How much longer is a Connecticut resident likely to be around than someone who lives in Mississippi? Three full decades. That’s not the scariest statistic in the new Human Development Index report on well-being in the United States. The life expectancy gap between Asian-American males and black Americans in those states is a staggering 50 years.

Did you know that Jim Crow laws remained in effect for the better part of a century? Enacted in the wake of the Civil War to establish “separate but equal” status for black Americans, they were enforced in southern states between 1876 and 1965. Jim Crow laws were a major catalyst for the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities to escape segregation, among them Billy Kyle’s parents, who moved to Detroit from Missouri and Arkansas, respectively.

The search function came in handy when reviewing the transcript of my interview with Dr. Natalia Tanner, whom I met in her sunny Detroit office on November 11th. Since it feels as though everything Tanner wasn’t the first black woman pull off, she was either the first woman or the first African-American to accomplish, I’d searched for “first.” The last find was the one that stuck in my head.