the result. The famous event where JFK had to send federal troops to forcibly integrate the University of Alabama happened almost a decade later. The first school desegregation cases were brought in Mississippi in the late 1960s. As of 2015, there were still 174 school districts under court-supervised desegregation plans.

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