2014 has come and gone, but the New York Times Editorial Board isn’t going to let the passing of the years keep it from focusing upon the World’s Most Important Place:

Race and Voting Rights in Ferguson By THE EDITORIAL BOARD JAN. 4, 2015

For most people, Ferguson, Mo., will be remembered for one awful August afternoon, when a white police officer there shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown.

But that incident was only a snapshot in the town’s long and complicated racial history — a history characterized by entrenched segregation and economic inequality, as well as by familiar and systemic obstacles that have kept black residents from holding positions of political power.

Ferguson’s population is two-thirds African-American, and yet its mayor, city manager and five of its six City Council members are white. So are its police chief and all but three officers on its 53-member police force.

The school board for the Ferguson-Florissant School District is much the same: More than three-quarters of the district’s 12,000 students are black, but the seven-member board includes only one African-American.

… Since the district’s voting-age population is 50 percent white and 47 percent black, and since both groups there tend to vote along strict racial lines, the white voters’ candidates almost always win.

Since blacks are still a minority in Ferguson among adults 18 and over, that suggests mathematically that, apparently, white-ruled Ferguson has been attractive to black parents looking for public schools for their children. In contrast, East St. Louis has had a black mayor since 1971, but the population has declined from 70,000 in 1970 to 27,000 in 2010.

How could that be?

Meet The New York Times’s Editorial Board »

Indeed, let’s meet them.

The last comment before comments were closed was:

Peter Blau NY Metro 3 hours ago

Ok — while the Ferguson school board has 1 African American out of 7 members, the NY Times Editorial Board has 1 African American out of 18 members! In other words, the Ferguson school board is more than twice as integrated as the NY Times editorial board. Have you no sense of shame, NY Times?

Most of the time, the modal New York Times commenter appears to be, roughly, a community college assistant dean of diversity, but this editorial has brought out dissenters.