Rick Perry gave a speech in the beginning of July at the National Press Club in Washington. In his speech, Mr. Perry recounted an abominable incident—the torture and lynching of a 17-year old black man in Waco, Texas, in 1916. The WSJ’s Daniel Henninger writes that by doing so, Mr. Perry threw down the gauntlet on “a long-overdue admission the Republican Party has ignored the black vote.”

But since the subject has been raised, one may ask: Since when has the Democratic Party not taken the black vote for granted?

That the black vote in the U.S.’s northern cities will be Democratic is as automatic as anything gets in politics. Liberals say they deserve this vote because Democratic politics has done so much for black Americans—Medicaid, food stamps, energy payments and the like.

What, exactly, has been going on in these moribund urban neighborhoods? How can so many people have stayed poor and unemployed in the same years the Democratic Party earned their votes by spending so much money on anti-poverty programs?

Presidential candidates need to turn the discussion to race, party and policies, especially to inner-city public schools, which Mr. Henninger calls “the greatest moral tragedy of the last century.” Read more here.