Sixteen Cents on the Dollar: The State of Black America, Part 1

Every year since 1976 the National Urban League has taken the measure of Black America. Its Equality Index boils that measure down to one question: what share of the pie do Black Americans get, compared with white Americans? On economics, the answer is 65.6 percent. On wealth, it is far worse.

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Note on the numbers: The Urban League's most recent full Black–white Equality Index appeared in the 2024 report. The 2025 report, titled Emergency, turned to voting rights and the rollback of civil-rights protections rather than publishing a new index. Figures below come from the 2024 index unless noted.

The Number That Explains the Others

The median Black household held $44,890 in wealth in 2022. The median white household held $285,010. That is sixteen cents on the dollar, the lowest score anywhere in the economics section of the index.

Income is closer: $51,374 for Black households against $79,933 for white households, or 64 percent. Income is what you earn this year. Wealth is what your family kept from the years before. The distance between those two numbers is the distance history traveled.

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Three Eras at a Glance

• Jim Crow, 1865–1954: Black farmers built land holdings of about 16 million acres by 1910, alongside Black banks, insurers and business districts such as Tulsa's Greenwood. Field Order 15 was reversed, the Freedman's Bank collapsed (1874), Greenwood was burned (1921) and Social Security left out farm and domestic workers (1935).
• Desegregation, 1954–1980: City homeownership, union wages and the Fair Housing Act (1968) brought gains, while redlining, highways, "urban renewal," contract buying and USDA discrimination drained Black homes and land.
• 1980–present: Homeownership near 44 percent and growing Black businesses met subprime lending, the 2008 crash, student debt and rollbacks of set-asides and DEI. By 2022 the median Black household held $44,890 against $285,010 for white households.

Built, Not Inherited: The Lockout After Emancipation

The gap was built, step by step, by law and by force. It began with what freedom did not include. Four million people left slavery in 1865 with no payment for 246 years of stolen labor. The enslavers, not the enslaved, were the ones compensated: in the District of Columbia in 1862, Congress paid slaveholders up to $300 for each person freed.

Land was the one real chance at a fresh start. In January 1865, General William T. Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15 set aside coastal land from South Carolina to Florida for Black families in plots of up to forty acres. Within months, President Andrew Johnson pardoned former Confederates and ordered the land returned to them. Freedpeople who had already planted crops were evicted. "Forty acres and a mule" became a phrase for a promise broken.

Black Americans saved anyway. The Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, chartered by Congress in 1865, gathered deposits from more than 61,000 people. Poor management and risky loans by its white trustees brought it down in 1874. Depositors lost close to $3 million, and many recovered only a fraction years later. A generation learned that even a bank with the federal government's name on it would not protect their money.

The Agrarian Trap: Sharecropping, Crop Liens and Convict Leasing

Without land, most freedpeople went back to the same fields under new names. Sharecroppers worked a white owner's land for a share of the crop. Tenant farmers rented land and bought seed, tools and food on credit. Under crop-lien laws, the merchant or landlord held a claim on the harvest before it was planted. Interest ran high, often 30 to 50 percent or more, and the landlord kept the books. At settlement each fall, many families were told they had come out behind and owed another year of work.

The law kept them in place. Black Codes and later vagrancy laws made it a crime to be without a labor contract. Anti-enticement laws punished employers who offered a better wage to someone else's worker. Leaving to find fairer terms could mean arrest. Debt peonage, holding a person to work off a debt, was outlawed by Congress in 1867, but it survived across the rural South well into the twentieth century.

Arrest itself became a source of labor. Under convict leasing, Southern states rented prisoners, overwhelmingly Black and often jailed for petty offenses or vagrancy, to mines, railroads, turpentine camps and plantations. States and counties collected the fees. Companies got workers they did not have to keep alive, and thousands died. Alabama did not end the practice until 1928. Every dollar it earned went to someone other than the people doing the work.

From the Cotton Field to the Northern Ghetto

Between about 1910 and 1970, some six million Black Southerners moved north and west in the Great Migration. They found better wages and the vote, but not open doors. Racial covenants, clauses in property deeds barring sale to Black buyers, fenced in whole sections of Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and other cities. The Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) that courts could not enforce them, but they shaped where families could live for decades after.

Crowded into a few neighborhoods, Black renters paid more for less, a "race tax" on housing. Speculators practiced blockbusting: they frightened white owners into selling cheap, then resold the same homes to Black families at inflated prices.

