However, just as every other upwardly mobile lower-middle-classed family, we moved from a rental house on the near East side to a far West side suburban neighborhood near the city limits. Ostensibly, my father insisted on his children attending Reitz High School where it was thought we could get a good education to prepare my sister and I for college. Sometime during my high school years, the city initiated court-order busing of black students from the inner-city to all portions of the city’s school system.

After several years of college at Indiana University in Bloomington, I lived for almost a decade in the Washington, D.C. area, a city which is nearly 70 percent black. The culture shock one experiences moving into a metropolitan community so different from a place like Evansville is considerable. It forces one to reevaluate many closely held beliefs about life, social conditions and the problems of race which we continue to struggle with as a society.

So it is within this backdrop that I learned recently that the Ku Klux Klan is planning a rally in nearby Boonville -- the resulting controversy and the protests of some were understandably predictable. To a certain extent so was the announcement that WFIE Channel 14’s news department would not cover the rally.

The truth is, however, that in many respects the Klan coming to Boonville forces us to confront some harsh realities many of us would like to avoid -- Evansville remains a terribly racist community.

Look around. Only a small handful of blacks serve in elective office and none can be found in top management of local banks, hospitals, media outlets, utilities or other major employers. Minority set-aside contracts on large municipal projects are not a priority as they are in municipalities which have larger, more politically powerful black communities.

Black business success stories are few and far between, notably, one which gets little attention but has survived for 15 years is Our Times newspaper, edited and published by Sondra L. Matthews, which received no media coverage whatsoever for its recent anniversary celebration.

With few successful black employers, how can the black community really be expected to flourish?

Three generations of institutionalized poverty and failed national welfare policies have in many instances destroyed black families and driven many into the clutches of drug abuse and personal despair. The tragic Ricky Murphy incident and the levels of black, male incarcerations demonstrate our racial callousness and how we as a society would rather lock up our problems in jail cells rather than offering economic opportunities.

Local elected officials are often long on political promises to the black community, but, with the unique exception of Casino Aztar, are usually short on delivering real progress which directly benefits our least advantaged residents.