CHICAGO, July 23 (UPI) -- It's been 30 years since Robert Hill wrote his first study on "The State of Black America" for the National Urban League, the nation's oldest and largest group working to move African-Americans into the economic mainstream.
Three decades later Hill, now senior researcher at a private research firm in Maryland, found despite the significant economic and social gains made by black Americans in the 1970's, '80s and '90s that continued racial progress is imperiled by high incarceration rates of minorities and rising unemployment in a jobless recovery.
While the number of blacks with middle-income earnings increased a manufacturing downturn pushed many well-paid workers into lower paying service jobs. The black unemployment rate is more than double that for whites, 11.8 percent to 5.5 percent.
Founded in New York in 1910, the National Urban League helped three generations make the difficult transition from an impoverished life in the rural American South to the industrial urban North, providing assistance in housing, healthcare and employment.
Millions of blacks moved North in the "Great Migration" following World War I but many found only more poverty, prejudice and discrimination.
Delegates of the group's 105 affiliates in 34 states convene for their 93rd annual conference Saturday at Pittsburgh's new David L. Lawrence Convention Center.
President George W. Bush is scheduled to speak to the Urban League after bypassing last week's NAACP conference in Miami Beach.
Bush's speech will be his first before a major U.S. civil rights group since he spoke to the Urban League in 2001. He spoke before the NAACP during the 2000 campaign. His speech to the least political of the national African-American organizations will blunt criticism by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and others who have chastised Bush for failing to meet with leaders of the civil rights community and organized labor during his presidency.
Jackson will join a panel on civil rights Monday. Education Secretary Rod Paige also will speak at the convention. New National Urban League President Marc Morial, former mayor of New Orleans, delivers the keynote address Sunday evening. He succeeded the group's longtime President Hugh B. Price who retired recently after nine years.
The Urban League, like other social service organizations, faces major challenges.
The U.S. Labor Department this spring opened bidding for a $15 million federal Senior Community Service Employment Program grant the Urban League had received for 25 years -- pitting the experienced social service agency against faith-based groups and organizations like Easter Seals and National Able Network.
The 37-year-old SCSEP program provides job training and subsidized volunteer-type positions to about 2,000 low-income people 55 and older seeking employment. Loss of the expected federal grant was a major financial blow to Urban League chapters in 24 cities already hit by cuts in state funding and the sluggish economy.
"The State of Black America 2003" report is a collection of essays. Hill writes on the nation's 8.1 million black families, Ernest Drucker on incarceration and public health, James Lanier on the criminal justice system and the war on drugs, Carolyn West on feminism, Kimberly Scott on black girls, Kenya Covington Cox on child care and working mothers and James Teele on the pioneering work and legacy of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier.
Hill examined the impact of the 1965 Moynihan Report on the black family that blamed a "weak and pathological" family structure for high rates of illegitimacy, welfare dependency and crime. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., blamed black America's ills on a matriarchal family structure and advocated "benign neglect" of social problems to President Richard M. Nixon.
The burgeoning civil rights movement forced the government to address the nation's race problem with policies like affirmative action to begin to even the playing field for the disadvantaged.
Moynihan was criticized for ignoring the debilitating effects of a legacy of 400 years of slavery, legal segregation and economic oppression in his landmark study.
"An opposing view contends that the majority of low-income black families are resilient, self-reliant, work-oriented, have strong kin bonds, and aspire to high educational goals for their children," writes Hill.
Hill acknowledged high teenage pregnancy rates, the growing number of households headed by single mothers, unemployment, youth violence, drugs and crime surely has undermined black economic and social progress.
"The strengths perspective has always had its critics, among blacks as well as whites," wrote Hill in an essay "The Strengths of Black Families Revisited." "But it is long past time to acknowledge that black families are both weak and strong. The strengths school does not deny that there are many real problems in the black community. It is disingenuous to contend that because one asserts black families are definable strengths, they're also claiming they have no weaknesses."
Hill said although blacks did have a higher proportion of single-parent households in 1965, that nearly three-quarters of black families had two parents.
"The regressive legacy of the Moynihan Report was that it provided ammunition for conservatives and centrists who argued for the reduction of welfare and other social programs, a position that was strongly criticized by Moynihan," said Hill. "Its progressive legacy has been the efforts to provide more job training, healthcare, education, housing and welfare assistance to poor families."
Moynihan to his credit acknowledged shortcomings in his 1965 report and championed healthcare, housing and other legislation to help middle and low-income families of all races during his years in Congress. The report spurred an explosion of research on African-American families that Hill says increased understanding of the family life of all disadvantaged groups.
Another essay in the 250-page report released in Washington Wednesday addressed the impact of high incarceration rates on black communities. Blacks comprise about half of the nation's 2 million prison inmates. Another 4.6 million people are in the criminal justice system on probation or parole.
The incarceration rate of American blacks is more than 700 per 100,000 -- the highest in the world.
"Mass incarceration in our society disproportionately targets African Americans and Hispanics," wrote Drucker. "African Americans, while only 12 percent of the total population constitute nearly 50 percent of the prison population; and approximately 40 percent of black men age 20 to 29 are currently in prison or jail, or on parole or probation. Incarceration is now becoming the norm for a substantial proportion of black American men; more black males go to jail than to college."
Sociologists Drucker and Lanier blame "get tough" drug enforcement polices of the last 25 years for inflating the incarceration rate for blacks citing the more than 450,000 offenders of all races imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses.
The nation's prison population had soared from around 200,000 in 1972 -- about 110 per 100,000 citizens. Today, there are 4,819 black inmates per 100,000 black males in the population compared to 649 white inmates per 100,000 white males. For females the rate is 349 black women incarcerated per 100,000 compared to 68 white women inmates per 100,000 white females.
Consider New York state, where blacks and Hispanics are 12 percent of the population.
"Since the so-called Rockefeller drug laws took effect in 1973, the rate of drug incarcerations in New York increased from 8 percent of the prison population to more than 30 percent," wrote Drucker. "Ninety percent of that group are male; 78 percent are New York City residents; 94 percent are black and Hispanic; and 70 percent of them come from just six New York City neighborhoods."
Lanier said the war on drugs had devastated black communities.
"Because the lack of rehabilitation programs in prisons gives them virtually no tangible skills they can use to 'go straight' when released and legitimately fulfill the roles of suitor, father, uncle, brother and just plain 'good neighbor,' they can easily become estranged from their own families, whom their imprisonment has almost always left in dire financial circumstances, and from their own neighborhoods and the larger black community," wrote Lanier.
"One in 14 African-American children, or 1.5 million youth, have a parent in prison. For a growing proportion of those children -- now about 125,000 -- the inmate parent is their mother, many of whom are first-time, nonviolent drug offenders."
Convicted felons lose their right to vote, cannot work in many professions in 48 states, and are ineligible for public housing, education aid and other government benefits.
Nearly half of the nation's 3.9 million affected are African-American.
"That means that 30 to 40 percent of black males age 18 to 30 are disenfranchised," said Drucker.
A study in the January issue of the American Sociological Review found the outcome of seven U.S. Senate races and one presidential race might have been altered since 1978 if current and former felons had been allowed to vote.
"Felon disenfranchisement laws, combined with high rates of criminal punishment in the United States, sometimes play a decisive role in elections," wrote Northwestern University sociologist Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, of the University of Minnesota.
