CLEVELAND, Ohio – A lot of progress has been made by Black Ohioans in the last 50 years. But compared to white contemporaries, there are still tremendous shortfalls in critical measures of success like income, education and employment, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and other research.
As part of coverage during Black History month, cleveland.com looked at those gaps over the last 50 years and sought to find out how much or how little progress has been made.
“Fifty years ago takes us to the Black Power movement,” notes Charles Wash, director of the National Afro-American Museum & Cultural Center in Wilberforce. “There were a lot of conversations around the state of Ohio about the need for consolidating our understanding of Black history and what it means to be African American in the United States.”
Currently, 1.7 million Black Ohioans represent 14.3% of the state’s population – a growing share of the state. In 1980, the 1 million Black Ohioans accounted for just 10% of the state. In fact, if it wasn’t for the growth of minorities, Ohio would have lost population overall over the last several years instead of its slight gain.
Here’s a closer look.
Income and poverty
The median household income for Black households is still among the lowest of any race in Ohio, and the gap has not tightened. In fact, Black households have slipped from making 73.8% of white households in 1970 to 55.5% in 2020, according to the Census Bureau.
While Asian households have a median income of $85,319, white households make $66,456, and Hispanics of any race make $50,221, Black households in Ohio have a median income of $36,929.
East Cleveland, Warrensville Heights and Trotwood, towns with high Black populations, are among the 20 cities with the lowest median income in the state.
In 1970, White households made a median income of $10,525, households with persons of the Spanish language made $9,397 and Black households made $7,767. Asian households only began being calculated separately in 1984.
For individual workers, the wage gap is even worse.
Policy Matters Ohio released a report in September that wages for Black men in Ohio fell by nearly $5 per hour since 1979, taking into account inflation.
Black men were paid 91 cents on the dollar compared with their white male counterparts in 1979, a shortfall of $2.25 per hour. But by 2021, that fell to 74 cents on the dollar, a shortfall of $6.08, according to the report.
“I was actually a little bit taken aback by what I found,” says Michael Shields, study author and job markets and quality senior researcher with Policy Matters Ohio. “Those losses are borne by Black men and wholly responsible for the decrease in overall pay that we see for all Black people working in Ohio.”
East Cleveland, Trotwood, and Maple Heights cities with high Black populations – are among the 20 cities with the highest levels of child poverty in the state. Black households have the highest poverty levels in the state at 27.7%, almost three times more likely than white households.
Overall, the poverty rate for Ohio’s Black population in 2021 was 27.5%, versus 10.6% for the white population.
And while only 14.3% of the state is Black, Black households account for 28.3% of those on SNAP, formerly knowns as food stamps. In Cuyahoga County, the county with the largest Black population in Ohio, this is 53.5%.
This has not changed much since 1970. A study using 1970 census data found that, like today, most of the East Side of Cleveland, which houses the majority of the city’s Black population, was designated as “low-income neighborhoods,” with poverty rates in some places over 40%.
Higher education attainment
The share of Black adults with college degrees has gone up more sharply than the state adult population as a whole, but a wide gap remains.
Only 18.7% of Black Ohioans aged 25 and older have a Bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 29.7% of Ohio in general.
In 1970, only 3.9% of Black Ohioans aged 25 years old or older had completed at least four years of college, compared to 9.3% overall.
Ange-Marie Hancock, executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, says a trend has begun to emerge in Ohio over the last few years.
“There has been a pivot for black high school students who are high achieving to choose historically black colleges and universities,” she says. But she said that while Central State and Wilberforce universities are options in Ohio, these are not the most popular, causing students to leave the state.
“We have a bit of a brain drain that might be going on,” Hancock says.
“We see more and more Black students are graduating [high school], and we see more of them are enrolling in college, but we still see those large gaps in college graduation rates,” Tanisha Pruitt, state policy fellow at Policy Matters of Ohio. “Something is happening and matriculation is not there.”
According to recent data from the Ohio Department of Education, just 15.7% of Black students are graduating college within six years, in comparison to 44% of white students.
Pruitt said Black students are less likely to take an AP course in high school, and those who do are less likely to score a 3 or higher on an AP test, which is considered a good grade on the exam. Black students are more likely to be diagnosed with a learning disability, and Black students are three times more likely to experience disciplinary infractions like expulsion.
Employment and workforce
Disparities remain in the workforce.
In 1970, 55.7% of Black Ohioans were employed, about the same as the 54.5% of Black Ohioans in the workforce in some capacity today. In 1970, some of the professions for Black workers were clerical work, furniture manufacturing and cleaning service workers.
But the jobs that employ the most Black workers in Ohio today still predominately include those requiring shift-based workers like cashiers, laborers, janitors, customer service representatives, drivers and cooks.
“There is occupational segregation,” Hancock says. “The jobs that employ the most Black workers are the ones with the highest levels of turnover and also the sectors that tend to have the highest amount of what is called temporary or almost full-time workers.”
The other problem is that these jobs often don’t offer many benefits, most importantly, healthcare.
