Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley

Black leaders today continue to cite racism as a major cause of black unemployment (and every other socioeconomic problem that blacks face). Yet in 1930, when racial discrimination was infinitely more open and rampant, the black unemployment rate was lower than that of whites. And until around 1950 the unemployment rate for young black men was much lower than today, and similar to whites in the same age group. “Black 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds had a slightly lower unemployment rate than white youngsters of the same age in 1948 and only slightly higher unemployment rates than their white peers in 1949,” wrote Stanford economist Thomas Sowell. How come? Sowell offered one plausible explanation: This was just before the minimum wage law was amended in 1950 to catch up with the inflation of the 1940s which had, for all practical purposes, repealed the minimum wage law, since inflated wages for even unskilled labor were usually well above the minimum wage level specified when the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938. The key role of the federal minimum wage laws can be seen in the fact that black teenage unemployment, even in the recession year of 1949, was a fraction of what it would become in even prosperous later years, after the series of minimum wage escalations that began in 1950.21