In the past year, intense tensions around race in America have re-emerged, sparking protests, civil unrest and reams of media coverage. The conversation has deep relevance in Cincinnati, which experienced racially charged unrest over the 2001 police shooting of unarmed 19-year-old Timothy Thomas, and, more recently, national attention over the shooting death of unarmed black motorist Samuel DuBose by a white University of Cincinnati police officer. (See "Searching for Answers," CityBeat issue of July 22).

But underneath issues around law enforcement’s role in black communities lie other problems. A pervasive and historically entrenched economic segregation in predominantly black neighborhoods continues to seal off many Cincinnatians, creating desperation and setting up extra barriers for residents of those communities. This lack of opportunity also informs the city’s much-publicized recent upswing in gun violence, its sky-high infant-mortality rate and a host of other problems.

Rev. Damon Lynch III was one of the activists instrumental in pushing for police reform in Cincinnati following the 2001 unrest.

“There are just underlying racial issues in America that we have to address,” Lynch said at a panel on community police relations earlier this year convened by Ohio Gov. John Kasich. “They can play themselves out in policing, they can play themselves out in the economy, issues of poverty. We all hear that Cincinnati has come a long way, but we’re not perfect. I still think there’s another side missing.”

Dr. Ervin Matthew, a sociology professor at the University of Cincinnati, says recent unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore, like Cincinnati’s unrest in 2001, has roots that stretch back through decades of systemic inequalities.

“Really, these communities have been under pressure the whole time,” Matthew says. “These communities don’t carry a lot of political power and financial status. They erupt because they’re appealing to a power structure that they feel doesn’t hear them, that has no reason to really consider them.”

Cincinnati’s economic and geographic segregation hasn’t gone unnoticed. A 2011 study by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Social Science Data Analysis Network found that Cincinnati is the eighth most-segregated city in America. A study of major U.S. cities by social science journal New Geography published in January ranked Cincinnati 50 out of 52 cities when it came to the economic prospects of black residents.

A CityBeat analysis of 2010 Census neighborhood and census tract-level demographic data, checked against more recent American Community Survey Census results, shows the disturbing extent of the economic isolation in Cincinnati’s black neighborhoods. And that isolation seems to be getting worse.

Of the city’s 10 neighborhoods with the lowest median household incomes, nine are more than 70-percent black. Six of those neighborhoods with considerable populations — The Villages at Roll Hill, Winton Hills, West End, Millvale, South Cumminsville and Avondale — are more than 90-percent black.

Each of these neighborhoods has a median household income around half, or less, than the city’s median of about $34,000 a year. In these places, life expectancies are five to 10 years lower than the city as a whole.

At least one of these neighborhoods, Over-the-Rhine, is undergoing a kind of revitalization, and its triumphs and travails are well-covered by the media. But the others are neglected, rarely considered places.

One Cincinnati neighborhood, English Woods, today consists almost entirely of a single housing tower looming over vast, empty, fenced-off fields that once contained the rest of the housing project. The neighborhood is home to about 400 people, 90 percent of them black. Its median household income is just $8,474 a year.

Together, these lowest-income and predominantly black neighborhoods account for more than 36,000 people, a quarter of the city’s black population.









Meanwhile, the 10 wealthiest Cincinnati neighborhoods by median household income are the demographic flipside. Mount Lookout, Columbia Tusculum, Mount Adams, Hyde Park, California, Mount Washington and Sayler Park, for instance, are all more than 90-percent white and have median household incomes between $48,000 and $115,000 a year.

There is but one exception, North Avondale, which is 60-percent black with a median household income of about $48,000 a year. Nearly all the rest of the city’s better-off enclaves, however, have black populations in single-digit percentiles.

Cincinnati’s economic segregation doesn’t always cleave to neighborhood names. Thousands of the city’s black residents also live in areas like Walnut Hills’ census tract 37, which is 85-percent black with a median household income under $10,000 a year. Just to the south, an area of Walnut Hills encompassing Eden Park and butting up against Mount Adams called tract 19 contains households with a median income of $47,000 a year. That tract is majority white.

The disparity extends beyond individual neighborhoods. Citywide, the median household income for blacks in 2013 was $21,300. It was $48,000 for whites.

That gap has been widening. In 2000, the median household income for white city residents was $36,452. For blacks, it was $20,984. In 13 years, whites in Cincinnati have gained $11,000 in median household income. Blacks have gained just $316.

Overall, 46 percent of the city’s blacks live in poverty, compared to just 23 percent of whites, according to the 2012 American Community Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau.

So how did Cincinnati’s black neighborhoods end up this way? The modern-day divide started with the disruption of the city’s long-time black community in the West End, was exacerbated by racist policies from government and financial institutions and continues today in subtler forms.

Gus Whitfield has experienced many of those factors first hand. He’s witnessed three separate episodes of civil unrest break out over race relations in Cincinnati and has worked his entire life trying to rise above the economic and social conditions that continue to isolate blacks in the city’s lowest-income neighborhoods. And at 71, he’s still sharp and gregarious enough to tell you all about them.





Gus Whitfield has seen Cincinnati’s racial tension up close, having grown up in the West End then moving to Avondale and Pleasant Ridge. Today, he’s back living in his old neighborhood. - Nick Swartsell



Whitfield and his parents were among those who came to Cincinnati during the Great Migration, which brought nearly 100,000 blacks to the city from all over the South between roughly 1910 and 1970. The Whitfields, sharecroppers from Louisiana, arrived here one night in 1953 on a bus that brought them straight to the West End.

At the time, the West End was a dense neighborhood home to tens of thousands of the city’s black working and middle class, as well as pockets of Jewish Cincinnatians and European immigrants. Violence against blacks migrating to Cincinnati in the mid-1800s as well as discriminatory housing practices by landlords relegated most black Cincinnatians to the area, though a few middle-and upper-class black communities also existed in pockets of Avondale and Walnut Hills.

Despite being a functioning community, the West End had a reputation as a slum, and the area’s outdated and neglected housing didn’t help matters. Only about 2 percent of the black families there owned their homes. The rest, like the Whitfields, rented on the cheap.

Whitfield didn’t like the city right away but soon figured out it was better than working alongside his father picking cotton in Louisiana, which he had done since the age of 7. Besides, he says, the West End was a tight-knit community then and a generally enjoyable place to be, even if it was low-income.

“We were poor, man,” Whitfield says. “We didn’t have anything. But I started liking it here. People looked out for each other. People still talk to me, recognize me from back then.”

But when Whitfield graduated high school in 1960, he found himself at a loss in the West End. Few real opportunities existed for young black men at the time, he says.

“I worked taking carpet out of peoples’ houses,” he says. “Dirty, hard-ass work for a dollar an hour. If I got in 40 hours, I made 40 dollars. After taxes, I might clear $27.”

He was looking for a way out. He found it walking past a Navy recruitment center one day in 1961. He took a test, passed, and signed up right away.

As he prepared to leave Cincinnati, big changes were coming to the West End. During the years prior, the city and the state had been preparing for federally-funded "slum clearance," often called urban renewal, and the construction of I-75, which was going to cut through the West End and an area now called Queensgate. Much of the latter, the southern half of Cincinnati’s first major black community, would be bulldozed. Roughly 3,000 structures were demolished, and more than 20,000 residents, nearly all black, were displaced to neighborhoods like Avondale, Over-the-Rhine, Walnut Hills and others.

City documents at the time estimate the population of this neighborhood, which demolition planners dubbed Kenyon-Barr, to be more than 25,000 people. Most of them were black. Today, just 120 people live in the grey, mostly empty Census tract designated as Queensgate that roughly corresponds to the area demolished. A few small buildings and a single intact block of Carr Street are largely all that remains of the once-bustling neighborhood.

Whitfield served in the Navy for six years, seeing places he’d only read about — South Africa, Jamaica and a good portion of Europe.

“I should have stayed in the Navy,” he says. “But I couldn’t see that far ahead at the time.”

When he came back to Cincinnati, the course of the city’s black community had shifted dramatically.

“When they put the expressway in, a lot of black people left the West End,” Whitfield says. “It changed a lot, man.”

Some of that change was good, Whitfield says, decentralizing the city’s black population and encouraging black families who could afford it to buy houses instead of rent. But as blacks spread out to other neighborhoods in the city, old communities were split apart, old prejudices emerged and new strife sprang up.

When he returned to Cincinnati in early 1967, Whitfield went back to what was left of the West End and worked at a foundry on Gest Street. Like his carpet job, the work was hard. He recalls the slivers of metal that would alight on his arms and neck, singeing his skin.

“All the time, I was filling out applications to get a better job,” he says.

He wound up in Norwood at a Fischer Body plant, making Camaros and Firebirds for General Motors.

The plant nearly doubled the $2 an hour he was making at the foundry, and the work wasn’t quite as grueling. Whitfield began looking for a new place to live closer to work and ended up in Avondale, one of the few neighborhoods accessible to the black working class then.

Avondale is illustrative of the fate of many black neighborhoods in Cincinnati. Following the Second World War, blacks who had worked their way into the middle class had begun to move to the neighborhood. What had been an almost entirely white community in the early 1940s gradually became more integrated. But only for a time.

By the mid-1950s, whites were moving out to the suburbs en masse. A resegregation had begun, fueled by racist real estate practices, governmental policies and insurance guidelines known as redlining.

“What is currently Avondale was intentionally created as a ghetto,” says Ervin Matthew, the UC professor who studies social stratification by race, class and gender, as well as urban sociology and social psychology. “These things didn’t just emerge organically.”

The 1934 Federal Housing Act, which put federal backing behind private bank lending, mandated surveys categorizing neighborhoods based on their riskiness. Black or integrated neighborhoods, seen as volatile, were marked out in red on insurance maps, and financing for homes and businesses in these areas was more difficult and expensive to obtain, if it could be obtained at all.

Meanwhile, suburban communities accessible almost exclusively to whites were looked upon much more favorably. Here, loans flowed freely. The availability of ready finance for suburban homes given almost exclusively to whites sparked an exodus from inner-city neighborhoods like Avondale. Real estate practices accelerated the process.

“As blacks started gaining access to these communities,” Matthew says, “property values shifted, real estate agents started telling people that this was a situation that was going to go downhill quickly. They then bought those properties and split them up into apartments.”

That practice, called blockbusting, further stoked white flight from Avondale and other neighborhoods. By 1960, only the northernmost section of the neighborhood remained majority white. Between 1955 and 1960, Cincinnati’s white population as a whole decreased by more than 44,000, according to Census data.

In the big picture, the exodus devastated the city’s tax base, making funding for quality schools and public services scarce, especially in low-income black neighborhoods.

As whites were beginning to leave the inner city, Cincinnati was looking for places to relocate blacks in the West End who were going to be displaced by the construction of I-75. Neighborhoods like Avondale, Walnut Hills and Mount Auburn, where some blacks already lived, fit the bill. The city drew up plans for new subsidized housing projects in those neighborhoods.

But this too caused more segregation. Another tenet of the Federal Housing Act, a concession to southern congressmen, stipulated that all public housing projects should be racially divided. It would take until the 1970s for many housing authorities to do otherwise. In Cincinnati, the legacy of that policy has played out in places like English Woods and Winton Terrace. In 1940, Winton Terrace was built as a whites-only housing project, but CMHA changed that policy around the time construction began on I-75. By 1965, the area was 95 percent black.

The city displaced residents of the West End on the promise that they could return there after renovations and that better housing would be provided. But for the most part, that didn’t happen.

A 1958 letter from then-NAACP Cincinnati Executive Secretary Kenneth Banks to the organization’s national housing office calls Cincinnati’s approach to resettlement “casual” and explains that the city had yet to identify enough places for blacks to move into. He wrote that developers showed little interest in building homes for blacks and that the city’s lack of statistics about the West End showed an apparent disinterest in even knowing exactly how many families the highway would displace.

Banks also highlighted two other highly concerning obstacles blacks faced in getting housing.

“While containing the largest number of Building and Loan [banks] of any county in the nation,” Banks wrote of Hamilton County, there was a “shortage of local money available to negroes for mortgage purposes.”

In addition, Banks wrote, developers were refusing to allow blacks to buy properties in so-called planned developments in tony Cincinnati neighborhoods and nearby suburbs. The confluence of these policy decisions and market dynamics put up huge obstacles for blacks, experts like Matthew say.



Fighting for a Place in the Middle Class

By the time Whitfield got to Avondale, it was quickly becoming another segregated black neighborhood on an economic downslope, and there was tension in the air as America wrestled with intense racial issues.

In 1967, as Whitfield moved in, profound civil unrest tore through the neighborhood following the controversial conviction of a black man for the murder of six white women. Thousands took to the streets, sometimes burning buildings and smashing windows. Then-Ohio Governor James Rhodes called in 700 National Guard troops. A participant in the protests told Cincinnati Magazine in 1990 that the unrest was precipitated by “constant police harassment” and “a lack of jobs.”

The next year, following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., unrest erupted in Avondale again.

“I was there when the riots started,” Whitfield says of the 1968 unrest. “By 9 p.m., you had to be off the street. The National Guard had jeeps with guns on the back that went all around.”

In 1968, riots erupted in Avondale for the second year in a row. Whites had already been fleeing the area after the creation of new subsidized housing projects for displaced black residents. - Photo: Courtesy of the Ohio History Connection



After the smoke cleared, Avondale had fewer businesses and even less investment coming in.

Meanwhile, Whitfield continued to claw his way past his low-income roots. After he was laid off from his third-shift job at Fischer Body, along with hundreds of other black workers relegated to the late shift, he got a better industrial job with Monsanto and moved on from Avondale in the early 1970s.

Those were good times, Whitfield says. Because of his naval service, he was able to buy a house with no down payment in quiet, comfortable Pleasant Ridge. He had gained a toehold in the middle class. But it wasn’t to last.

Whitfield was laid off from Monsanto after working there for a decade. He cycled through a number of shorter-lived blue-collar jobs that didn’t pay the bills and led only to lay-offs. The bank foreclosed on his house, and he found himself unemployed long term after his last manufacturing employer, Rainbow Bread, shut down its Norwood plant. Eventually, Whitfield became homeless, spending years in and out of housing.

“The rough times for me were sleeping on the street, no job, no home,” he says.

The larger dynamics in Cincinnati and around the country as a whole in the 1980s and 1990s were not particularly kind to black, blue-collar workers like Whitfield and the neighborhoods they lived in. As America’s manufacturing economy shrank, blacks often found themselves the first to be laid off.

And since black businesses in the communities had evaporated and educational opportunities there were often sparse because of underfunded schools, there were few other options for work. Disinvestment and white flight continued. And then, the crack epidemic and the subsequent war on drugs hit urban neighborhoods hard.

“Within these communities, it became difficult to get opportunities because people didn’t want to open businesses there — banks redlined for the longest time,” says UC professor Matthew. “So over time we see a lot of disappearance of businesses and viable options for work in these places. And what can replace viable options for work sometimes are illicit economies.”

Those illicit economies — drug dealing, prostitution and other criminal activities — brought higher crime rates, increased policing and the further perception that black neighborhoods were dangerous, lost lands.

“One of the narratives that follow these neighborhoods around is the criminalization narrative,” Matthew says. “When people walk through inner-city areas, it’s not just the disrepair that causes people alarm, but the fear that something bad will befall them, that they’re under physical threat. And in some cases it plays out that way. But there are studies that suggest that people tend to overestimate the degree of criminality in these communities.”

The reliance on illicit economies and perceptions of criminality have been devastating for black communities, leading to disproportionate incarcerations and wrongful convictions for blacks in inner-city neighborhoods. These disparities linger, with many ex-offenders in these communities having difficulties finding employment after leaving the justice system. (See "Boxed In," CityBeat issue of June 2).



According to 2010 U.S. Census data, Ohio has 2,336 black and 422 white prisoners per 100,000 people. This despite the fact the state is 83-percent white. (See "Free at Last, Free for Now," Citybeat issue of April 15).



Some of this disparity has to do with law enforcement’s long-running war on drugs, a battle even some high-level law enforcement professionals admit is racially biased and ineffective.



“The war on drugs has been a massive failure, and law enforcement will never fix the narcotics problem in this country, because it’s a criminalized social problem,” Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy told Gov. John Kasich’s Ohio Community-Police Relations Task Force earlier this year. McCarthy went on to say that police reform alone won’t solve those social problems. “Disadvantaged communities see the police as the most visible arm of the system. We have a systematic problem that runs a lot deeper than repairing police-community relations.” (See "Deeper Issues," CityBeat issue of March 18).



For Whitfield, unrest and tension in black neighborhoods isn’t a unique occurrence, but a cyclical event, something that goes far beyond a single shooting or arrest.

“It seems like they jump up every 15 to 30 years or so,” Whitfield says. “I think it happens because people are depressed. They’re angry. They don’t have anything to do. They’re stuck in that neighborhood.”

After losing his house in Pleasant Ridge, Whitfield eventually returned to the West End. That’s where he was living in 2001, when, for three sustained days, the sound of shattering glass and the scent of smoke from burning buildings once again filled the air, this time in neighboring OTR.





By the early 1960s, the city had eliminated about 1,000 structures in this section of the West End, displacing more than 20,000 mostly black residents.

