The death of 25-year-old Baltimore resident Freddie Gray in police custody has drawn renewed scrutiny to the ongoing problem of the excessive use of force by police in African American communities across the U.S. Gray’s death from spinal damage—likely caused in the back of the police van in which he was detained—led to days of protests in Baltimore, with repeated clashes between demonstrators and the police. Recently, Baltimore lead prosecutor Marilyn J. Mosby announced that the city would be pursuing homicide charges against the officers who had unlawfully arrested Gray.

Tensions between community members and the police have simmered for decades in West Baltimore, where Gray was stopped. An area with high rates of poverty, low life expectancies, and limited educational opportunities, West Baltimore was the site of a 25-year study on the persistence of racial and socioeconomic inequality conducted by Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olson. Their findings, presented in the RSF book The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood (2014), offer a detailed examination of the complex connections between socioeconomic origins and socioeconomic destinations of city residents. In their study, the authors traced the outcomes of almost 800 predominantly low-income Baltimore school children, and monitored the children’s transitions to young adulthood with special attention to how opportunities available to them as early as first grade shaped their socioeconomic status as adults.

Karl Alexander, co-author of The Long Shadow, recently spoke about the inequalities that have long affected Baltimore with several media outlets, including the Economist and the Nation. Among the research detailed in the book is the finding that low-income black men in the study were less likely to be employed than their white counterparts, even if they had obtained more education. As Alexander told Al Jazeera, “To be on your own when you’re poor and black in a city that doesn’t have abundant opportunities isn’t an easy place to be.” In an article for the Atlantic Black Star on the marginalization of Baltimore’s black population, Nick Chiles also cited The Long Shadow, noting that “even without the benefit of a college degree, the 40 percent of the children [in the study] who were white still wound up having far better outcomes as adults than the Black children.”

In the wake of the Baltimore protests, the research in The Long Shadow has been profiled by Ezra Klein at Vox, as well as by the National Journal, which contextualizes Freddie Gray’s life amidst a backdrop of socioeconomic hardship outlined by the authors. As journalist Brian Resnick put it, “Future earnings, educational attainment, and lifelong health are all set on a track, to some degree, by a childhood environment.” He soberly concluded, “Baltimore hasn't changed all that significantly for its poorest residents since the 1980s.”

Click here to read more about The Long Shadow or purchase a copy of the book.