The Amateur Message Boards of the World Famous VoyeurWeb

Baltimore is a majority black city; the city's mayor, state's attorney, police chief and city council are all African-American, as well as 63 percent of its population. Even its police force — the impetus for the recent upheaval — is 48 percent black. Baltimore often brags that it has the most diverse leadership team and public agency of any city in the United States. What's not so well know is that it also has one of the highest crime and drug rates in the United States and poverty is seen everywhere. The big factories have closed, one after another; it was 10 years ago that General Motors shuttered its plant that made Chevy Astro and GMC Safari vans. City officials like longtime Mayor William Schaefer tried to make up the difference by developing the Inner Harbor, with its hotels, bars and restaurants, but that did little to spur much hiring across much of the city. Fraud and corruption among city politicians and officials stripped the public of any gains.

It wasn't always this way. Baltimore was once a very prosperous city, celebrated by journalist H.L. Mencken. It was a manufacturing dynamo, famed for the rye whiskey and straw hats it made, among other things. But the story of Baltimore is much the same as other liberal cities who felt blacks were "under represented" in public agencies and leadership positions, affirmative action pushes were made to place blacks into those positions to better represent the general population.

After that move, the city's population steadily declined, dwindling from nearly one million to 622,000. The city saw growth for the first time in six decades when it gained more than 1,000 residents in 2012, most of those were African immigrants; the next year, the count slightly declined. The question that begs to be answered, is why black public officials and leaders have consistently turned once prosperous cities like Baltimore into slums even though they receive huge amounts additional federal funding to help their visions?