William Julius Wilson: Poor black men left behind

• Harvard professor says urban poverty worse now than in previous decades

Although the civil-rights era garnered economic and social gains for middle-class blacks in the 1960s, poor inner-city blacks still suffer from economic inequality, a Harvard professor said in a lecture Thursday night. Issues that affected inner-city blacks such as inadequate jobs, housing and schooling outlasted the civil-rights gains of the era, said professor William Julius Wilson. Wilson is a distinguished professor in Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He spoke in the spring semester installment of the University of Montana Presidential Lecture Series, with a lecture titled The World of The New Urban Poor. He said the rate of joblessness among inner-city black males exceeds that of the past, and it Ãs a fact which is often overlooked or obscured. In the last three decades, black males with few job skills or little training have had difficulty finding jobs suited for them, Wilson said. This is due to a decrease in the demand for low-skilled workers and an increase in jobs that require workers to have computer skills and high school degrees, he said. Many problems are driven by fundamental changes in (the) new global economy,he said. An employer's image of the inner-city black male also contributes to this economic inequality, he said. As a professor at the University of Chicago in the 1980s Wilson oversaw a study based on a random sample of employers in Chicago. The study found that employers considered inner-city black men with little job experience to be lazy, dishonest and prone to theft. The effect of this attitude was that black males were denied a chance to prove themselves in the workforce, he said. [more]

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