Today, Avondale, OTR and other neighborhoods like it are struggling to overcome the past, with varying degrees of success. As the nation’s gaze once again turns to the surface levels of its persistent race issues, some neighborhood activists and community leaders are hoping to saw away at the deeper roots of the problem.

In Avondale, that struggle can be a life-or-death proposition. The neighborhood, Cincinnati’s fourth-largest with a population of 12,500, is 91-percent black and has a median household income of just $18,000 a year. Life expectancy is a startling 68 years old, nine years less than the city average and 20 years less than affluent, 90-plus percent-white neighborhoods like Columbia Tusculum.

Avondale has been wracked by gun violence recently, though it’s a more intermittent problem than news reports might suggest. The neighborhood saw only one murder in 2012 and four in 2013. But last year there were 11, and 2015 seems to be heading in just as violent a direction. Earlier this month, a 4-year-old girl was hit by a stray bullet from a drive-by in the neighborhood, causing community activists to organize marches and vigils against the violence there and in other low-income communities around the city.

One of the activists working the streets of Avondale is 50-year-old Ozie Davis III. On a recent Saturday, Davis stood next to a looming statue of Abraham Lincoln at the corner of Reading and Rockdale roads, preparing for his nearly daily walk around the neighborhood to engage residents and hand out newsletters.

Davis is a life-long resident of the neighborhood and the president of the Avondale Comprehensive Development Corporation, a nonprofit that seeks to bring new investment into the community while supporting and advocating for its residents. He remembers a time when Avondale’s major thoroughfares, Reading Road and Burnet Avenue, still had many black-owned businesses. Davis says Avondale has a lot of promise, and he believes those streets can be vibrant once again.

As he walks past blocks that alternate between well-kept houses with green yards full of playing children and abandoned homes, Davis says the neighborhood’s decline has been long-running and complex.

“The change in the economy was a big deal,” he says. “At some point, you had a lot of factory jobs, and there was a large opportunity to be middle class. You didn’t have to go to college to get a job at Ford or GM.”

It’s a sentiment Whitfield would understand perfectly.

“Then GM Norwood closed, GM Sharonville closed,” Davis continues, referencing the plant from which Whitfield was laid off decades ago. The Norwood facility produced its last vehicle in 1987.

“That impacted people who couldn’t afford to keep these houses up. That transformation, to the information economy from the manufacturing economy, was a big deal.”

Davis spends much of his time on these walks talking to teens and young adults looking for jobs or help finishing school — the next generation that will attempt to navigate the divide between Avondale and places with more opportunities.

Three young men shout at Davis from across Reading Road. He waves them over, and they cross and greet him enthusiastically. They tell him they graduated high school. One is going to Cincinnati State for welding. Another is going to Central State University.

“Excellent,” Davis says. “We have people up there. Whatever you need, let me know.”

For Davis, these interactions are the point of his work, an attempt to help knit together the community and provide extra support for young people who have faced serious challenges in their neighborhood. Ninety percent of students from Avondale qualify for free and reduced lunch, and many have seen violence first hand.

But Davis sees a bigger picture as well.

He’s quick to talk up Avondale Comprehensive Development Corporation’s ongoing work with the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Choice Neighborhoods program, which is in the process of investing $30 million in new development into Avondale. That includes money for new affordable housing and also funds for job training, educational support and other services.

“The good thing about the Choice Neighborhoods grant is that there’s money for people,” he says. “You have to invest in people, too. That’s one of our main capacities.”

As Davis walks down a side street, 15-year-old Dwayne Hamilton approaches him. Hamilton is looking to get a job, maybe doing work in OTR’s Washington Park. Davis might be able to help.

“It’s a little hard, because it’s a hard community,” Hamilton says of finding work and staying out of trouble in Avondale. “You gotta survive here. Not everyone can get a job, so they have to do what they have to do to feed their families, you know? But I’m trying to stay occupied. Everybody here is already caught up in bad stuff, regardless. But I don’t want to lose my life over something stupid.”

Davis hopes the Choice Neighborhoods grant will be a catalyst that will bring new jobs and new hope to young people like Hamilton and other residents of Avondale.

On a wider scale, some black leaders — including activist Rev. Lynch, Cincinnati City Councilman Wendell Young and State Rep. Alicia Reese — have proposed a citywide neighborhood development corporation that would focus on bringing more opportunities to predominantly black neighborhoods. The group has called for $50 million in investment to get that process started.

Other advocates say it will take a multi-layered approach to address the systemic issues behind the city’s economic segregation.

