Analysis: European Americans saw a tick up of 10 basis points in their unemployment rate after three straight months of no change. Asian and Latino Americans both saw increases of 30 basis points from April. African Americans had a decrease in their unemployment rate of 80 basis points for April.
AFRICAN AMERICAN UNEMPLOYMENT RATE BY GENDER & AGE
AFRICAN AMERICAN MEN: 5.2%
AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN: 5.0%
AFRICAN AMERICAN TEENAGERS: 18.2%
AFRICAN AMERICAN PARTICIPATION BY GENDER & AGE
AFRICAN AMERICAN MEN: 68.7%
AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN: 62.9%
AFRICAN AMERICAN TEENAGERS: 33.2%
Analysis: African American Men saw an decrease in their unemployment rate by 100 basis points and African American Women decreased by 60 basis points. African American Men and Women decreased their participation rate in April by 90 basis points and 10 basis points, respectively. African American Teenagers unemployment rate pulls back with a decrease of 190 basis points, but still up almost 60 percent from January. African American Teenagers also had their participation rate increase by 40 basis points up to their highest participation rate over the past five months for the second month in a row.
African American Men-Women Job Gap: African American Women currently have 781,000 more jobs than African American Men in April. This is an increase from 710,000 in March.
CONCLUSION: The overall economy added 175,000 jobs in April while African America added 66,000 jobs. From New York Times, “The cooling job market could bring relief to a tight housing market, where the average rate for a 30-year mortgage hit 7.22 percent this week. “An economy that is too hot is not good for interest rates,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors. “Hence, the latest news of some cooling in the labor market could mean the topping-out of mortgage rates this week before more sustained declines through the remainder of this year.”
A few years ago, HBCU Money did a report highlighting which HBCU states had the highest African American marriage rates. In the piece, HBCU LOVE: Top Ten HBCU States With Highest African American Marriage Rate, Virginia led with 34 percent African American marriage rate. The national average African American marriage rate is 29.7 percent which seven HBCU states exceeded. It is no small leap to say that HBCUs play a vital role in these high marriage rates given their role in helping African Americans have a space dedicated to themselves and cultural pride that feeds into a desire for an African American partner. Not something as likely for African Americans who attend PWIs where so few options are available that it may make it quite difficult to match with or find an African American partner among so few options. It also is significant that HBCUs provide for the bulk of African American professionals in all fields and leading to cultural pride, economic stability, and alignment of values while learning to appreciate the diversity of African America which ultimately play a major role in leading to African American marriage.
Unfortunately, African American marriage rates are still struggling. Finding marriage or a life partner is culturally challenged where young women are stressed to focus on their books and young men are stressed to focus on the plethora of young women where on many HBCU campuses the women to men ratio is considerably unbalanced. This is a result of a myriad of social factors not least among them high school graduation rates among African American boys continues to struggle and those who do graduate have far too few who are actually college ready even if they are accepted. It also does not help that so many young women and men are coming from single parent households, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention reports only “four in ten Black children” live with two parents. This means that the majority of women and men on HBCU campuses know marriage only through a theoretical lens and to say little of what has shaped their views on marriage, partnership, and the institution that is African American (healthy) love. For African America that desperately needs more marriage for a myriad of reasons and HBCUs being one of the most optimal African American spaces (for those HBCUs who still care to be such) the question is how can that seedling be grown into a full blown redwood. Enter “The HBCU Marriage Pact”, a blend of HBCU pride, computer science blended together and you end up with HBCU Computer Love – “To share in my computer world, I no longer need a strategy, thanks to modern technology”. Copy and pasted from Stanford University’s Marriage Pact.
