 Black leaders have really prioritized the integration of political institutions with the goal of closing racial and economic gaps. And at least in terms of electing more blacks to office, they've had a good deal of success on this front. By the early 1980s, major US cities with large black populations, Cleveland, to Detroit, to Chicago's, Philadelphia's and so forth had elected black mayors. Almost all of whom pushed for bigger government and for special treatment for blacks. Since 1970, the number of black elected officials has grown from fewer than 1,500 to more than 10,000 in this country, including, of course, a black president. The problem is that all this political clout never really paid off economically for the black poor, which is what we were told would happen. You look at how the black underclass fared in these black run cities, Coleman Young's Detroit in the 1970s, Marion Barry's Washington DC in the 1980s, Sharp James's Newark, New Jersey in the 1990s. These black mayors created unbeatable political machines in the name of helping the black poor. Yet the poor became more impoverished on their watch. In an era of increasing black political clout and affirmative action, the black underclass lost ground, both in absolute terms and relative to the white underclass. In the 1970s and 80s and even into the 1990s, the poorest blacks in America saw their incomes decline at more than double the rate of the poorest whites in America. In the wake of the war on poverty, black labor force participation declined. Black unemployment rates rose, and the black nuclear family disintegrated. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, the proportion of black children living with both parents fell from 2 thirds to 1 third. The pre-1970 era shows that what's needed more than political saviors, racial preferences, wealth redistribution schemes, is economic growth and opportunity. Tight labor markets are more beneficial than affirmative action. Having a black man in the home is more important than having one in the White House. A few years ago, I wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal on the prevalence of violent crime in poor black neighborhoods. And in the column I used a quote from Martin Luther King, who once told a black congregation, do you know that Negroes are 10% of the population in St. Louis and responsible for 58% of the crimes? King said, we've got to face that. We've got to do something about our moral standards. He said, we know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world too. We can't keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves. After the column ran, a number of readers contacted the paper and accused me of making up the quote, which comes from a 1961 Harper's Magazine profile of King by James Baldwin of all people. Some readers apparently just couldn't believe that the nation's most prominent civil rights leaders used to speak this way about problems in the black community and the role of personal responsibility. I'm not arguing that blacks should disengage politically. My point is that political power and political clout does not automatically lead to upward mobility for a group. And that's a case that's been proven not just with black history, but with the history of many other groups who rose economically first and engaged in politics later. And that has been the more typical pattern for a group rising, a minority group, rising from poverty to prosperity. So black's political success is not something that has automatically translated into economic success. And yet, that is what the civil rights leadership has been focused on primarily since 1965. The thinking was that we got the Voting Rights Pass Act, the Voting Rights Act passed. And if we can just get more of our own in office, the rest will take care of itself. And I went through that history of black mayors and poverty rates to show that the rest has not taken care of itself.