Thomas MacMillan Photo
NAACP President James Rawlings.
Black New Haveners lag 40 points behind white peers on reading tests, have half the average income of white families, and are concentrated together in struggling neighborhoods. There’s a name for that situation, according to the NAACP: “Urban Apartheid.”
That’s the title of a new report released Thursday by the Greater New Haven branch of the NAACP.
A year in the making, the report details many challenges minorities face in and around New Haven, and lays out some suggested solutions, including calling on the suburbs for help.
“We are almost at the point of having a permanent underclass,” branch President James Rawlings said at a press conference at NAACP headquarters on Whalley Avenue. That underclass is mostly non-white and concentrated in poor urban neighborhoods, he said. For children growing up in such situations, “knowing where they’re born, we know they have no future,” Rawlings said.
He called out a few key statistics from the 25-page “Urban Apartheid” report, which focuses on challenges in education, economic equity, healthy neighborhoods, and civic engagement. Click here to read the full report compiled by the NAACP.
Among the stats he mentioned:
- In New Haven, 66 percent of white students are reading at goal level by third grade, versus 26 percent of black students.
- Ninety-eight percent of families with incomes of over $50,000 have access to the internet, versus 78 percent of families below that income level, in greater New Haven.
- Twelve percent of minorities say they have trouble paying their rent or mortgage, versus just 4 percent of non-minorities in the greater New Haven metropolitan area.
- Median income for black families in New Haven County has dropped $9,000 since 2008, compared to a drop of less than $3,000 for white families, who have an average income that’s nearly twice as high as black families.
- Black people have less access to transportation, and thus have less access to jobs and longer commutes when they do have jobs.
“These are systematic issues we need to deal with,” Rawlings said.
Rawlings was joined at the press conference by noted child psychiatrist Dr. James Comer, who emphasized the importance of equal access to a good education. The mayors of New Haven and Hamden and the head of the United Way all spoke of the importance of regional cooperation to deal with the problems presented in the report.
“We can’t have one town bearing the burden,” Rawlings said. He said the people who “fall out” in the suburbs end up on the New Haven Green.
Among the efforts towards regional cooperation, he said the NAACP will be asking the federal Housing and Urban Development agency (HUD) to locate public housing in “healthy communities” in the suburbs, instead of concentrating them in the city.
Rawlings said the NAACP will be taking the report on a “road show” through 12 nearby towns, and the group will be meeting with the South Central Regional Council of Governments and the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce.
Rawlings said he anticipates facing “a lot of NIMBY [Not In My BackYard] as we go forward.”
But that’s nothing new, he said. “These are the same issues we’ve been going through for the last 200 years.”