Leanne Italie of the Associated Press writes, “The Marriage Pact, an annual matching ritual that has become popular on nearly 90 college campuses around the U.S., has turned that dusty cliche into fun. And a few couples have found lasting love. Nearly half a million students have participated since the pact first rolled out at Stanford University in 2017. Born of an economics project by two students there, the pact involves an algorithm that rates matches based on such statements as “I prefer politically incorrect humor” and “I pride myself on telling hard truths.” Unlike dating apps and services, each student gets just one name, a percentage on the quality of the match and an email address to reach out.” Liam McGregor, creator of Stanford’s Marriage Pact, explained to Ms. Italie that, “Rather than dwell on physical beauty and personal stats like height and hair color, the Marriage Pact focuses its 50-question survey on core values. Communication styles and conflict resolution.” This is what significantly sets it apart from dating apps that allows for the distraction of aesthetics that often mislead our assessment of actual compatibility.
For this to work at HBCUs though it cannot be an exactly Copy & Paste without nuance. African Americans are caught in a vortex between not being able to afford to get married and not being able to afford not too. A large driver of closing the wealth gap is getting African American marriage rates up in order to scale capital and resources among African American families and into African American institutions. While the development of the HBCU Marriage Pact would go a long way it must also come with addressing some of the unique barriers that many African Americans face in building healthy relationships and this is where HBCUs and HBCU alumni associations can come in. Funding an African American Marriage Development Program. In the program students can learn about the history of African American marriage, healthy communication, receive therapy, learn household financial planning, etiquette, and other tools to increase the probability of a sustainable and productive marriage. For an added bonus, those who get married through the HBCU Marriage Pact would also be eligible to receive a financial grant to assist in funding the newlywed couple’s emergency fund in hopes of also mitigating some of the early financial pressures that African American couples face.
HBCUs themselves could coordinate consortium research around the HMP to conduct a longitudinal study to see the HMP’s potential impact. It has a myriad of interdisciplinary components that could be researched from education, economics, health, and many more. Quite an amazing prospect that we could be both putting into action a solvable problem and being the institutions that conduct the research around its theory.
The foundation of all Black institutions is the foundation of the African American family and it is in peril because African Americas are not pairing with each other for a myriad of reasons. But if we are to ensure there are African Americans tomorrow who want to attend HBCUs, then today and immediately we must engage of the work to incentivize and strategize for more of it to happen. The more African American couples who are also HBCU alumni deepens the empowerment and strength of both institutions continuing to be the institutions of our community and not gentrified or diluted like so many of our institutions have lay burden to or under attack by this very moment.
4 WAYS TO STRENGTHEN AN HBCU MARRIAGE PACT:
If they choose to sign up for the pact, then they must complete wholistic development of therapy, financial literacy, parenting classes, and more that would show they have the proper aptitude to be someone’s partner.
Developing HBCU marriage chapters in cities. This would allow HBCU couples to meet and network with each other to build and develop community.
Offer continuing education workshops in best marriage and family practices so that HBCU couples can continue to learn about best practices for community and family building.
Create an endowment that gives a financial reward marriage capped at the 10 year anniversary mark. $1,000 in year 1, $2,000 in year 2, so on and so forth up to year 10 when the couple receive $10,000. A combined $55,000 over ten years that would go into financially strengthening the burgeoning family.
Pew Research Center highlights a look at the 161,031 U.S. firms with majority African American ownership as of 2021. Below are a few of the highlighted graphs that Pew Research showed in their report with HBCU Money commentary.
According to the SBA there were approximately 3.2 million African American-owned businesses as of 2018, but that is just the top layer. When you dig into the numbers by the Census of how many of those 3.2 million African American-owned businesses actually have paid employees and receipts exceeding $1,000 that number plummets to the previously mentioned 161,031 or only 5 percent of total African American-owned businesses.
African American businesses are highly concentrated in health care and social assistance. Businesses that often have low scale potential and high risk often times due their clients being predominantly African American and higher probability of being uninsured. Where are the African American-owned energy companies? Manufacturing companies? Multinational firms? These are the questions that need to be asked, considered, and discussed by HBCU business schools and African American organizations like the HBCU Chamber of Commerce.
It is no surprise that the highest concentration of African American-owned businesses are in locations with higher African American density populations and high concentrations of HBCUs. HBCUs and HBCU alumni unfortunately are not doing enough to create investment infrastructure to ensure the businesses are able to go into less explored and more profitable areas as the aforementioned graph highlighted.
