Page 124 - Freedom in the world_Neat

Thus in 2005 Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of manslaughter for his part in the killing of
three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a case memorialized in the 1988
film Mississippi Burning. Killen was brought to justice 41 years after the crime was
committed.7
A number of Southern states have revived investigations of crimes committed against
blacks or civil rights advocates four or five decades ago. Some states have also established
variants of the truth commissions that new democracies in Latin America, Africa, and
Eastern Europe have used to set the historical record straight about past crimes or acts of
repression in which the state was complicit. North Carolina formed a special commission in
2000 to investigate a race riot that occurred in 1898 in the city of Wilmington.8 Some
states have provided compensation to victims of acts of racial injustice. Florida gave
compensation to the nine survivors of the 1923 Rosewood race riot—another incident that
became the subject of a film—and set up a fund to provide university tuition assistance for
descendants of the victims.9
Some African American activists have launched a movement to win financial reparations for
the descendants of black slaves in the United States. Among other things, proponents
point to congressional action that provided payments to Japanese American survivors of
World War II internment as precedent for similar compensation for blacks. Attempts to gain
congressional support for slavery reparations have never made much progress, and the
effort largely collapsed in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. At the same time,
advocates of reparations have initiated lawsuits against corporations in the insurance,
financial services, tobacco, and other industries, demanding reparations for their or their
predecessor-companies’ ties to slavery.10

Race and Poverty

Some black critics have expressed frustration at the resources devoted to finding and
punishing the perpetrators of civil rights crimes and the commissions of inquiry into
incidents like the Rosewood riot. They assert that by focusing on past wrongdoing, white
society is giving itself sanction to ignore more pressing contemporary problems stemming
from economic and social inequality. Among other things, they contend that a real
commitment to equality would require a serious and expensive antipoverty program
directed at black youth in inner cities.

However, the statistics on the level of poverty in black America tell a mixed story. One can
find data that reinforce the views of optimists or confirm the bleakest conclusions of
pessimists.

For the optimists, the figures show a substantial decline in poverty and a general
improvement in other economic indicators over the past four and a half decades. In 1959,
when the U.S. Census Bureau began publishing data on poverty, the poverty rate for
African Americans stood at a huge 55.1 percent. The comparable figure for whites was
18.1 percent. By 1970, poverty for both blacks and whites had declined substantially due
to a decade of uninterrupted growth and job creation in the industrial sector. For blacks,
poverty stood at 33.5 percent—still high, but dramatically lower than 11 years earlier. The

Page 124 of 168