Economy
The Unsteady Rise of Minority Civil Servants
Where public payrolls still don't reflect the local population.
Photographs from the riots that spread across American cities in the 1960s capture a telling detail about the era. The incensed communities, as history well remembers, were black. And, invariably, the police officers were white.
The Kerner Commission appointed by Lyndon Johnson to study the causes of these "civil disorders" later cited this disconnect as one piece of the underlying problem. Blacks, twice as likely at the time to be unemployed as whites, had been systematically shut out from good public-sector jobs. And their exclusion from the most visible civil servant ranks of all – on urban police forces – made the tension between the powerful and the powerless in cities like Chicago and Detroit all the worse.