Toledo is pulling apart on race, economics ...

February is Black History Month, and The Blade is publishing articles that report racial progress and uplift in our community. This isn't one of them.

A new study by the Urban Institute, a respected, nonpartisan policy research group in Washington, rates the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas on what it calls black-white equity. Toledo ranks seventh from the bottom.

This isn't one of those silly magazine surveys that claims to identify the fattest or drunkest or worst-dressed American cities. This is serious business, and it demands a serious local response.

Urban Institute researchers used Census data to measure racial and ethnic differences in five factors -- residential segregation, family income by neighborhood, test scores of public school students, and rates of adult employment and home-ownership-- to calculate each metro area's equity score.

Toledo's overall grade for racial equity: F. If it's any consolation, we got a B grade for Latino-white equity.

Margery Austin Turner, the Urban Institute's vice president for research and author of the study, says that despite the appreciable gains of the Civil Rights era, the report card confirms that wide gaps remain in economic opportunities for black and white Americans.

Those disparities are especially pronounced in a number of metropolitan areas in the Midwest and Northeast -- not just Toledo, but also New York and Chicago and Philadelphia. Closing these gaps, she concedes, "is no simple matter."

The Rev. John Jones, president of the Greater Toledo Urban League, offers a one-word reaction to the Urban Institute report: "Wow." He says the recession's effects on this area, especially the huge loss of manufacturing jobs it caused, have compounded the local opportunity gaps that the report identifies. But longer-term factors are also at work, he argues.

"We're not too far from where we were in the late 1970s and early 1980s, from a disparity perspective," he told me. "We still don't have systems in place to ensure equity and inclusion. And if we don't do the things that are going to break the cycle of poverty and inequality, we're going to be in the same spot 20 years from now."

What should we do to bring up the dispiriting marks on Toledo's report card? Rev. Jones calls for a greater local emphasis on helping minority entrepreneurs start and expand businesses and gain access to capital and contracts.

"Who's going to be the first to hire in the urban core, where unemployment is highest?" he says. "Small businesses, and probably minority businesses. I'm not talking about quotas, or waiting for someone to hand something to us. I'm talking about policies that ensure everybody gets a fair share.

"Right now, we all know that is not the case," he adds. "We have to make sure we're at the table."

Programs to improve job skills, in the private and public sectors, need to expand, Rev. Jones says. He wants Toledo's African-American community to develop and support a broader array of leaders. And he insists that disadvantaged Toledoans must show personal responsibility and initiative in taking advantage of the opportunities that are available to them.

Ms. Turner of the Urban Institute agrees that job training is essential, along with targeted investments in schools and fair-housing enforcement. She says solutions "have to be crafted locally," and Toledo civic leaders and makers of social policy must "challenge themselves" to attack inequality at its roots.

The Urban Institute report has its limits. Trying to compare the New York metropolitan area, which has 19 million residents, with metro Toledo and its population of about 650,000, takes you only so far.

Some of the areas in the study that got high grades for racial equity have relatively few black residents. And if black-white inequity is worse overall in the Rust Belt than in the Sun Belt, as the study seems to suggest, then the solutions need to be national as well as local.

But the Urban Institute's conclusions track too closely with the Toledo's area's performance in other recent studies to be explained away. The Brookings Institution reported that metro Toledo ranks first among the largest metropolitan areas in the growth of concentrated, extreme poverty over the past decade -- in its suburbs as well as the central city.

A report by the US2010 research project concluded that Toledo trailed only the Detroit and Oklahoma City metro areas in its growth of residential segregation by family income between 2000 and 2007. And the ProPublica journalism Web site reported that income inequality in Lucas County is among the nation's worst.

Taken together, these studies suggest an inescapable conclusion: There is not one Toledo but two, and they are growing farther apart along economic and racial lines. That division will obstruct this region's ability to recover fully from the recession and to grow and develop.

In an election year, improving Toledo's equity score should be a topic of debate among political candidates, from presidential and congressional aspirants to county board hopefuls. But it isn't solely the responsibility of politicians. It's ours too.

Back in 1968, a federal report commissioned in the wake of urban riots the previous summer warned that America was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal." Nearly a half-century later in Toledo, we appear to have reached that point in some disquieting ways.

How we respond to urgent issues of inequality and separation -- whether we place the emphasis on us-against-them, or on all of us -- will largely determine this community's future.

David Kushma is editor of The Blade.

Contact him at: dkushma@theblade.com