Ferguson's Real Problem is Poverty. Jobs Solve Most of It.

W.E.B. Du Bois said in 1897…“The man who won’t control his finances won’t control anything else,” and, “...nothing positive will ever occur in a community that fails to circulate its dollars.”

Frederick Douglass said in 1874, "…the failure of the Freeman Bank did more to set freed slaves back than 10 more years of slavery." The Freedman's Bank, signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on March 3rd, 1865, was chartered to teach freed slaves about money (the circa 1865 version of modern day financial literacy).

Ambassador Andrew Young said in 2005, speaking before 18 African Heads of State, “..you can make more money, honestly, from a growing economy, than you can steal from a dying economy.”

Van Jones said in 2013, “..nothing stops a bullet like a job."

I said earlier this week at the launch of Jacksonville 2020 in Jacksonville, Florida with Mayor Alvin Brown there, “if you deal with class, you get race for free.”

The real challenges of Ferguson, Mo. in November, 2014, are more about money, poverty and class, than race, police and the color line.

This does not mean that race is not a problem in America. Race is and remains a big problem here and around the world too. And this challenge is not new. I'm only saying that the real color challenge is green, not black or blue.

It is a recognized fact that young black men have a significantly higher probability of dying at the hands of the police than their white male counterparts (21 times more likely, according to a recent report using FBI data). That said, I like attacking problems I can solve, and racism at the moment is not one of them.

Racism in America is like rain; it's either falling somewhere or it's gathering. So you might as well get out an umbrella in a color you like and start strolling through it, because it's not going to change ~ so you must. And you can.

Quoting my personal hero and mentor Ambassador Andrew Young, senior aide to the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, "l don't want to be like a part-time fire-fighter, spraying small streams of water on a raging inferno, already out of control. I want to be like an architect, framing a vision for fire-retardant homes that future generations will live in." Everyone has a role, and this is mine. Helping to answer the question posed by Dr. King in his final book, "Where Do We Go from Here?"

For me, the answer is not just civil rights justice, but silver rights empowerment for all, for a new generation.

The reality is, beneath racial challenges are almost always economic realities, and financial consequence.

Slavery, as horrible as it was in America, was not personal, it was economic. How do you build a country for free (effectively no labor cost during an agriculture age; where Africans were clearly the world experts on land-based cultivation in that era)?

The Arab Spring was first and foremost an economic crisis. Mohamed in Tunisia simply wanted to peacefully operate his small kart business, taking care of his responsibilities and putting a roof over the heads of his family. But the local authorities would not let him be. They told him he needed a permit, and then said a permit for his business actually did not exist. Translation -- I am in charge of your life. Not you.

Mohamed, feeling a loss of hope, went outside and set himself on fire. And right before he ended his own life, he did not cry for 'death to America,' or 'I hate the west.' Nor did he call for a 'Jihad.' He said 'I just want to work.'

Within a month, the government of Tunisia had fallen totally, and within 90 days the Arab Spring was world history, engulfing an entire region in turmoil.

Michael Brown stands accused of stealing cigars from a local store, and later found himself in direct conflict with a police officer. For sure, there is no excuse for stealing, but at bottom this was an economic problem too. If Michael Brown had a job he would been able to pay for his cigars, and in all likelihood he would be alive today.

And today you have the highly unfortunate incident of Eric Garner in NYC, who was selling ‘loosies’ (cigarette singles), in conflict with local ordinance. And instead of writing him a ticket and giving him an economic penalty, another one of God’s children is now dead. The man may have had the wrong hustle, but the man had hustle! He wanted to work.

According to Gallup, the thing that people want most in the world — by a long shot – is a JOB.

Not who you pray to. Nor your religious preference. Nor democracy and the right to vote. A JOB is what people want most in the world.

The problem in the world today is a global jobs and opportunity gap. You have 7B people in the world, and only about 1.5B jobs.

The world needs 1B-2B more jobs, not more chock holds and gun fights.

As you will see play out in the days and weeks that follow, the real challenges and problems of Ferguson, Mo. go much deeper than a deeply troubling relationship between residents and the local police department.

It goes deeper than a young man who took something that didn’t belong to him in a local store, and probably said things he should’t have said, ending up dead; a life cut short and a body laying in the middle of an American street.

Here are just a few stats and facts from a recent Brookings Institution study and MarketWatch Report on Ferguson and the surrounding community:

• St. Louis, at 9.7%, ranks among the highest metro areas for unbanked residents in the nation.
• A total of 29% of African-Americans in the community are unbanked, compared with only 3% for white residents, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. It’s the widest racial gap in the nation.
• Payday lenders in Missouri charge average annual interest rates of 455%, according to a ProPublica study. That they are flourishing in Ferguson is, perhaps, no surprise.
• Dramatic demographic transformation moved Ferguson from a largely white suburban enclave (it was 85 percent white as recently as 1980, with higher than average levels of education) to a predominantly black community (it was 67 percent black by 2008-2012, with decidedly lower levels of education, and ownership).
• But Ferguson has also been home to dramatic economic changes in recent years. The city’s unemployment rate rose from roughly 7 percent in 2000 to over 13 percent in 2010-12.
• For those residents who were employed, inflation-adjusted average earnings fell by one-third.
• The number of households using federal Housing Choice Vouchers climbed from roughly 300 in year 2000, to more than 800 by the end of the decade.
• Amid these changes, poverty skyrocketed. Between 2000 and 2010-2012, Ferguson’s poor population doubled. By the end of that period, roughly one in four residents lived below the federal poverty line ($23,492 for a family of four in 2012), and 44 percent fell below twice that level.
• These changes affected neighborhoods throughout Ferguson. At the start of the 2000s, the five census tracts that fall within Ferguson’s border registered poverty rates ranging between 4 and 16 percent.
• However, by 2008-2012 almost all of Ferguson’s neighborhoods had poverty rates at or above the 20 percent threshold at which the negative effects of concentrated poverty begin to emerge. (One Ferguson tract had a poverty rate of 13.1 percent in 2008-2012, while the remaining tracts fell between 19.8 and 33.3 percent.)

At the end of the day, there is an economic problem that has to be resolved in Ferguson, and 100 other American cities just like it. To deal with anything else, is ultimately like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The ship is sinking, and we are all picking drapes.

And worse, far too many of our leaders are becoming experts on what we and they are against, versus becoming experts on what we and they are for — and then doing something positive about it.

What Michael Brown in Ferguson needed, and what Mohammad in Tunisia, and Eric Garner in New York City wanted — was work, and a good job.

This is a problem we can actually solve. I have some ideas to accomplish this. What’s yours?

Let’s go...

This piece is third in a series from me on Ferguson, here on LinkedIn. Here are the others. The Second Victim. Finding Steve Jobs.

John Hope Bryant is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Operation HOPE and Bryant Group Companies, Inc. Magazine/CEO READ bestselling business author of LOVE LEADERSHIP: The New Way to Lead in a Fear-Based World (Jossey-Bass). His newest bestselling book is How The Poor Can Save Capitalism (Berrett Koehler Publishing).

Bryant is a Member of the U.S. President's Advisory Council on Financial Capability for Young Americans, co-founder of the Gallup-HOPE Index,and co-chair for Project 5117, which is a plan for the rebirth of underserved America.

Bryant is the only bestselling author on economics in the world who is also of African-American descent.

Follow John Hope Bryant on LinkedIn Influencers here

Photo Credit: Evan Simko-Bednarski