In March, the unemployment rate for Black Americans fell to 5% from 5.7% the month before.
This was the lowest Black unemployment rate ever recorded in the Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly data, which goes back to 1972. It wasn’t really an all-time low — a 1953 BLS study estimated that the Black unemployment rate had been 4.6% the previous year and even lower during World War II — but the 1.8 percentage-point gap in March between the Black unemployment rate and the white rate of 3.2% may have been (it was 2.2 percentage points in 1952).
These milestones understandably received a lot of attention. When the Black unemployment rate fell to 4.7% in April and the Black-white gap contracted to just 1.6 points, that received attention, too. Then the Black unemployment rate jumped to 5.6% in May and 6% in June, generating headlines of a less-positive sort, while the white rate barely budged. In July, it fell back to 5.8%, pretty much where it was in February.