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For black Americans, the inequality that fuelled fiery protests more than 50 years ago remains | CBC News
Jun 02, 2020 2 mins, 12 secs
There's already a presidential report tracing the sources of rage in black communities that erupted in fiery protests across American cities.

Atop its list of factors was an unholy trinity of segregation — separate police treatment, in separate communities, with separate school systems.

Talk to black protesters these days, and police brutality is frequently cast as just one point in a constellation of inequalities.

The commission produced a politically unpopular argument: that white people had rigged the system for themselves by voting for, and supporting, policies that ensured separate societies. .

Sophia Tekola said media reports are missing the bigger picture when they portray the current frustration as being caused by only one issue, the deaths of black people in police custody.

The court decided in 1974 that it would not intervene in school districts designed around white and black areas because they weren't explicitly segregated by race.

A report by EdBuild, a school funding research and advocacy group based in New Jersey, found a funding gap of $2,226 per child, per year between predominantly white and predominantly black school boards.  .

The book Police Brutality chronicles deadly race riots in American cities, in just one century alone, in 1900, 1917, 1919, 1921, 1943, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1968, 1980 and 1992.

The mutual fear and mistrust lingers between police and black communities.

In a Pew Research survey of 7,916 police officers in 2016, 93 per cent said they felt increasingly concerned about their safety on the job, at a time when anti-police protests had escalated into deadly violence.

The same survey also offered a glimpse into how police saw civil rights issues.

It found 92 per cent of white police officers said black Americans have equal rights with white people.

That was much different than the view of their black police colleagues and even of white members of the general public surveyed separately by Pew.

"[Police brutality is] definitely a real thing," said Pegues, a justice correspondent for CBS. 

"You have police working in communities that they're frankly not familiar with

You have police officers that see residents in the communities that they 'protect and serve' as the enemy."

The report for Baltimore, for example, reached the same conclusion as the Kerner Commission in 1968 — that most black people perceived the existence of two separate societies

Black residents were stopped by police without cause far more often than white people; charged with drug possession more often than white drug-users; and almost exclusively the residents charged with crimes that require an officer's judgment call, such as failure to obey

A demonstrator in Washington named Shannon Clark said he was protesting because most people he knows are aware of someone hurt by police brutality

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