As already noted, six out of ten African-American women were household servants who, driven by economic desperation, often worked 12-hour days for pathetically low wages.
#HOW MANY AFRICAN AMERICANS IN AMERICA MANUAL#
(Only one in eight owned the land on which he worked.) A trivial 5 percent of black men nationally were engaged in nonmanual, white-collar work of any kind the vast majority held ill-paid, insecure, manual jobs-jobs that few whites would take. When Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma in 1944, most blacks lived in the South and on the land as laborers and sharecroppers. And yet, in reality, blacks who consider themselves to be middle class outnumber those with incomes below the poverty line by a wide margin.Įdited by Alan Berube and Bruce Katz 2005įifty years ago most blacks were indeed trapped in poverty, although they did not reside in inner cities. In a 1991 Gallup poll, about one-fifth of all whites, but almost half of black respondents, said that at least three out of four African Americans were impoverished urban residents. Blacks are even more prone than whites to exaggerate the extent to which African Americans are trapped in inner-city poverty. Crime and the welfare check are seen as their main source of income. Many assume blacks live in ghettos, often in high-rise public housing projects. Almost a third of the black population lives in suburbia.īecause these are facts the media seldom report, the black underclass continues to define black America in the view of much of the public. Black two-parent families earn only 13 percent less than those who are white. Forty-two percent own their own homes, a figure that rises to 75 percent if we look just at black married couples. And thus it’s news that more than 40 percent of African Americans now consider themselves members of the middle class. Progress is the largely suppressed story of race and race relations over the past half-century. In 1964, the year the great Civil Rights Act was passed, only 18 percent of whites claimed to have a friend who was black today 86 percent say they do, while 87 percent of blacks assert they have white friends. In 1958, 44 percent of whites said they would move if a black family became their next door neighbor today the figure is 1 percent.ġ8 and 86. In 1940, 60 percent of employed black women worked as domestic servants today the number is down to 2.2 percent, while 60 percent hold white- collar jobs.Ĥ4 and 1. Let’s start with a few contrasting numbers.