'Marketplace' Report: Black Economic Progress : NPR

Marketplace' Report: Black Economic Progress : NPR
Petra Todd:Economic Progress of African Americans in the 21st Century

MARKETPLACE for a kind of a report card on the economic progress of African-Americans. As a group, how have black Americans done, economically, in those years?

The black middle class has expanded, and for many African-Americans, the education gap that helps a middle class expand has closed or narrowed. But I suspect a lot of Americans would find the overall statistics discouraging.

Yes. The short answer is yes, but again, there's a significant hitch. One group that has fully closed the wage gap is college-educated black women. They earn as much as college-educated white women now. And a new reports says that all working black women, including those who are aren't college educated, are earning about 88 percent of what white women earn. That's as of the year 2000, and that's up from 82 percent shortly after Dr. King died.

For men, it's not so good. The report says black men were recently earning 70 percent of what white men earn, and that's up from 60 percent in 1970. But the problem there, is that the statistic measures what working men earn, and that doesn't count that black male unemployment and incarceration are both way up since 1970. So here's researcher Petra Todd from the University of Pennsylvania.

The Urban League says the average net worth of African-American families is just over $6,000. that's about a tenth the average net worth of white families. Black home ownership is up, and that's an encouraging future wealth indicator, but it's still only 70 percent the rate of white home ownership.

African-American families made big economic strides during the '60s and '70s, but since then, their relative lack of education has hurt, because the kinds of jobs that African-Americans tend to hold are those that are most impacted by stagnating wages and by the global premium on skills. So some progress, yes, but some backsliding, as well.



The Census bureau released a report on black-owned businesses this week. From 2002 to 2007 -- that's the data set -- the number increased at a rate three times that of non-black owned companies. In places like Atlanta, the increase was more than 90 percent higher. Atlanta may be a hub, but the growth happened all over the country, in particular in the north -- states like New York, New Jersey and Illinois. In that vein, we are having some conversations on the program this month about the African American economic experience.


The Great Migration: Author Isabel Wilkerson
learn more about the book.
More than six million African Americans moved out of the South between World War 1 and 1970. The exodus was called the Great Migration and it transformed American culture and identity, from our music to our economy to our politics.

Isabel Wilkerson's book on the Great Migration is called "The Warmth of Other Suns." You can read an excerpt at our new book blog.

Uprising, 'Great Migration' Offer Lessons In Dignity 

I have been, like most people, following news of the street protests and unrest in the Middle East. And it may seem strange, but my mind keeps going back to a book I read last summer by the great former New York Times reporter Isabel Wilkerson. It is called The Warmth of Other Suns and it is about the so-called Great Migration.
It details the mass movement of millions of blacks from the rural Southern United States to the North, Midwest and West in the decades following the first World War, up until the beginning of the 1960s.What would one have to do with the other?



Isabel Wilkerson: My parents were born in this country -- my mother in Georgia, my father in Virginia. Our roots are deep in America. But like the majority of African-Americans you might meet in the North and West, I am descended from people who had to seek a kind of political asylum within the borders of their own country.

From World War I until 1970, some six million African-Americans fled the South with the same dreams as anyone crossing the Atlantic or the Rio Grande. They defected a caste system that made it illegal for a black person and a white person to play checkers together in Birmingham. The movement was called the Great Migration.
Economics played a role. Before the Great Migration, 90 percent of all African-Americans were living in the South. They were virtual captives despite the Emancipation Proclamation. An oversupply of black labor held down their wages, and they had few options elsewhere.

But World War I changed everything. The North was suffering a labor shortage and began recruiting black workers. The South resisted this poaching of its cheap labor by arresting blacks from railroad platforms and imposing fees of $25,000 on northern recruiters. But the people kept leaving until the caste system built to confine black labor finally collapsed after the Civil Rights era. By the end of this Great Migration, nearly half of all black Americans were living outside the South in the great arc of the North and West.

It is virtually impossible now to extract the culture that grew out of the Great Migration from American culture. The music of Miles Davis, the literature of Toni Morrison, the plays of August Wilson might never have been written. It was the unsung decisions of their parents, like those of mine, that helped change America and left a legacy of inspiration for all of us.