Bloomberg offers plan to tackle racial economic inequality

Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg made a pitch to African American voters the day before the national holiday honouring Martin Luther King Jr., visiting the site of a race massacre nearly 100 years ago that left hundreds dead and the city’s thriving African American community in the rubble.

The former New York City mayor spoke out against an American history of race-based economic inequality from slavery to segregation to redlining and outlined a proposal aimed at increasing the number of black-owned homes and businesses.

The plan includes a 70 billion US dollar investment in the nation’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

“For black Americans, there was nothing that white landowners, businesses, banks, and politicians might not take: Their wages and their homes, their businesses and their wealth, their votes and their power, and even their lives," Bloomberg said during a speech to several hundred people at the Greenwood Cultural Centre, which houses artefacts and other memorabilia from the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.

Bloomberg described the initiative as a "plan for righting what I think are historic wrongs and creating opportunity and wealth in black communities.”

The plan offers incentives for investment in underserved communities, increases support for black-owned banks and ties federal housing money to progress in reducing segregation.

It would require bias training for police, teachers and federal contractors, and address voter disenfranchisement practices such as ID requirements, poll purging and gerrymandering.

Bloomberg also pledged to back a commission to study whether black Americans should receive reparations for slavery.

Bloomberg faced some criticism in November for visiting a black church in Brooklyn just days before launching his presidential bid when he apologized for his longstanding support of the controversial “stop-and-frisk” police strategy he embraced as mayor that disproportionately impacted people of colour.

The visit to Oklahoma, a Super Tuesday state whose primary is on March 3, keeps with Bloomberg’s strategy of skipping early voting states such as Iowa and New Hampshire and focusing on delegate-rich Texas, California and others.