Fault Lines

An excerpt from the NY Times -

A Rampage Exposes Racial Fault Lines
By Manny Fernandez and Richard Fausset

Ora Houston, an African-American councilwoman here, stood as a proclamation was read inside City Hall on Thursday.

It had nothing to do with the Austin serial bomber, Mark Conditt. It had to do with a deeper, older and far more invisible hurt — the 90th anniversary of a 1928 city plan that created a “Negro district” on the east side of town.

“The Negro district was intentionally created by the Austin City Council to force Negros and Mexicans who lived in other parts of Austin to move to the Negro district,” Mayor Steve Adler said as Ms. Houston, a longtime East Austin resident, looked on at his side. “And the effects are apparent in the racial and economic disparities found in East Austin today.”

Three of the five bombs that terrorized Central Texas this month went off in East Austin, where the majority of the city’s black and Hispanic residents live, prompting the police to investigate them as possible hate crimes. When the fourth bomb was planted in an upscale gated and largely white community west of Interstate 35, the issue of race disappeared from most official statements — a fact that has stirred deep resentment among many black residents. The only two people killed, many have been quick to point out, came from two of the city’s most prominent black families.

The debate over how to characterize the bomber’s nearly three-week campaign of violence has been a reminder, for many, of the ways in which race, geography and class continue to play out in a city that prides itself on tolerance and diversity.

Though Austin is widely seen as a liberal island in a deeply conservative state, the attacks have stoked the raw racial, economic, political and geographical divisions that continue to shape life here, 90 years after the city was segregated by decree. Austin and its suburbs remain sharply divided by class, race and even religion. Like Houston, it is an urban, diverse and Democratic hub surrounded by largely white, Republican suburbs, including Pflugerville, Mr. Conditt’s hometown.

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