COLUMBUS – A century after the beginning of a massive migration that saw millions of African-Americans flee the segregated South of Jim Crow to the booming industrial Midwest, a new study indicates that, while those people and their descendants found increased opportunities and prosperity, achieving equality was a more elusive goal.
In Ohio, black residents, who make up 12.3 percent of the state’s population, the difference between the black and white unemployment rate is fifth largest in the nation and the gap between what Ohio employers pay white and black workers is larger than in all but 41 states, according to a new report, Race in the Heartland, jointly released by Policy Matters Ohio, the Economic Policy Institute, the Iowa Policy Project and the Wisconsin-based COWS.
The report shows that, while more black Americans live in the 12-state Midwest region -– which stretches from the northern plains to Missouri and from Nebraska to Ohio — than in the Northeast or the West, Midwestern states often have higher black-white gaps on school suspensions, bachelor’s degree attainment, incarceration, and segregation.
People from other states and other nations flooded into Ohio and the Midwest during the industrial boom and, although manufacturing and labor unions helped create good jobs for many black workers, discrimination and segregation limited their opportunities for good homes, school and health care sharply. A combination of systematic housing discrimination, established through deed covenants and zoning laws and sometimes enforced by mob violence, led to racial segregation in housing which persists to this day.
Of the eight most segregated large metropolitan areas in the 2010 census, six were in the Midwest and two of those six – Cleveland and Cincinnati – were in Ohio.
When the number of industrial jobs declined, black Midwesterners suffered more than whites and other groups, with the result that — in one recent ranking — eight of the 10 states deemed most racially unequal, including Ohio, were in the Midwest.
The authors of the report say the black-white prosperity gap can be narrowed and its effects lessened through a number of policy changes, including higher minimum wages, labor law enforcement, childcare investment and union-friendly practices to improve jobs and incomes; greater access to Medicaid, food aid and housing assistance to improve health care.
To eliminate the housing discrepancy, the report recommends local and state governments adopt policies that improve neighborhoods, eliminate exclusionary zoning, remove mortgage lending obstacles and enact tax reform.