The poverty rate for African-Americans has fallen since 1964, but African-Americans remain much more likely to be poor than whites.
Where the poverty rate was 12.7 percent for whites in 2012, it was more than twice that for blacks (27.1 percent) and Hispanics (25.6 percent).
In the war on poverty’s early years, though, a stunning 42 percent of African-Americans lived in poverty (as of 1966), while the figure for Hispanics was 22.8 percent (in 1972), by Census measures.
The economic gap is seen in educational opportunities as well as in income. “Among 25- to 34-year-olds in 2013, the share that completed a four-year college degree was 41 percent for whites as compared to 23 percent for African Americans,” Ms. Parrott says in her report.
