New census data helps explain why the District’s black voters felt disenfranchised and turned out en-masse to vote Mayor Adrian Fenty out of office and elect D.C. Council Chairman Vince Gray on his promise that he would work to reverse the deepening divide between the city’s white and wealthy residents and its black and poor residents.

Voting data shows that Gray handily won the city’s black and poorer neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River and Fenty found large margins of victory in the white, wealthy neighborhoods in Northwest. In the buildup to the primary, it became clear that many black voters felt they had been disenfranchised by the Fenty administration. They said they believed Fenty had favored white neighborhoods over black as longtime residents were pushed out of the city by climbing