Giving a group of people freedom without opportunity is cruel, like donating frozen turkeys to the homeless, knowing they do not have access to a pan or stove to bake it in. And yet, this is precisely how Black Americans were treated after the Civil War. While the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the federal government took no steps toward closing the racial wealth gap created by this unjust system. As a result, much of the black community continued to struggle economically, locked out of generational wealth. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. touched on this in his 1963 speech at the March on Washington. "The negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.
Lisbon: a city robbed of its soul
The icing on the cake of the tragedy of economic crisis (after the hardship, broken families, incapacity to provide) is the depriving of an…