Segregation and poverty have declined among blacks since 1968

“EVERY TIME I think about it I feel like somebody’s poking a red-hot iron down my throat,” says Bigger Thomas, the poor black boy living in a Chicago slum in the novel “Native Son”. “Goddamit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like living in jail.” Richard Wright penned those lines about the debilitating psychological effects of the ghetto in 1940, before the civil-rights era; before the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 and the ensuing widespread racial unrest and riots; and well before the current seething protests against racial injustice in several hundred American cities. How relevant are those sentiments today?