Ken ChiltonKen Chilton didn't make up the numbers, take them from Fox News or cite them out of context. They're online for anyone to examine, and they're awfully painful.
* No student -- not one -- from the predominantly black Brainerd and Howard High schools passed all four parts of the ACT college readiness test last year.
* Only six in 10 students who enrolled at Brainerd and Howard graduated.
* Because of that lack of education and training, those same students can't get the high-paying jobs that have come to the area.
"Even though we're having success as a region with getting manufacturing jobs," Chilton said, "a lot of people who need them aren't qualified for them. The data bear that out."
The Tennessee State professor and former head of the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies, in a Monday address titled "State of Black Chattanooga," also cited figures from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Pew Research Center that starkly show the economic steps backward blacks have taken under the first black president, Barack Obama.
From 2010 to 2013, the median wealth of white households nationwide increased by 2.4 percent, while the median wealth of black households fell by 33.7 percent.
"Inequality is the new normal," Chilton said.
And it will continue to be the new normal if that's what those households continue to choose. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Chilton provided for those who attended -- as one of a series of events surrounding the birthday of the late civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. -- a dose of reality.
If those who heard it translate it simply into information to be used in demanding more resources for inner-city neighborhoods, they will have missed the point.
Money won't buy Howard and Brainerd students an education. It won't buy them a good reputation. It won't buy them a good job. Those things have to be earned by hard work, personal responsibility and sacrifice. No government program, no grant and no hand-holding can give them that.
Sherman Matthews, chairman of the Unity Group that is sponsoring the King birthday events, said last year the "community is too complacent, too compliant and too accommodating."
"We hear the same thing over and over," he said, "but we don't hear people who challenge our thought process."
Chilton's stark numbers should be all the challenge necessary for families -- to desire better educated students, to seek jobs and their possibilities of upward mobility, and to examine how they got where they are and effect real change.
But Matthews, in making the aforementioned comments, was talking about someone else coming to stimulate the thought process during the King week events. That someone is President Obama's former longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who is to speak at a Saturday prayer breakfast at Tucker Missionary Baptist Church.
This is the same Wright who said HIV/AIDS was created by the American government to kill black people, who said God should "damn America for treating us citizens as less than human," and in his most quoted diatribe said America had experienced terrorism for "the stuff we have done overseas," and now "America's chickens! [Are] coming home! To roost!"
In a King celebratory event in Chicago last year, the minister who married Obama and the first lady and baptized his two daughters didn't have much good to say about the president, who distanced himself from his former pastor during his 2008 campaign.
"That's not the man of peace that you just talked about," he said, referring to a weekly "kill list" the president looks at concerning the war in Afghanistan. "That's a man controlled by government."
Wright, at the event, also disparaged another president from Illinois, saying Abraham Lincoln "liked to tell darkie jokes" and that he invoked a racial slang for blacks "incessantly."
If he comes here to spout that kind of rhetoric, it's exactly the last thing struggling black families need to hear. They would profit more from local and national black voices who could tell stories of starting out in a poor household, benefiting from the public education available, working their way through college and striving hard to rise in their professions.
Chattanooga is full of those living examples, people who chose diligence and patience over anger and bitterness. Indeed, if life in the Scenic City is to turn around for those suffering in the third of the city that is black, they must emulate those who choose to look ahead and not those who only want to look back.