7.5% of Black Americans Remain Unemployed

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 6:38AM EST · Published Nov 4, 8:05AM EDT

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7.5% of Black Americans Remain Unemployed — © Thinkstock

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced on Friday that unemployment fell to 4.1% in October. By some measures, that was a 17-year low. One group that still suffers from unusually high, nearly recession-level joblessness, is black Americans. The jobless rate for the group was 7.5% last month.

The 7.5% figure is particularly high when compared to other groups. The unemployment rate for adult women was 3.6%. For adult men, it was 3.8%. (Each of these groups would have posted better numbers if the figures for black Americans were backed out.) Among white Americans, it was 3.5%. The unemployment rate among Asian Americans was 3.1%. The only large group with an unemployment rate worse than black Americans was teenagers, for which the jobless rate was 13.7%.

It is worth noting that the unemployment rate among black Americans has improved over the course of the year, which is true for most groups. A year ago, the number was 8.4% among black Americans.

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A rundown of the part of the BLS report:

The unemployment rate edged down by 0.1 percentage point to 4.1 percent in October, and the number of unemployed persons decreased by 281,000 to 6.5 million. Since January, the unemployment rate has declined by 0.7 percentage point, and the number of unemployed
persons has decreased by 1.1 million.

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult women (3.6 percent) and Whites (3.5 percent) declined in October. The jobless rates for adult men (3.8 percent), teenagers (13.7 percent), Blacks (7.5 percent), Asians (3.1 percent), and Hispanics (4.8 percent) showed little change.

In October, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was little changed at 1.6 million and accounted for 24.8 percent of the unemployed.

The labor force participation rate decreased by 0.4 percentage point to 62.7 percent in October but has shown little movement on net over the past 12 months. The employment-population ratio declined by 0.2 percentage point over the month to 60.2 percent, after increasing by 0.3 percentage point in September. The employment-population ratio is up by 0.5 percentage point over the year.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.