And among those working, just 38.1% are in full-time jobs, less than the 51.5% overall.
“Thirty-eight-point-one percent means that there’s a gap in who has access to health care benefits given that our systems are so heavily reliant upon making sure employers provide insurance,” says Hancock.
However, 30.1% of Black workers in Ohio are working in management, business, science and arts occupations as of 2021, considered professional occupations that typically pay more than other jobs.
Much of this workforce participation comes from Black women.
“Women’s workforce participation has grown steadily up until recently workforce participation tanked for everybody during COVID,” Shields says. “We’ve seen a lot more entry of middle-income women into the workforce, and poor women have always worked. Black women have consistently had higher workforce participation than white women.”
But Black women are often paid less for the same job, according to Pruitt.
“Education and some of these industries that a lot of women go over to see Black women being paid less and it’s these historical wage gaps,” says Pruitt. “Traditional work where they don’t get paid a lot like in secretarial roles or cleaning.”
The lack of Black men in the workforce may also be due, in part, to collateral sanctions or penalties due to a person’s guilty plea, says Shields. Guilty pleas usually result in jail time, disproportionately affecting Black men.
Despite being less than 15% of the state’s population, they comprise 34% of the jail population and 45% of the prison population. One-third of Black men are incarcerated in their lifetime.
“In Ohio, incarceration rates are between three and four times what they were in the 1970s,” he says. “There can be restrictions on the types of workplaces that you’re able to work in, based on having had a criminal conviction.”
As of 2020, there were 4,026 Black-owned businesses in Ohio, according to the Annual Business Survey by the census. These businesses employ more than 55,000 workers, with more than a quarter of the companies being in the health care or social assistance industry.
Nearly 20% of these businesses have existed for more than 15 years, according to the Ohio Department of Development. There are an estimated 140,918 Black-owned businesses with employees in the United States as of 2020.
Housing
Cuyahoga County has the largest share of the Black population in the state, accounting for 23.7% of the overall population in the county, up from 19.1% in 1970.
This includes a number of cities where the Black population now represents the majority of the people: Warrensville Heights (92.8%), East Cleveland (88.9%), Bedford Heights (77.4%), Maple Heights (72.3%), Euclid (63.8%), Richmond Heights (58.9%), Garfield Heights (56.9%) and Bedford (54.8%).
People in predominately Black cities are more likely to rent, with East Cleveland topping the list. Warrensville Heights, Bedford Heights and Euclid are among the cities with more renters than homeowners.
East Cleveland has been predominately Black for at least 50 years, with 58.6% of East Cleveland being Black in 1970, the largest share in the county.
Other Ohio cities where at least half of the current population is Black are Trotwood (64.6%), North College Hill (60.7%) and Forest Park (55%). All of these predominately Black cities had most of their housing built in 1979 or earlier.
According to the 2020 census, 31 Ohio cities had Black populations of less than 1%, including Wellston (0.15%), Columbiana (0.34%), New Carlisle (0.38%) and Vermilion (0.4%). Others below 1 in Greater Cleveland were Kirtland (0.5%), Bay Village (0.6%), Brecksville (0.76%) and Independence (0.76%).
Age and health
The median age for Black Ohioans has always been lower than white Ohioans, sometimes by more than 10 years. But it has slowly grown over time.
The median age for someone Black in Ohio is 33.7, with women having a median age of 35.5 and men having a median age of 32.
This is slightly higher than 20 years ago, when the 2000 census reported a median age of 30.5, with Black men having a median age of 28.7 and women being 32.1 years old. However, this remains lower than Ohioans as a whole, who have a median age of around 39, a six-year difference.
Life expectancy tells a deeper disparity, with a 2019 report from the Center for Community Solutions finding that areas that had higher percentages of the populations who was poor or Black had lower life expectancy.
While many neighborhoods on the East Side of Cleveland had a life expectancy of only 65.4 to 70.7 years, many of the outer suburbs in the county had a life expectancy as high as 81.4 to 88.6 years of age.
However, despite the pandemic cutting life expectancy short in Ohio and the rest of the United States, the 2019 median age of Black men and women remained relatively the same as those today.
But that is not to say that COVID-19 has affected all Ohioans equitably. Despite making up only 14.3% of the state’s population, 16.5% of all patients who were hospitalized with COVID-19 during the pandemic have been Black.
Cleveland’s University Hospitals Harrington Heart & Vascular Institute found that Black patients with heart disease increased at more than triple the rate of their white counterparts. Meanwhile, another University Hospitals study published in 2022 found that the decades-old practice of redlining is directly correlated with elevated risk and cases of coronary heart disease, stroke, and chronic kidney diseases throughout Black communities.
Black History Month was started by American historian Carter F. Woodson, who established Black History Week in the second week of February 1926. This week coincided with two prominent figures in Black History – President Abraham Lincoln (Feb. 12) and abolitionist Frederick Douglass (Feb. 14). The week was then expanded to the entire month of February as part of the nation’s bicentennial.
Zachary Smith is the data reporter for cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. See previous stories at this link.
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