If there were any lingering questions about the state of race relations in America in the wake of the riots which reduced parts of Baltimore to smoldering ashes in April, they were answered rather emphatically when in June, 21-year old Dylann Roof killed nine black worshippers at the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina.

And although Roof’s actions did not start a "race war" (his professed intent), they did raise fresh questions about black-white relations, questions which played a role in the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol.

Since then, we’ve gotten multiple noteworthy (if alarming) sound bites from the likes of Louis Farrakhan who said in a speech this week that blacks may need to "rise up and kill those who kill [them]," and the Ku Klux Klan’s Grand Dragon who in June suggested that "a lot of the whites in the U.S. are starting to wake up."

As we noted on Tuesday, the US has had its share of deadly social violence over the past year, much of split along along racial lines, but it's mercifully avoided a full-blown racial war.

However, in recent weeks there has been a troubling increase in invocations toward even more violence, and even more deaths, which seek to achieve just that: a United States gripped in racial warfare.

It’s against that rather disturbing backdrop that we present the following results from Gallup, whose latest Minority Rights and Relations poll shows that "Americans rate black-white relations much more negatively today than they have at any point in the past 15 years."

More color from Gallup: