Racial Differences in Unemployment in the United States, 1890–1990

Although the ratio of nonwhite to white unemployment rates in the United States has approximated two to one for most of the postwar era, such large racial differences did not exist 60 to 100 years ago. In the era from 1890 to 1930, the nonwhite unemployment rate seemed not to be materially different than the white rate. Though writers such as Edna Bonacich, Robert Higgs, and Gerald Jaynes have made perceptive observations about race-specific differences in job opportunities over time, they did not have all the evidence they needed. In this note, we present a consistent time series on the magnitude of the differential in unemployment rates.