Jeniece Jones, executive director of Housing Opportunities Made Equal, a Cincinnati-based fair housing advocate, praises anti-segregation efforts like the federal government’s 1968 Fair Housing Act and HUD’s move to a voucher-based system for subsidized housing, which attempts to spread out low-income renters. But there is still much work to be done, she says.

Some of that work comes in the form of continuing to push for fairer, less-segregated housing. Even though HUD’s voucher program, usually known as Section 8, has decreased homelessness and segregation, low-income people are still concentrated away from middle- and high-income people — both in Cincinnati and other cities. That, in turn, leads to racial segregation.

Across the country, the average voucher holder still lives in a mostly-minority neighborhood with higher-than average poverty rates, according to a study by the Brookings Institution. In the Greater Cincinnati area, voucher holders live in neighborhoods with poverty rates that are 12.5-to-18 percent higher than the region’s average.

There are reasons for the continuation of this segregation. A 2012 study by HUD found that housing providers showed black renters 11-percent fewer units than white renters and that realtors showed black homebuyers 17-percent fewer houses for sale than white buyers.

As late as 1999, HOME and the NAACP settled a suit against Nationwide Insurance Company over the company’s insurance practices, which the advocacy groups say amounted to redlining low-income minority neighborhoods. As part of the settlement, Nationwide agreed to contribute $1.25 million to various low-income home loan and financing programs.

Some advocates say practices like loan discrimination and redlining continue today. Even so, housing experts like Jones say they’re part of a much bigger picture.

“There’s a clear and present history of discrimination in this country,” she says. “You see it in fair housing, you see it in economic development, you see it in equal pay. You have to address systemic bias, institutional racism, economic development, mass incarceration — it’s a multi-faceted issue.”

Systemic Poverty and Cincinnati

Long-standing economic divides are wellsprings of racial tension and neighborhood violence in Cincinnati and other cities like it across the country.

And while some neighborhoods like Avondale and Over-the-Rhine see millions in development and efforts to improve job prospects, other places like South Cumminsville, English Woods and the West End languish. What’s more, jobs and development alone won’t be enough to erase the yawning gap created by decades of racially biased housing obstacles, over-incarceration and other dynamics.

The effects of policies like redlining and loan discrimination, for example, still linger.

Economic development doesn’t always benefit low-income people: Recent investment in Over-the-Rhine has pushed rent and land values up, forcing some longtime black residents to move out. - Photo: Nick Swartsell



Property ownership is one way to pass along wealth from generation to generation. The difficulties blacks have found in buying houses — and in the tumbling property values in their neighborhoods when they do — have kept many black families from accumulating wealth in the same way white families have and continued a pervasive wealth gap.

A study released this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that the overall median net worth of a white family in America without a college-degree holder was $80,000. For black families without a college-degree holder, it was $9,000. That statistic captures not just yearly income, but the financial resources a family has accumulated over time. Not even college degrees span this gap most of the time. For white households with a degree holder, median wealth was $360,000. For black households with a degree, it was just $33,000.

Systemic issues like the wealth gap, over-incarceration, geographic isolation and others continue to haunt the deep pockets of poverty where many black Cincinnatians live.

The West End, for example, has never really emerged from the segregation and economic isolation that characterized it when Whitfield first arrived there in 1953. Today, the neighborhood has the fifth-lowest median household income in the city at $12,808 per year. The average life expectancy of 69 is eight years under the city average. Segregation has not just continued, but increased. In the 1950s, three-quarters of the West End’s residents were black. Today, that figure is more than 90 percent. Jobs are scarce and economic development is rare.

What’s more, even if neighborhoods see their prospects go up, black residents may not always see the benefits as those areas gentrify. Some experts like Matthew believe investment like the $1 billion that has been poured into OTR, for example, could revitalize neighborhoods while displacing low-income and predominantly black residents. Others, including housing activists in the neighborhood, echo that concern and point to rising rents and land values there. (See "Moving Up, Moving Out," CityBeat issue of Aug. 12).







After years of striving, Whitfield says he’s content these days, though he’s very aware of the racial tensions in Cincinnati.

He moved back to the West End years ago and spends his time playing cards with friends at nearby social service agency Our Daily Bread. Despite his laid-back retirement, he says he still feels the systemic racism that’s hobbled the neighborhoods he’s lived in.

“Hell yeah, it still exists,” Whitfield says. “It isn’t like it was in the 1950s, but it still exists. You just don’t see it outright now.” ©