Across the country, African Americans are applauding a fast-growing movement to remove the Confederate flag from public life after last week's racially charged massacre of nine black worshipers in a Charleston church. But even many of those who support the effort suspect it will do little to address what they see as fundamental racial injustices - from mass incarceration of black men to a lack of economic and educational opportunities.
In South Los Angeles, where police last year shot and killed Ezell Ford, a 25-year-old unarmed black man, residents interviewed by Reuters said that while they welcomed the prospect of the Civil War-era flag finally being purged from public grounds, they did not see its removal as a watershed moment for race in America.
"Black folks are still being killed; they are still being under-educated; they still have little access to health care," said Melina Abdullah, an attorney who has helped organize community response to Ford's killing. Taking down the Confederate flag, she says, will not solve "institutional racism and a police system that kills black people."
Abdullah sees a far more intractable problems facing African-Americans than the Confederate flag, including a justice system with an incarceration rate six times higher for black men and a high rate of gun violence in many neighborhoods. In the United States, blacks are more than twice as likely to die from gunshots as whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We can't have this debate over the flag blind people to the larger struggle,” said Abdullah.
Glenn Martin knows the odds many black Americans face. Now 42, he grew up in the crime-ridden New York neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in the 1980s and 1990s, a mixed-race child of a single black mother of three who was on welfare. He says he was subjected to racist taunts and insults by white colleagues at a series of jobs.
Eventually, he turned to crime, robbing stores at gunpoint, a life that led him in and out of the prison system. Eventually, in his thirties, he turned his life around and now works for JustLeadershipUSA, an advocacy group dedicated to cutting the U.S. prison population.
“For so many black lives, it's a cycle of in and out of the welfare system and the jail system,” he said.
Asked whether the movement to bring down the Confederate flag will help, he was dismissive. "We are always looking for the easy way out rather than having difficult discussions about systematic racism."
