U.S.

Blacks Making Steady Progress

July 22, 2002 / 9:55 AM EDT / AP

In areas ranging from jobs to home ownership to politics, blacks continue to make gains, but equality with whites remains a far-off goal, the National Urban League says in its annual report on the state of black America.

"When you look at the data, yes, we have made substantial headway, but there are still — without a shadow of a doubt — substantial gaps in every category, every vital sign," said Hugh Price, president of the New York-based black empowerment group. "We're making steady progress but we're not in the end zone yet."

The report, a collection of eight essays written by experts in fields such as labor, home ownership and civil rights, is intended to capture an annual snapshot of blacks in America. The first one was published in 1976.

The authors highlight several areas where blacks have made gains yet disparity persists. Among them:

During the 1990s, black unemployment fell to its lowest level in 30 years. The rate of poverty among black families fell to 26 percent, the lowest ever recorded.

Yet black workers have been hit harder by the recession than others. In June, the unemployment rate for whites was 5.2 percent; for blacks it was more than twice that, 10.7 percent.

In the workplace, blacks are about twice as likely to hold lower-paying, less-prestigious service jobs. About 20 percent of blacks hold professional or managerial jobs, while more than 30 percent of whites do. Less than 1 percent of certified public accountants, for example, are black.

Compared to whites and the rest of the nation, blacks are still stuck in the pre-civil rights era when it comes to owning their homes. For whites, the homeownership rate is 74 percent. For blacks, it is 48 percent — the national rate in the 1940s.

There were more than 9,000 black elected officials in the year 2000 — more than at any other time in the nation's history, the report says, drawing on data from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Blacks also represent 38 percent of all AIDS cases reported in the United States, Maya Rockeymoore, of the Urban League's Institute for Opportunity and Equality, says in an essay citing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention figures.

The gay community, led mainly by white males, responded to the early threat of AIDS by using political muscle to marshal federal, state and local resources. But blacks were slower to organize, Rockeymoore says in her essay, "African Americans Confront a Pandemic: Assessing Community Impact, Organization and Advocacy in the Second Decade of AIDS."

That lack of a coordinated, early mobilization, combined with "poverty, substance abuse problems and exclusion from social insurance programs" has placed black and Hispanic communities "at a distinct disadvantage in their efforts to ward off the spread of AIDS," Rockeymoore writes.