What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Jobs: The Continuing Scandal of African-American Joblessness

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Like the country it governs, Washington is a city of extremes. In a car, you can zip in bare moments from northwest District of Columbia, its streets lined with million-dollar homes and palatial embassies, its inhabitants sporting one of the nation’s lowest jobless rates, to Anacostia, a mostly forgotten neighborhood in southeastern D.C. with one of the highest unemployment rates anywhere in America. Or, if you happen to be jobless, upset about it, and living in that neighborhood, on a crisp morning last March you could have joined an angry band of protesters marching on the nearby 11th Street Bridge.

They weren’t looking for trouble. They were looking for work.

Those protesters, most of them black, chanted and hoisted signs that read “D.C. JOBS FOR D.C. RESIDENTS” and “JOBS OR ELSE.” The target of their outrage: contractors hired to replace the very bridge under their feet, a $300 million project that will be one of the largest in District history.¹ The problem: few D.C. citizens, which means few African-Americans, had so far been hired. “It’s deplorable,” insisted civil rights attorney Donald Temple, “that . . . you can find men from West Virginia to work in D.C. You can find men from Maryland to work in D.C. And you can find men from Virginia to work in D.C. But you can’t find men and women in D.C. to work in D.C.”²

The 11th Street Bridge arches over the slow-flowing Anacostia River, connecting the poverty stricken, largely black Anacostia neighborhood with the rest of the District. By foot the distance is small; in opportunity and wealth, it couldn’t be larger. At one end of the bridge the economy is booming even amid a halting recovery and jobs crisis. At the other end, hard times, always present, are worse than ever.

Live in Washington long enough and you’ll hear someone mention “east of the river.” That’s D.C.’s version of “the other side of the tracks,” the place friends warn against visiting late at night or on your own. It’s home to District Wards 7 and 8, neighborhoods with a long, rich history. Once known as Uniontown, Anacostia was one of the District’s first suburbs; Frederick Douglass, nicknamed the “Sage of Anacostia,” once lived there, as did the poet Ezra Pound and singer Marvin Gaye. Today the area’s unemployment rate is 20 percent and, in some pockets, even higher.³ District-wide, it’s 10.8 percent,⁴ a figure that drops as low as 3.6 percent in the whiter, more affluent northwestern suburbs.

D.C.’s divide is America’s writ large. Nationwide, the unemployment rate for black workers at 16.7 percent⁵ is almost double the 9.1 percent rate for the rest of the population. And it’s twice the 8 percent⁶ white jobless rate.

The size of those numbers can, in part, be chalked up to the current jobs crisis in which black workers are being decimated. According to Duke University public policy expert William Darity, that means blacks are “the last to be hired in a good economy, and when there’s a downturn, they’re the first to be released.”

That may account for the soaring numbers of unemployed African-Americans, but not the yawning chasm between the black and white employment rates, which is no artifact of the present moment. It’s a problem that spans generations, goes remarkably unnoticed, and condemns millions of black Americans to a life of scraping by. That unerring, unchanging gap between white and black employment figures goes back at least sixty years. It should be a scandal, but whether on Capitol Hill or in the media it gets remarkably little attention. Ever.

The Sixty-Year Scandal

The unemployment lines run through history like a pair of train tracks. Since the 1940s, the jobless rate...