After Baltimore, what hope for change?

A protester throws a tear-gas canister back toward riot police after a 10 p.m. curfew went into effect in Baltimore in the wake of rioting following the funeral of Freddie Gray. (Photo: David Goldman/AP)

This August marks the 50th anniversary of a defining moment from the 1960s, the Watts riots that left 34 dead and an area of South Central Los Angeles smoldering and in ruins.

Half a century later — and 23 years after the riots following the Rodney King-beating verdict — the persistence of police brutality, racism, poverty and economic neglect in America’s inner cities has erupted afresh as a topic riveting the nation.

Although we live in the age of Obama, the latest round of social unrest shows how economic conditions for African-Americans have endured largely unchanged throughout his presidency. Inadequate housing, crumbling public schools and abject poverty — all remain problems in cities like Baltimore that have lost their economic base.

Nationally, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that one out of every three African-American men will eventually be put in jail, and 27 percent of African-Americans lived in poverty in 2013 — nearly triple the white poverty rate. For all of the racial progress that has been made in the last half-century, the riots in Baltimore remind us that the roots of black-white inequality reach so deep not even seven years of an African-American in the Oval Office can uproot them.

Obama has ushered in some substantial, progressive policy changes since he took office in 2009. From reducing the number of uninsured Americans to reining in Wall Street and curbing friction with Cuba, he has enacted sweeping reforms with repercussions that are likely to be hotly debated long after his final day in the White House.

Yet such reforms have not targeted the tide of problems in long-suffering communities such as West Baltimore.

Nor has the racial progress in political representation that’s been made over the past 50 years, during which African-Americans have gained political power in ways that would likely have surprised the civil rights activists of the 1960s, sufficed. In addition to electing an African-American president, the nation has seen the appointment of its first two African-American attorneys general. In Baltimore, where the riots occurred this week, the mayor and the police chief are both African-American. Congress has 48 members who are African-American, the most in history — an achievement made possible by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court recently diluted.

Demonstrators push against a police car after rioting erupted in a crowd of 1,500 in the Watts section of Los Angeles, August 12, 1965. (AP)

And the situation in 2015 is not as bad as it was in 1965, of course. The Watts riots lasted days; the destruction was so widespread that the Los Angeles Times described Watts as “a holocaust of rubble and ruins.”

By many accounts, Baltimore’s police force has treated young, poor African-American men harshly, but the scale of brutality cannot match that of L.A. Police Chief William Parker’s force in the mid-’60s. Parker called rioters “monkeys in a zoo,” and he instilled a racist culture in his department, where racial slurs were commonplace.

The Watts riots failed to lead to social and economic improvements in African-American urban communities. In 1968, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. touched off dozens of riots in America’s cities. Journalist Clay Risen writes in A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination that, above all, “The ghetto frustrations that led to civil disorder were … a product of long-standing, deep-seated fissures — between blacks and employers, shopkeepers and customers, police and civilians, landlords and tenants.”

Episodes of police brutality against mostly African-American men have recurred over and over again. What hasn’t changed since Watts or Rodney King — as the deaths of Eric Garner, Walter Scott and Freddie Gray remind us — is the hostile relations between largely white police forces and African-American communities.

Reforms have been slow and inadequate. Making big-city police more attuned to the constitutional rights and community needs of the people they are tasked with protecting has remained a struggle, and even a relatively small number of officers abusing their power and filmed on iPhones can touch off a fury at larger, systemic abuses.

Looters mill in the parking lot of the ABC Market in South Central Los Angeles, April 30, 1992, during riots following the verdicts in the Rodney King assault case. (Photo: Paul Sakuma/AP)

The president himself hinted on Tuesday that he would like society to make “massive investments in urban communities” to alleviate the riots’ causes. But he also acknowledged the utter lack of will in Congress (or elsewhere in American politics) to actually make those investments.

The forces inhibiting such changes are decades in the making and not easily overcome. American politics and society have become more fragmented in recent decades; notions of individualism and personal freedom have triumphed over a shared commitment to community melioration. From the 1978 tax revolt to the repeated denigration of public assistance to the poor and the flaws of “big government,” there has been little appetite to attack the problems afflicting the inner cities through collective public action. Even today’s nascent debate about reducing income inequality is more about aiding a struggling, mostly white middle class than assisting impoverished blacks.

Although the 2016 presidential candidates are now proposing to reform the criminal justice system, there are few indications that drastic improvements in life in the most impoverished communities are near at hand.

Meantime, it’s also clear that the Obama administration will leave a long list of lasting legacies whose impact will be felt for years ahead. But reforms that better the social and economic conditions of working-class African-Americans in communities from North Charleston to Staten Island to West Baltimore will be missing from this list.

Matthew Dallek, an assistant professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, is writing a book about the politics of home defense during World War II.