Roughly 567,000 Black men lost their jobs between November 2025 and February 2026, according to the National Urban League’s 50th annual State of Black America report.
The report also finds that an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 Black women lost jobs in 2025, and puts the combined cost of these losses at about $87 billion in lost income.
The report, titled “America at 250: Is the American Dream Dead?”, was released July 30 at the Urban League’s annual conference in Nashville. It describes Black unemployment climbing to 7.8 percent, up from a historic low of 4.7 percent in 2023.
The job figures are the Urban League’s analysis, but independent data points in the same direction. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition found the number of employed Black men over 20 has declined by roughly 650,000 since November 2025, and the Economic Policy Institute found Black men’s employment-population ratio fell 1.7 percentage points since the first quarter of 2025, driven largely by workers without college degrees.
Urban League President Marc Morial attributed the losses to what he described as a systemic rollback of civil rights enforcement under the Trump administration and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s failure to investigate workplace discrimination — his argument, not an established finding. “The EEOC has become an embarrassment to America,” Morial said. The EEOC has not publicly responded to Morial’s criticism as of this writing. A Justice Department spokesperson told The Hill the Civil Rights Division enforces the law “evenhandedly for all Americans” and that “preferential treatment on the basis of race has no place in our society”.
Beyond employment, the report finds the median Black household holds about 15 cents in wealth for every dollar held by the median white household, and that 44 percent of Black Americans own their homes compared with 73 percent of white Americans — a gap the organization says is wider than before the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
The report also warns that 191 state legislative seats are at risk following the Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which struck down Louisiana’s congressional map and sharply narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That figure originates in a December 2025 analysis by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter, which projected that Republican-controlled Southern legislatures could eliminate 191 Democratic-held seats — most of them held by Black legislators — if the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.
The 50th edition organizes its agenda around three imperatives the Urban League has advanced for several years: defeat poverty, defend democracy, and demand diversity.
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