Then there's the issue that still remains the major flash point in racial relations in America. That's the criminal justice system.
*In 1965, an estimated 35,000 blacks were in America's state and federal jails; in 2015, the number has soared to more than half a million.
http://www.sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=107
The gap between the two black Americas was brutally underscored in August, 1965, when at the height of the Watts riots, Martin Luther King Jr. came to Watts. He was jeered by a few blacks when he tried to calm the situation. But King did not just deliver a message of peace and non-violence; he also deplored police abuse and the poverty in Watts. Fifty years later, he would almost certainly have the same message if he came to South L.A. or any of the other Watts's of America.
What I saw in Watts in 1965, and what I see in the Watts's of America fifty years later stand as stark and troubling proof of that.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a frequent MSNBC contributor. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show Nationally Syndicated radio show. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio Los Angeles and KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network.
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