WASHINGTON – When President Obama was elected the nation's first black president in 2008, it suggested a move toward a post-racial America, the kind of society that Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned in his "I Have a Dream" speech nearly a half-century before.

No doubt, the votes of a majority of U.S. voters for a black man was a watershed of monumental proportion. But six years into the Age of Obama, relations between blacks and whites are arguably worse in communities across the nation.

As protesters take to the streets after a pair of grand juries decided not to indict white police officers for killing unarmed black men in Missouri and New York, it's clear that America's long-standing racial divide not only remains but has deepened.

"We are more racially fractured and fragmented," said James Peterson, director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.

"It has exposed more wounds than it has healed," he said of Obama's election. "It has exposed how racist our society still is."

Obama has pushed for a slew of policies to boost blacks, with some success: increasing access to health care, making college more affordable and changing sentencing guidelines. And he launched My Brother's Keeper, a program designed to empower young minority men.

Yet vast disparities between blacks and whites remain. Blacks earn less money, graduate from college at lower rates and are imprisoned at disproportionately higher rates than whites. The unemployment rate for blacks is more than double the national average, 11.1 percent, while it's 4.9 percent for whites, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Improving blacks' quality of life may help empower them and narrow the quantifiable gap between black and white. But ultimately race relations comes down to what's in a person's head. And even the first black president can't change how people feel about each other.

"You have to separate steps that can be done that level the playing field and ensure justice from how people feel in their hearts," senior Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett said in an interview. "We have been evolving for generations now. … That's not something you can just simply change in six years, but we can certainly make progress and move in the right direction."

'A lot more' needs to be done

A new McClatchy-Marist Poll released Friday finds voters divided over whether Obama's race helped or set back race relations. By 43 percent to 34 percent, voters think the fact that the country has a black president has helped rather than hurt.

Whites and Latinos think it's helped, by percentages of 44-35 and 46-25, respectively. But blacks think it's hurt race relations rather than helped, by 42 percent to 33 percent.

The number of people who think blacks and whites do not get along has increased throughout Obama's presidency, from 19 percent in late 2009 to 28 percent in 2014, according to polls conducted by the Pew Research Center and USA Today.

In 2013, just before the 50th anniversary of King's speech, fewer than half — 45 percent — of Americans said the country had made substantial progress toward racial equality. About the same share — 49 percent — said that "a lot more" remains to be done.

Shawn Alexander, a professor of African and African-American studies and director of Langston Hughes Center at the University of Kansas, said the nation's systemic racial problem will not dissipate until American talk about race and policies are changed to level the playing field.

"America is not honest about race," he said. "We failed to confront race."

Obama's election brought race to the forefront. And some say it led Obama to face an increased number of death threats and less cooperation in Washington.

"I think racial issues have really gotten worse," said Colette Flanagan, a black woman who founded the group Mothers Against Police Brutality after her 25-year-old son was killed last year by a white police officer in Dallas. A grand jury declined to indict the officer.

Still, Obama says Americans should not discount the progress that has been made.

"If you look at the history of race in America, it's usually not a single moment when suddenly everything gets solved. It's a process," Obama said this week on the Spanish-language network Univision. "We have to recognize that issues of racial prejudice and discrimination, they're embedded deeply in society, and they don't transform overnight, but each successive generation, what we've seen in America is we've seen improvement."