The social and political levers that enabled segregation in the ‘60s are still at play today, with disparities in achievement and wealth growing more pronounced over time. Holder Supreme Court decision responsible for gutting parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965) were also included on the list. Trussville, Hoover, Homewood and Shelby County (the same county represented in the landmark Shelby v. Vestavia Hills and Mountain Brook, two wealthy, majority-white suburbs, ranked second and third, respectively. Income in Birmingham, like the rest of America, is inextricably linked to race. Six of Birmingham’s suburbs, whose public schools operate as separate from Birmingham City Schools (BCS), ranked among the top 50 most income disparate city lines in the nation. While those laws ended segregation by law in the form of Jim Crow, de facto segregation persists to this day, with Birmingham public schools ranking among the least integrated and most unequal in the country.Ī 2016 report from the education non-profit Ed Build found that the income divide between Birmingham and six of its neighboring white flight suburbs was among the most extreme in the country. Those images, broadcast on national television, shocked the American conscience, leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, landmark legislation that sought to calcify racial equity in the unruly South. and hundreds of peaceful protesters, many of them children, were brutally attacked by Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor and the Birmingham Police Department.
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