When Black families did build something, white mobs often destroyed it. In Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, armed white men overthrew an elected interracial government and drove out Black businesses. Riots in East St. Louis in 1917, across the country in the Red Summer of 1919, in Tulsa's Greenwood district in 1921 and in Rosewood, Florida, in 1923 burned homes, churches and shops. These were not only acts of terror. They were transfers of property, and almost none of it was ever paid back.

The Color of Property: Homeownership as Policy

Homeownership is the main way most American families hold wealth, and for much of the twentieth century Washington decided who could have it. In the 1930s the Home Owners' Loan Corporation drew maps grading neighborhoods for lending risk. Black neighborhoods were shaded red, the lowest grade. The Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934, wrote that practice into its underwriting rules and backed loans for whole suburbs on the condition that they stay white. Of roughly $120 billion in home loans backed by the FHA and the Veterans Administration from 1934 to 1962, less than 2 percent went to nonwhite families. Levittown, the model postwar suburb, barred Black buyers in its leases.

Shut out of normal mortgages, Black families in cities like Chicago bought on contract. They paid inflated prices in installments, built no equity, and could lose the house and every payment after a single missed month. A newer version came with the subprime boom: Black borrowers, including many who qualified for safer loans, were steered into high-cost mortgages. The 2007–2009 foreclosure crisis wiped out roughly half of Black household wealth.

The pattern still shows. In late 2023, 45.5 percent of Black households owned their homes, against 74.5 percent of white households, a score of 61 percent on the Urban League index. Homes in majority-Black neighborhoods are still valued lower than similar homes elsewhere; a Brookings Institution study put the total loss at about $156 billion.

The Hidden Hand of the Tax Code

Redlining and riots were visible. Some of the most lasting damage came through a system most people never see: taxes. For a century, the gap between the median white and median Black household has never narrowed below six to one. Part of the reason is that government policy built white wealth through subsidies and drained Black wealth through violence and through official means. The tax system has done both, often without a single racial word in the law.

Start with the property tax. In rural Southern counties and Northern cities alike, local officials assessed Black-owned property at higher values than comparable white-owned property. Black families paid more in taxes on homes and land the market valued less. When they fell behind, counties sold their tax debts, and investors who bought those debts could take the property. Records across a century and a half show the same pattern: appraisers undervalued Black property while assessors overtaxed it. That double blow pushed Black owners toward delinquency and, in the end, losing their land.

Federal tax law adds a quieter tilt. Rules that sound neutral land differently once you know how Black and white families live. The tax code rewards married couples with one main earner through the "marriage bonus." Black married couples are more likely to depend on two similar paychecks, say a nurse and a city plumber, so they often pay a marriage penalty instead. The breaks for homeowners work the same way. Deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes, and the untaxed gains on a home, are worth the most to families whose homes rise fastest in value. Homes in Black neighborhoods are worth less and gain less, so the biggest subsidies in the code flow away from Black families.

None of these rules mentions race. Together they mean that for many Black families the government charged more and paid back less, year after year. That is part of why the sixteen cents on the dollar has been so hard to move.

Jobs: The Dual Labor Market and the Public-Sector Lifeline

Work was walled off as well. The Social Security Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 left out farm and domestic workers. That carve-out, demanded by Southern members of Congress, excluded about 65 percent of Black workers nationwide and more than 80 percent of Black working women in the South from the New Deal's basic protections. Many craft unions barred Black members, keeping them out of the skilled trades that paid best. In factories, Black workers were too often "last hired, first fired."

Government work became the main exception. Post offices, schools, hospitals and federal agencies hired Black workers under civil-service rules when private employers would not, and those jobs built much of the Black middle class. That is also why cuts to public payrolls land so hard on Black families, the subject of tomorrow's chart.

The gaps remain. Unemployment was 5.8 percent for Black workers in November 2023, against 3.3 percent for white workers. Lower pay means less saved for a down payment. Fewer homes means less to borrow against when a job ends. Less wealth means less to hand down. Each gap feeds the next, which is why the sixteen cents on the dollar is not an accident of the market. It is the sum of the history.

What Comes Next

Tomorrow, Part 2 looks at the public jobs that built much of the Black middle class, and how fast they are disappearing.

The State of Black America · Part 1 of 5. One chart a day, Nov. 9–13. Part 1 · Part 2 · Part 3 · Part 4 · Part 5

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