Jacksonville is still a tale of two cities, race relations update finds

[Lunican]

The Florida Times-Union

January 12, 2008

Jacksonville is still a tale of two cities,race relations update finds

By Charlie Patton,
The Times-Union

The 21st annual Martin Luther King Jr. Breakfast got off to what the keynote speaker called "a depressing" start Friday as William Bond presented the 2007 edition of Jacksonville's Race Relations Progress Report.

The report, compiled by a Jacksonville Community Council Inc. committee, didn't contain a lot of encouraging news, noting, "All indicators demonstrate unacceptable disparities between white and black residents."

Bond, who chaired the committee that compiled the report, quoted State Attorney Harry Shorstein's comment that Jacksonville increasingly is "two cities," one predominantly poor, black and plagued by violence.

See also: Read the full JCCI report

"As a society, we are not spending our money to take care of our poorest or neediest," Bond said.

Isaiah Rumlin, president of the NAACP's Jacksonville branch, one of the breakfast's host organizations, echoed Bond's comments.

"There are two cities within Jacksonville, the haves and the have-nots," Rumlin said in an interview.

While the infant mortality rate among Jacksonville African-Americans declined in 2006, it remained "abysmal," Bond said. He called the 12.7 deaths per 1,000 black infants (down from 17.5 per 1,000 in 2005) "almost in the Third World category."

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