"[T]hings like out-of-wedlock birth, crime, broken families, educational problems, literacy, and many other issues" are economic, not racial. I lived for seven years in an almost exclusively white rural Appalachian area where all of those problems, and all you might imagine to be related, were rampant. You can add: little or no pre-natal care (with resultant low birth-weight and other neonatal distress); fetal alcohol syndrome and alcoholism generally; physical abuse and abandonment of women and children; a propensity to other so-called "addictive behaviors" such as gambling; poor diet and obesity, with diabetes, heart disease and related health issues . . . shall I continue?

It is, however, an unavoidable truth that poverty among black folks (urban and otherwise) is more related to racially-based denial of opportunity than it is any other consideration. If you spent your formative years in a city where the black voters were a numeric majority but a political non-entity (for example: where 12 years passed between Brown v Topeka, KS Board of Ed. and its enforcement in the local schools), you might understand this.

What you say in the first paragraph is certainly true, but doesn't change the basic premise of my statement. Certainly blacks were not as a group much wealthier 50 years ago than they are now, yet the statistics still declined, not improved. Blacks as a group had more intact families, fewer out-of-wedlock births, more literacy, and less crime (call them "quality of life" factors) many years ago under much greater political, cultural and economic oppression than they are dealing with now.

There is one factor that has increased over the past 50 years that is almost directly inversely proportional to black quality of life, and that is the rise of the welfare culture.

Neither racism or poverty curves match the quality of life curves as causes.

It isn't racism. It isn't poverty. It's the government discouraging intact families, taking over the role of fathers, and supporting illegitimacy. And it goes without saying that this is not restricted to minorities. Just out of curiosity, what was the main means of support in Appalachia?