This neighborhood south of downtown is bleak, with empty parking lots fenced in by barbed wire, and skeletons of buildings covered in graffiti.
Many of the people walking the long blocks of Mechanicsville grew up poor, and their children are likely to be poor, too. It’s part of the vicious cycle of poverty—without access to high-quality education, kids born into poverty are likely to remain there for their whole lives, despite the promise of the American Dream. According to the Kids Count Data Center, a project sponsored by the Annie E. Case Foundation, 39 percent of African American children lived in poverty in 2013, the highest rate of any racial group. And one study found that 42 percent of African Americans born into the lowest-income category remained there as adults.
[For more of this story, written by Alana Semuels, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...e-of-poverty/384029/]
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