In Washington, a historically black church is trying to attract white members to survive. Atlanta’s next mayoral race is expected to feature the first competitive white candidate since the 1980s. San Francisco has lost so many African-Americans that Mayor Gavin Newsom created an “African-American Out-Migration Task Force and Advisory Committee” to help retain black residents.

“The city is experiencing growth, yet we’re losing African-American families disproportionately,” Mr. Newsom says. When that happens, “we lose part of our soul.”

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Nation magazine contributing writer Kai Wright, discusses his July 14 article about the mortgage crisis and its affect on the Black middle class.

For his story, Wright traveled to Atlanta, Georgia where he met George Mitchell and many others like him who had fallen victim to lending scams.

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Nearly 18,000 homes faced foreclosure in the Atlanta area during the first quarter of 2008, an almost 40 percent jump from the first quarter of 2007. In Fulton County, which encompasses most of the city’s core and is heavily African-American, one in 122 homes was in foreclosure in the first week of April. A digest of Atlanta’s March 2008 “foreclosure starts” was as thick as the phone book, and the Mitchells’ 30310 ZIP code topped the list.

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For 40 years, we have been waging a “war on drugs.” Families are being kicked out of housing when many have done nothing wrong. Drug addiction is bad. But the war on drugs is worse. Frances Johnson, a 68-year-old grandmother in Washington, D.C faced eviction simply because her grandson was arrested for possessing a small amount of marijuana.

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Black children are twice as likely to enter U.S. foster care than white children. The culprit: our inattention to poverty.

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Around the world, rising food prices have made basic staples like rice and corn unaffordable for many people, pushing the poor to the barricades because they can no longer get enough to eat. But the worst is yet to come.

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Life expectancy for the nation as a whole has increased, but the affluent have made greater gains, researchers said. New government research has found “large and growing” disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans, paralleling the growth of income inequality in the last two decades.

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A startling new report has predicted the subprime mortgage crisis will cause people of color to lose up to $213 billion, leading to the greatest loss of wealth in modern U.S. history. The figure appears in a new report from United for a Fair Economy called “Foreclosed: The State of the Dream 2008.” The group accuses mortgage lenders of deliberately targeting the poor and people of color with high-cost loans. We speak with Dedrick Muhammad, co-author of the report. [includes rush transcript]

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After reviewing foreclosure data, city attorneys concluded that the leading mortgage lender was steering black homebuyers into high-cost, subprime loans, a contention Wells Fargo denies.

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The New Orleans City Council has unanimously voted to move ahead with the demolition of 4,500 units of public housing. Under the plan, the city’s four largest public housing developments will be razed and replaced with mixed-income housing. Hundreds of people were turned away from the City Council meeting. Police shot protesters with pepper spray and tasers. We go to New Orleans to speak with two local community activists and a former SWAT commander. [includes rush transcript]

More from Kali Akuno

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Protests against a City Council plan to tear down low-income New Orleans housing turned ugly Thursday, with police using pepper spray and stun guns to clear a crowd angry they weren’t allowed into City Hall for the vote.

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The scene outside New Orleans’ City Hall boiled on the brink of a riot Thursday as protesters stormed the gate and were met with police spraying mace and firing Tasers. Protesters broke through the gates outside City Hall shortly after 11 a.m.

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The federal government is beginning this week to tear down thousands of apartments in the city’s four biggest public housing projects.

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Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., founder and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, is calling on Congressional leaders and other elected officials to convene with him at the 11th Annual Wall Street Project Conference — to tackle the financial crisis that could send America spiraling into a devastating depression.

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Forty years after fighting and bleeding for full legal equality, African Americans are falling further behind whites economically.

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