Change We Can Believe In, by Barack Obama: on Civil Rights

Legalized discrimination meant blacks could not amass wealth

Segregated schools were and are inferior schools. We still haven’t fixed them, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination-- where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions--meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth & income gap between blacks and whites, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities