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Abstract
Halfway through the second term of the United States’ first black president and 50 years after a civil rights movement survived bloody repression to win passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, racial tensions have burst into the open again. A series of episodes that began last year when at least four unarmed African-American men, and one boy, died at the hands of police officers, most of them white, pushed race back into the headlines. Relations between police and African-Americans represent only the tip of the iceberg where race relations are concerned. But coinciding as they did with the half-century anniversaries of major civil rights victories, the police incidents showed that the racial divide persists.