For the full Pew Research Center report click here.
“Good morning, Revolution: You’re the very best friend I ever had. We gonna pal around together from now on.” – Langston Hughes
The year is 1938 in Harlem, New York and an entrepreneur and his son are about to make themselves and their six lieutenants’ families 86 years later the wealthiest African American families that nobody has ever heard of. Their fortune as a group is estimated to be worth a minimum $4.4 billion and upwards of $36 billion. How did it happen you ask? Some would say it was the result of a robbery 86 years ago and others would say it was restitution due.
IMDb’s summary of Harlem Nights goes as follows: “Sugar” Ray is the owner of an illegal casino, who contends with the pressures of vicious gangsters and corrupt policemen who want to see him go out of business. In the world of organized crime and police corruption in the 1930s, any dastardly trick is fair.” A bit more detail to the story (spoiler alert) is that as the European American mafia uses violence and police corruption to destroy “Sugar” Ray’s club, he then gets revenge by robbing the betting houses of the mafia and blowing up their most profitable club in the process. “Sugar” Ray promises each of his six most trusted employees turned lieutenants $50,000 a piece (equal to $1.1 million in 2024 dollars) for their participation in the caper. The group initially believes that there will be approximately $750,000 (equal to $16 million in 2024 dollars) in those betting houses, but through a bit of misdirection on the group’s part they get the mafia boss himself to unexpectedly add another $500,000 (equal to $10.7 million in 2024 dollars) of his own money into the stash for a total of $1.25 million (equal to $26.7 million in 2024 dollars). Beyond the group, there are two additional participants who play a vital but small role in the caper and are handsomely rewarded for it. It is not clear on how much, but just to keep the numbers clean let us assume they gave each a lesser amount and yet still quite significant of $25,000 a piece (equal to $532,500 in 2024 dollars). Enough to ensure their full silence forever on the matter certainly. With the robbery/restitution complete, exactly how does that turn their family lineages into billionaires 86 years later?
The Club Sugar Ray 8 consist of “Sugar Ray” Brown (Richard Pryor), Vernest “Quick” Brown (Eddie Murphy), Bennie Wilson (Redd Foxx), Vera Walker (Della Reese), Willie (Ray Murphy), Jerome (Robin Harris), and Jimmy (Charlie Murphy) who have $1.2 million left among them. As promised by “Sugar Ray” and “Quick” each of the six receive $50,000 a piece and the remaining $900,000 (equal to $19.1 million in 2024 dollars) is retained by father and son. The group decides to form the Sugar Hill Trust, an ode to the African American neighborhood in Harlem that was the heartbeat of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s, and deposits half of each of their proceeds into it which amounts to $600,000 (equal to $12.8 million in 2024 dollars) to be invested into the 15 year old S&P 500 which ended February 1939 trading at 281.79 (as of March 9, 2024 it was trading at 5,123.69). They agree that Sugar Hill Trust will invest in this and reinvest all dividends. By doing so, by February 2024, that initial $600,000 is now valued at $4.4 billion (see above) and producing annual dividends for the Sugar Hill Trust of $58.5 million. The next phase of their wealth follows the advice of Sugar Ray from dinner one evening when he says, “Yeah, you know that’s where its at – the gambling. If we make that move we should concentrate on that. Give up the joy houses, after hours spots, concentrate on gambling.”
