WASHINGTON - Fifty years after the "dream" of racial equality invoked by Martin Luther King at the March on Washington, the reality is that African-Americans still suffer the most unemployment.
Government statistics show the overall U.S. unemployment rate stood at 7.4% in July.
But while whites had a jobless rate of 6.6% last month, the rate was nearly double for blacks at 12.6%.
By comparison, the Hispanic, or Latino, minority fared better, with 9.1% unemployed.
Asian-Americans were the least affected by the woes in the U.S. labor market after the Great Recession; only 5.7% lacked jobs.
"Discriminations against African-Americans are still very pervasive, it's a major force of the economy," said Heather McGhee, vice president of Demos, a Washington-based think tank on equal rights.
The yawning gap between majority whites and blacks is nothing new and has persisted through periods of economic expansion and recession.
Since 1972 the jobless rate for blacks has held at roughly double that of the entire workforce.
Even at the end of 2000, amid full employment in the U.S., when the jobless rate was 3.9%, 7.3% of African-American workers were unemployed.
The weight of this joblessness has pushed blacks into the majority of the 27.6% of Americans living in poverty, although they represent only 13% of the population of some 316 million.
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