State of Black America: 'Bad geting worse'

by Fred Gaboury

This article was reprinted from the February 3, 1996 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

For the twentieth time in 20 years the Urban League has issued its "The State of Black America." And, as documented in its more that 360 pages, the state is not good - especially the state of Black children. The report also underlines the extent - and impact - of racial discrimination in our society.

- A Black baby is almost three times as likely as a white baby to be born to a mother who has had no prenatal care at all.

- A Black infant is more than twice as likely as a white infant to die during the first year of life.

- A Black child's father is twice as likely as a white child's father to be unemployed. If both parents of a Black child work, they earn 84 percent of what a white family earns.

- A Black child is 40 percent more likely than a white child to be behind grade level in school and 15 percent more likely to drop out.

- A Black youth is twice as likely as a white youth to be unemployed. A Black college graduate faces about the same odds of unemployment as a white high school graduate who never attended college.

In an essay written for the most recent edition of the Urban League study, Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund, said Black children, youth and families remain worse off than whites in every indicator of American life - and the gap is widening. Citing 1987 figures, she said that "nearly half" - 45 percent - of all Black children were then living in poverty and that poverty rates among Black children are closely related to the "eroded employment and wage base" among Black families.

Edelman blames wage stagnation, including the fact that the minimum wage has not been raised since 1981, for a "dramatic impact" on a family's ability to provide for itself. "For a growing number of Black children," she wrote, "living in a family where the parents are employed does not provide an escape from poverty."

She also blames cuts in federal programs for low-income families and children. "From 1979 to 1985, 30 percent of the increase in poverty among families with children was due to declining federal assistance," Edelman said, adding: "Only 704,000 children were lifted out of poverty in 1983 through 1987 - five years of economic "recovery." At that rate of improvement (assuming no more remissions), it would take 17 years - nearly another generation of children - just to get back to the 1979 level of child poverty."

Families headed by people under 30 have been particularly hard hit by economic change and earnings losses. Pointing to 1994 statistics showing that only about half of white men and barely one fourth of Black men between the age of 20 and 24 earned enough to support a wife and one child above the poverty line, Edelman said comparable figures for 1979 showed that 64 percent of white males and 57 percent of Black males in the same age group earned enough to support a family of three.

Edelman said the "end result" is that the failure of marriages among young Blacks has fueled the growth in female-headed families and the "almost inescapable" poverty that follows. "the employment rates and in good-paying jobs among Black males has had a devastating impact on the number of marriages among young Blacks," Edelman said.

Edelman gave activists fighting against attacks on public assistance - especially imposition of "family caps" or additional restrictions on teenage mothers - additional ammunition when she said, "Young Black women are not having more babies." She said the proportion of Black women younger than 20 who have given birth "has fallen fairly steadily since the early 1970s. The birth rate for unmarried Black teens is also decreasing," she said, adding that the birthrate among unmarried white teens nearly doubled between 1976 and 1986.

Republican attacks on the entitlement status of welfare never end. Earlier this week the GOP Congressional leadership announced plans to send a new welfare bill to the White House in an effort to embarrass President Clinton who once said he would sign the legislation.

That announcement drew a fiery response from Edelman who reminded the president that the bill, with its block granting of federal money to the states, would drive an additional 1.2 million children into poverty. in an open letter to Clinton she listed a number of "it would be wrongs:" To destroy the 60-year-old safety net for children, women and poor families. To exacerbate rather than alleviate the current "shameful and epidemic child poverty that no decent, rich nation should tolerate for even one child." To leave millions of voteless, voiceless children to the vagaries of 50 state bureaucracies and politics.

"We cannot heal our racial divisions or prepare our nation for the future unless we give poor Black, Brown and white children a healthy and fair start in life," she warned. Edelman said the GOP claim that their welfare "reform" was necessary to protect children from future debt they did not incur was the "domestic equivalent of bombing Vietnamese villages in order to save them."

In her article in the "State of Black America," Edelman makes a strong case for Congressional action to create a public works program by quoting Professor William Wilson, chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago: "[T]he Black delay in marriage and the lower rate of remarriage, each of which is associated with high percentages of out-of-wedlock births and female-headed house holds, can be directly tied to the labor market status of Black males ... [T]he problem of Black joblessness should once again be placed as a top priority item in public policy agendas designed to enhance the status of families."

The battle to improve the State of Black America can not be resolved by the African American people alone, no matter how determined or heroic their struggle. The other side of the coin is that no other group can, either. Thus, the fundamental basis for united struggle: We may have come here on different boats but we're all in the same boat now.