Another Mountain to Climb

Service Employees International Union has posted a report about the challenges facing African-American workers 40 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Entitled "Beyond the Mountaintop: King's Prescription for Poverty" (24p. pdf.), the report reveals how little economic progress has been made for the average person within the black community in America. Here's a quote from a summary of the report by Isaiah Poole:

That report concludes that 40 years after King spoke of a promised land of social and economic justice, “we seem to be paralyzed outside the gates of the city.” It is true that African Americans “have made amazing progress to get where we are. Black educational attainment is three times higher than in 1968, for example. Our out-of-wedlock birthrate has fallen in half. And countless positions of authority—from school boards to political offices to the boardrooms of Fortune 500 corporations—are now filled with black women and men.”

And yet, today African Americans still face what the report calls “a two-dimensional job crisis: high unemployment and low wages.” Four out of 10 black people over the age of 16 were jobless in 2006, the report notes, and 31 percent of black full-time workers earned less than $25,000. Thus, even as the education gap between black people and white people has narrowed dramatically in the past 40 years, the racial economic disparities have not.

The unemployment rate among African Americans today, 7.9 percent, is higher than it was in 1969, when it was 5.3 percent, and in 1999, when it was 6.3 percent. The median income for black men actually fell between 2001 and 2006 in inflation-adjusted terms, from $23,673 to $22,609. Childhood poverty, after being cut in half during the Great Society years of the late 1960s, is now at 32.6 percent, only slightly lower than it was in 1969 and higher than it was in 2000.