In January, the unemployment rate for African Americans overall dropped to 13.6 percent, a sharp plunge from the December 2011 figure of 15.8 percent.
Those officials who did remark on the change, (and not many did, according to UC Berkeley labor specialist Steven Pitts, Ph.D.) urged caution to see if the decline would continue.
The February figures came out last week and the answer is it didn’t. The Black unemployment rate climbed to 14.1 percent in the second month of the year.
Pitts attributes the increase to three factors: