Deurbanization and the Struggle to Sustain a Black Teaching Corps: Evidence From Michigan

From 2005 to 2015, the number of Black teachers in Michigan dropped by 48%, substantially exceeding declines in the corresponding K–12 Black student population. These teacher losses are an acute phenomenon within a broader national context of deurbanization of K–12 student populations away from those districts with the largest and most established faculties of color. Districts receiving large numbers of incoming Black students hired few Black teachers over the period, leading to marked declines in Black student exposure to Black educators, and Black employment gains since 2016 have generally been in areas where Black teachers were already employed. We discuss the historical conditions under which Michigan’s Black faculties were established and multiple forward-looking challenges to building and sustaining Black faculties in geographically diffuse populations.

Permanent Black Immigrants’ Experiences of Working in Ontario

This Major Research Paper is a qualitative study that utilizes a narrative approach through an anti-Black racism lens to investigate the cultural, historical, political and socioeconomic factors that influences the career advancement and employment journey for Black immigrants in Ontario, specifically those from the Caribbean. This study follows the employment journey of two adults of African descent in Ontario. Through their stories, the two participants detail their experiences with subtle systemic racism and resulting precarious employment. Other common themes that emerged amongst the participants were low income status, blocked career advancement opportunities, maintaining multiple jobs, lack of training specifically for Black immigrant adults, and low wage employment. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of changing policies and structures in order to remove the barriers to stable employment and career advancement faced by people of African descent. Keywords: Anti-Black Racism, Narrative, Ontario, African, Caribbean, Black, Employment Stability, Systemic and Policy

Permanent Black Immigrants’ Experiences of Working in Ontario

This Major Research Paper is a qualitative study that utilizes a narrative approach through an anti-Black racism lens to investigate the cultural, historical, political and socioeconomic factors that influences the career advancement and employment journey for Black immigrants in Ontario, specifically those from the Caribbean. This study follows the employment journey of two adults of African descent in Ontario. Through their stories, the two participants detail their experiences with subtle systemic racism and resulting precarious employment. Other common themes that emerged amongst the participants were low income status, blocked career advancement opportunities, maintaining multiple jobs, lack of training specifically for Black immigrant adults, and low wage employment. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of changing policies and structures in order to remove the barriers to stable employment and career advancement faced by people of African descent. Keywords: Anti-Black Racism, Narrative, Ontario, African, Caribbean, Black, Employment Stability, Systemic and Policy

Employment Mobility and the Belated Emergence of the Black Middle Class

As the Covid-19 pandemic takes its disproportionate toll on African Americans, the historical perspective in this working paper provides insight into the socioeconomic conditions under which President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign promise to “build back better” might actually begin to deliver the equal employment opportunity that was promised by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Far from becoming the Great Society that President Lyndon Johnson promised, the United States has devolved into a greedy society in which economic inequality has run rampant, leaving most African Americans behind. In this installment of our “Fifty Years After” project, we sketch a long-term historical perspective on the Black employment experience from the last decades of the nineteenth century into the 1970s. We follow the transition from the cotton economy of the post-slavery South to the migration that accelerated during World War I as large numbers of Blacks sought employment in mass-production industries in Northern cities such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. For the interwar decades, we focus in particular on the Black employment experience in the Detroit automobile industry. During World War II, especially under pressure from President Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Committee, Blacks experienced tangible upward employment mobility, only to see much of it disappear with demobilization. In the 1960s and into the 1970s, however, supported by the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Blacks made significant advances in employment opportunity, especially by moving up the blue-collar occupational hierarchy into semiskilled and skilled unionized jobs. These employment gains for Blacks occurred within a specific historical context that included a) strong demand for blue-collar and clerical labor in the U.S. mass-production industries, which still dominated in global competition; b) the unquestioned employment norm within major U.S. business corporations of a career with one company, supported at the blue-collar level by mass-production unions that had become accepted institutions in the U.S. business system; c) the upward intergenerational mobility of white households from blue-collar employment requiring no more than a high-school education to white-collar employment requiring a higher education, creating space for Blacks to fill the blue-collar void; and d) a relative absence of an influx of immigrants as labor-market competition to Black employment. As we will document in the remaining papers in this series, from the 1980s these conditions changed dramatically, resulting in erosion of the blue-collar gains that Blacks had achieved in the 1960s and 1970s as the Great Society promise of equal employment opportunity for all Americans disappeared.

Trends in Black–White Employment Gaps Since the Great Recession

The Great Recession had a devastating impact on labor force participation and employment. This impact was not unlike other recessions, except in size. The recovery, however, has been unusual not so much for its sluggishness but for the unusual pattern of recovery in employment by race. The Black employment–population rate has increased since bottoming out in 2010 while the White employment–population rate has remained flat. We examine trends in labor force participation and employment by race, sex, and age and determine that the explanation is a combination of an aging White population and an increase in labor force participation among younger Black people. We estimate the likelihood of labor force participation and employment among young men and women to control for confounding factors, such as changes in educational characteristics. We then decompose the gaps among groups and the changes over time in labor force participation using an Oaxaca–Blinder-like technique for nonlinear estimations. We find that much smaller negative impacts of characteristics and greater returns to characteristics among young Black men and women than among young White men and women explain the observed trends.

The Struggle for Control over Black Politics and Protest

The 1920s witnessed a dual black presence beyond tokenism in the chambers of the Chicago City Council as well as possessing the nation's sole black voice in the U.S. Congress. Further, the Illinois Senate, the Illinois Commerce Commission, the Cook County Municipal Court, and the Chicago Library Board accommodated a new African American membership. Among white racists, Chicago's City Hall even derisively carried the label of being “Uncle Tom's Cabin” because of extensive black employment and a small black decision-making capability. This chapter explores this occurrence. Focusing on economically regenerative politics and robust economics as integral features of the bedrock foundation for the heralded Black Metropolis, the chapter also explores the nexus of politics and nonpolitical economic protest, along with this pivotal relationship to the economic fabric of black Chicago in business, labor, associational linkages, the professions, and the underground economy.

The Negro marketing dilemma

Purpose Terminologies such as “integrated marketing” and “market segmentation” may be common parlance in contemporary marketing literature, but, in post-war America, they had distinct racial orientations mediated by a history of segregation. This paper aims to examine the resonant discourses in the construction of the Negro market in post-war America and observes that the field of marketing provides a historiography, where Negro marketing was constructed as dilemmatic and through a duality of the black market impacting the well-established white market. A survey of marketing literature from the 1950s to the 1970s reflects a discursive turn from scepticism and caution in approaching the Negro market to evoking the ethical discourse and advocating equal rights for the black consumer. Design/methodology/approach A review of articles on the topic reveals that research occurred in other academic fields beyond the remit of marketing, and these different disciplines approached the issue of the Negro market from different research orientations and fields of enquiry. This paper focuses on academic literature that was published in marketing and business journals which were concerned with marketing to the black community. The journals reviewed in this paper include Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing/Communications, The Journal of Business, The Journal of Marketing and Journal of Advertising Research published from the 1950s to the 1960s. In reviewing the marketing literature from these journals, it highlights the recurrent and resonant themes and shifts in discourse in the period mentioned. Findings Despite the scepticism, there was a recognition among market researchers that they were in a unique position to influence significantly the future relationships between blacks and whites in America (Gould et al., 1970, p. 26; Kassarjian, 1971; Hair et al., 1977; Solomon et al., 1976). The marketing discourses also showed reluctance in supporting black media, as advertising agencies did not have a preference for it. Black advertising organizations, while providing access to the Negro market, were seen as having high preparation costs and high costs per thousand in terms of reaching the population. There was also dissatisfaction expressed with the results of the copy (Alexis, 1959). Originality/value The moral turn in advertising is evident in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where marketers spoke of intervention beyond market strategies. Cohen (1970, p. 3) argued fervently that there exists an opportunity for advertising to improve its social image by giving more attention to the black community. The moral discourse of social responsibility as marketers and advertisers sought to go beyond advocating consumer rights to recognising that structural changes and attitudinal shifts was required to reform the industry through recruitment and training of black staff in creative and consultative roles. Wall (1970, p. 48), in commenting on integrated advertising, observed that beyond producing advertisements which create a sense of equality in life style and values, black employment is vitally important in creative levels in the advertising industry to improve credibility and acceptance.