This leads to the creation and founding of the Harlem Nights Corporation (ala Las Vegas Sands). According to Forbes, “Las Vegas Sands Corp. engages in the development of destination properties. Its properties feature accommodations, gaming, entertainment and retail, convention and exhibition facilities, celebrity chef restaurants, and other amenities. It operates through the following geographic segments: Macao, Singapore, and United States. The Macao segment handles the operations of The Venetian Macao; Sands Cotai Central; The Parisian Macao; The Plaza Macao and Four Seasons Hotel Macao; and Sands Macao. The Singapore segment includes the Marina Bay Sands. The United States segment consists of Las Vegas Operating Properties and Sands Bethlehem.” As of March 9, 2024 market close, Las Vegas Sands had a market capitalization of approximately $39 billion. The Adelson family, which founded the company, currently controls and owns 57 percent of the firm and has a net worth of approximately $32 billion controlled by its matriarch, Miriam Adelson. Instead of the company being named Las Vegas Sands and controlled by the Adelson Family, it is instead aptly named Harlem Nights Corporation and controlled by the lineages of the Sugar Hill Trust bringing its value to $36.4 billion when you include the $4.4 billion of S&P 500 holdings. In addition, Harlem Nights Corporation annual dividend pays Sugar Hill Trust $342.6 million which combined with their S&P 500 dividend gives the families an annual income of $401.1 million among them. The complexities by which the family may access that income is far too complex to get into in this article, but it is worth reading up on the strategy called ‘Buy, Borrow, Die’ if the reader should be so inclined.
In the years following, Bennie marries Vera and they become the patriarch and matriarch of the eight, “Sugar” Ray marries Annie, and “Quick” marries Sunshine who have children and begin the foundation of the legacy that transforms African American institutions near and far. They are a quiet force that is felt, but rarely heard. “Sugar” Ray and A.G. Gaston are friends and their friendship and business dealings together help A.G. Gaston’s bank, Citizens Federal Savings Bank, transform over time into one of the nation’s largest banks, which leads to African American homeownership skyrocketing after World War II despite African American soldiers being largely left out of the G.I. Bill. There is massive entrepreneurship expansion, African American towns like Rosewood and Tulsa are able to rebuild after long hard fought roads from their attempted massacres, HBCUs having endowments that are among the largest in the country, and ultimately a stability in African America that seems almost unimaginable to many of us today. It simply takes a few to be committed feverishly to the building of the institutions and the empowerment of a people. To imagine such a world would be as “Sugar” Ray Brown’s last words before leaving New York, “sweet as sugar.”
Bonus History: In one of Harlem Nights’ last scenes where “Sugar” Ray and “Quick” enter an abandoned bank building there is a sign above that says Dunbar National Bank as they enter. Sergeant Phil Cantone, a crooked cop who works for Bugsy Calhoun, ask “Sugar” Ray and “Quick” why they were breaking into a bank that has been closed for five years. According to Harlem World Magazine, “The Dunbar National Bank was the first bank in Harlem to be managed and staffed by African-Americans. The Dunbar National Bank was funded byJohn Davison Rockefeller Jr., specifically for the population of Harlem. The president of the Bank was Joseph D. Higgins, 36 years a banker, onetime Federal Reservist, former vice president of the American Exchange-Irving Trust Company.”
Analysis: European Americans saw no change in their unemployment rate from March for the third straight month. Asian and Latino Americans saw an decrease of 90 basis points and 50 basis points, respectively. African Americans had an increase in their unemployment rate of 80 basis points for March.
AFRICAN AMERICAN UNEMPLOYMENT RATE BY GENDER & AGE
AFRICAN AMERICAN MEN: 6.2%
AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN: 5.6%
AFRICAN AMERICAN TEENAGERS: 20.1%
AFRICAN AMERICAN PARTICIPATION BY GENDER & AGE
AFRICAN AMERICAN MEN: 69.6%
AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN: 63.0%
AFRICAN AMERICAN TEENAGERS: 32.8%
Analysis: African American Men saw an increase in their unemployment rate by 10 basis points and African American Women increased by 120 basis points. African American Men and Women decreased their participation rate in March by 20 basis points and 40 basis points, respectively. African American Teenagers unemployment rate jumps by 470 basis points and 850 basis points over the past two months as their volatility continues. African American Teenagers also had their participation rate increase by 210 basis points up to their highest participation rate over the past five months.
African American Men-Women Job Gap: African American Women currently have 710,000 more jobs than African American Men in March. This is an decrease from 859,000 in February.
CONCLUSION: The overall economy added 303,000 jobs in February while African America lost 204,000 jobs. From CNBC, “This is another really strong report,” said Lauren Goodwin, economist and chief market strategist at New York Life Investments. “This report and the February report showed some broadening in terms of job creation, which is a very good sign.”
HBCU Money 