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The national economic position of Black Americans has for decades included unemployment rates that are double those of Whites and a racial wealth gap of 13 to 1. Barriers to employment in the construction industry are among the many contributing factors. In 2010, I participated in the creation of an alliance to challenge the exclusion of African American organizations from discussions on the Oakland Army Base redevelopment project. This paper introduces the broad range of urban activist scholarship and then describes this particular activist campaign and its success in raising the percentage of hours worked by African Americans in construction jobs on this project. It uses a critical race theory framework to explore the necessity of a race-conscious approach to campaigns on such issues as local hire. It also describes the methodology of a long-term resident participating in the daily life of a city as a scholar-activist analyzing the urban issues that emerge. The paper concludes with recommendations to activists, policymakers, and scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the hybrid nature of material and digital spaces, more decisions are being made online that have a direct effect on offline actions. This is increasingly true for the locations where people are choosing to consume goods and services such as restaurants or retail outlets. The growth of the GeoWeb-personal data uploaded to certain Internet sites such as social media platforms-has established large databases showing the locations where people go during their daily lives for the purposes of consumption. One such repository is the social network, Foursquare, which people use to display their physical location to their friends, digitally. In looking more closely at datasets from Foursquare overlaid with information on racial characteristics in census tracts, a pattern emerges: predominantly African-American tracts are increasingly left out of this type of online participation. This paper will compare Foursquare data from several U.S. cities to discuss the implications of being left off of social media platforms tied to economic activity. It is likely that these virtually invisible areas will have a direct impact on the economic vitality of their physical counterparts [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Progress in narrowing black-white earnings differences has been far from continuous, with some of the apparent progress resulting from labor force withdrawal among lower-skilled African Americans. This paper documents racial and ethnic differences in male earnings from 1950 through 2010 using data from the decennial census and American Community Surveys. Emphasis is given to annual rather than weekly or hourly earnings. We take a quantile approach, providing evidence on medians and other percentiles of the distribution. Treatment of imputed earnings greatly affects measured outcomes. Hispanic men have exhibited earnings growth similar to white men over several decades. Black men have been left behind economically due in large part to increased joblessness, a process exacerbated by weak labor market conditions. By 2010, joblessness had risen to over 40 percent and the median black-white earnings gap was the largest in at least 60 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use new county-level segregation estimates for the period of 1880 to 1940 to document a general rise in residential segregation in both urban and rural counties occurring alongside rising homeownership rates. However, we find a negative correlation between segregation and homeownership across space for both black and white households. Following Fetter (2013), we show that living in a more segregated county substantially reduced the impact of GI Bill benefits on white homeownership rates, suggesting that segregated locations potentially hindered both white and black homeownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using state-level data from 1980-2010 we examine whether economic freedom, as measured by the Economic Freedom of North America Index, has had any impact in increasing or decreasing the ratio of median income for black households to the median income of white households. To our knowledge, there has been no research on racial income disparities and the role that economic freedom might have in alleviating or exacerbating the problem. We find evidence that economic freedom is associated with an increase in the racial income gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically assesses the empirical evidence on the relationship between immigration and African American employment. Studies using various methodologies and data are reviewed: natural experiments, time series, and cross-sectional studies of local labor markets and intertemporal changes in the national labor market. We find that for African Americans as a whole, immigration may have little effect on mean wages and probability of employment. However, there is some evidence that immigration may have had an adverse impact on the labor market outcomes of African Americans belonging to low education-experience groups. However, even this modest conclusion must be qualified: the literature has many unresolved econometric issues that might easily undermine the received wisdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which talks about the topics discussed in the special issue including the history of American capitalism, self-help economic activities of African Americans, and history of African American businesses.

Although residential segregation is known to have declined for some racial groups in America, much less is known about change in the relative socioeconomic quality of the neighborhoods where different racial and ethnic groups live. Using census data for 1980-2010, we find that the neighborhoods where whites and minorities reside have become more alike in terms of neighborhood poverty and median income, largely because whites now live in poorer neighborhoods and because African Americans live in less-poor neighborhoods. The narrowing of black-white neighborhood inequality since 1980 has been sizable, far exceeding the narrowing of Hispanic-white neighborhood inequality; nonetheless, despite blacks' relative gains, the disparity in black-white neighborhood economic conditions remains very large. Asian Americans, on the other hand, now reside in neighborhoods that are economically similar to the neighborhoods where whites reside. Regression analyses reveal that racial neighborhood inequality declined the most in U.S. metropolitan areas where racial residential segregation declined the most. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on historian W. E. B. Du Bois' outlook on the segregation in education system for African Americans. It states that Du Bois had both supportive and contradictory views on the race segregation in education. Topics include his knowledge of African economic and social cooperation, his response education researcher L. A. Pechstein's argument that supported segregation, his essay "The Crisis" on National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) non-opposition.

In this article, we use data on virtually all foreclosure events between 2005 and 2009 to calculate neighborhood foreclosure rates for nearly all block groups in the United States to assess the impact of housing foreclosures on neighborhood racial/ethnic change and on broader patterns of racial residential segregation. We find that the foreclosure crisis was patterned strongly along racial lines: black, Latino, and racially integrated neighborhoods had exceptionally high foreclosure rates. Multilevel models of racial/ethnic change reveal that foreclosure concentrations were linked to declining shares of whites and expanding shares of black and Latino residents. Results further suggest that these compositional shifts were driven by both white population loss and minority growth, especially from racially mixed settings with high foreclosure rates. To explore the impact of these racially selective migration streams on patterns of residential segregation, we simulate racial segregation assuming that foreclosure rates remained at their 2005 levels throughout the crisis period. Our simulations suggest that the foreclosure crisis increased racial segregation between blacks and whites by 1.1 dissimilarity points, and between Latinos and whites by 2.2 dissimilarity points. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article looks at the impact of Title VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 banning employment discrimination based on race or sex, on the occasion of the law's 50th anniversary, focusing on the economic conditions of African Americans. Topics include deindustrialization, the black-white gap in unemployment rates, corporate affirmative action programs, and structural factors related to African American poverty and unemployment.

Because homeownership continues to be a key mechanism underlying racial inequality in America, recent developments that led to the foreclosure crisis bring to the forefront issues concerning minority homeowners' ability to sustain ownership. This article uses longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine racial differences in the likelihood of homeownership exit over the last four decades. We find that black homeowners are at a significantly higher risk of transitioning to renter status than are white homeowners, even after accounting for life-course, socioeconomic, and housing characteristics, and the selection into homeownership. Most importantly, we show that the racial gap in ownership exit has widened substantially over time, especially among owners who purchased their homes in the 1990s or later. These findings are consistent with arguments that the nature of racial stratification in U.S. housing markets has shifted over time from overt market exclusion to market exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]