African-Americans rank race relations as priority for U.S.

African-Americans now rank race relations as the most important issue facing the country, according to a year-long study.

In June 2015, 13% of African-Americans named race relations as the biggest issues, while 4% of white Americans said the same in the Gallup survey measuring perspectives on the most important issues facing Americans.

That marks a 10 percentage point increase among blacks from a year ago before confrontations between unarmed African-American men and law enforcement in cities across the nation put race relations front and center in the national discourse. Among whites, the ranking jumped just 3 percentage points.

The poll was completed before police say a white man killed nine people in a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., early Thursday morning. The instance was described as a "hate crime" by Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen.

Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, an activist and author, who organized groups in Ferguson in August 2014, is not surprised by the findings.

"In terms of the broader public, it's always been critical of people of African descent," Sekou said. "Ferguson highlighted the contradiction in a way that demanded attention in a certain way."

Sekou said he thought the killings in Charleston were not a case of an unstable individual acting out, but an instance indicative of a larger issue of race relations in the U.S.

"What we saw highlighted an immoral system," Sekou said.

The same percentage of African-Americans – 13% – also named unemployment as a top issue, and white Americans ranked dissatisfaction with the government and the economy in general as top issues, at 18% and 12%, respectively.

The Gallup survey comes during a trend of police killings of unarmed African-American men in Ferguson, Mo., Staten Island and Baltimore.

Antonio French, the city alderman of Missouri's 21st ward and a prominent citizen journalist during the events in Ferguson, said Americans believed the election of President Obama would solve race relations in the country.

If anything, French said, it has just heightened tensions between African Americans and white Americans.

"We try to make our white constituents and white colleagues understand what is happening in black communities does affect them," French said. "All these things have direct effects on our country, and even if it's not happening directly to white people, they need to understand what is happening to their black brothers and sisters is affecting us all."

French added that the findings from the Gallup poll would likely have a higher percentage of all Americans ranking race relations as the most important issue in the U.S. after the shootings in South Carolina.

In June 2014, before the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, 3% of African-Americans and 1% of whites ranked race relations as the most important issue facing the nation.

Gallup researchers have conducted this poll for decades. The largest percentage of Americans believed race relations was the biggest U.S. issue in the mid-1960s. The last peak was in the early 1990s, when the 1992 Los Angeles riots revamped the conversation about race in the U.S.

Richard Ford, a law professor at Stanford University who specializes in civil rights and anti-discrimination law, wrote in an e-mail to USA TODAY that the series of deaths of African-American men in police custody is responsible for these findings. He said the police incidents over the past year are similar to the race riots in the 1960s and the Los Angeles riots in the 1990s.

"The policing scandals put race back on the agenda — for now," Ford wrote.

In her summary of the survey, Alyssa Brown, a deputy editor at Gallup, noted these findings came after the outcry over the shootings of Brown and Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Many took to the streets of Ferguson in August 2014 and in Baltimore in April to express their emotions and disbelief over the deaths of the two unarmed men.

"After the highly publicized outcry in Ferguson after Brown's death, blacks became just as likely to name race relations as the nation's top problem as they were to name unemployment," Brown wrote. "This level of concern has held following riots in Baltimore stemming from Gray's death after Gray was taken into police custody."

In December 2014, Obama told NPR he believes the U.S. has become less racially divided during his term.

The poll also found perceptions of law enforcement differ among the two races. The poll found 68% of African-Americans believe the American criminal justice system is racially biased; 37% of whites said the same.

While movements like #BlackLivesMatter picked up steam as a response to the killings, Ford said more durable solutions must be made to attempt to solve race relations in the U.S.

"It's pretty clear we are not doing enough now," Ford wrote. "The policing issues are symptoms of larger ills: residential segregation and poor opportunities in minority communities, which lead many to turn to grey market activities in order to get by."

French said the #BlackLivesMatter movement is an attempt at solving this issue of race relations across the country.

"The Black Lives Matter movement is really an effort to keep on the radar screen of mainstream society of the lives of African Americans."

Sekou said while he does not have hope in American currently, he believes young people are the ones making race relations at the forefront of the national conversation.

"I don't have much hope in America given the fact that every other day someone is killed by the police," Sekou said. "I have hope in young people because they're the ones that are making Americans pay attention."

The researchers surveyed 3,566 adults, ages 19 and older, including 2,698 non-Hispanic whites, and 352 non-Hispanic African-Americans.