Cleaning up after a CVS was set afire. Andrew Burton/Getty Images
The death of Freddie Gray and the subsequent protests in Baltimore have, once again, put that city in the spotlight. The problems plaguing Baltimore are coming into sharp relief as the nation is, once again, faced with a US city that has both a significant Black population and equally significant socioeconomic problem.
Fusion takes a snapshot based on the area where Gray was from, Sandtown:
— Just 42 percent of residents are employed, compared to the national average of 59 percent.
— Thirty-three percent of residential properties are vacant or abandoned.
— Just 54 percent of its residents are even in the labor force, even though 77 percent of residents are between 20 and 64 years old.
— Just 4.5 percent of the neighborhood has a Bachelor’s degree.
Not enough? How about this: “Sandtown is also home to the highest number of residents incarcerated in all of Maryland.”
Gray and his family actually received a settlement in 2010 because of high lead levels in their home, another persistent problem in Sandtown where there have been a number of similar legal claims.
Baltimore was also the scene of riots in 1968, following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. “Many of the areas where we’re seeing disturbances today actually never recovered from the 1968 riots,” Lawrence Brown, an assistant professor at Morgan State University said.
A Forbes contributor goes into detail about other problems facing the Black population in Baltimore — from the AIDS epidemic to high rates of poverty.
In other words, the tragic death of Freddie Gray may have sparked the anger we saw yesterday, and rightfully so. We still don’t even know for sure what happened to him, though there are suspicions that he was taken to the local police station without being securely buckled into the police vehicle. His family says his spinal chord was 80 percent severed and his larynx crushed.
That’s enough to make the nation angry but it’s certainly not the only reason Baltimore residents have to take to the streets.
