GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — Several months after the July 1967 race riot devastated parts of Grand Rapids, a report listed a dozen challenges the city’s blacks faced.
At the top of the list in the city’s “Anatomy of a Riot” report: income, housing, health care, the family breakdown and crime.
Fifty years later, Grand Rapids Community College President Bill Pink is struck by how much of that list still applies.
“It is very troubling,” said Dr. Pink, a black leader who co-chairs Mayor Rosalynn Bliss’ Racial Equity Initiative — a project driven by a $300,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
Among the inequities it will address: The disparity between black and white poverty in Grand Rapids, the state’s biggest gap. In the city, 41 percent of blacks live in poverty. For whites, it’s 16 percent.
“It is surprising that you see that disparity,” Pink said. “It, yet, still remains a surprise to me that we’ve seen that disparity for so long.
“This is now the opportunity for us to get together and say, ‘Here’s the problem, what do we do about it?’ And then put the action plan together and do it.”
He said the focus should be on education, jobs and what he calls “covert” racism.