While housing remained structurally aligned against African Americans, unemployment also increased worsening their economic situation.

“The gap in unemployment between African Americans and white increased during the 1970s and 1980s—the same period in which African Americans’ incomes ceased converging with whites” (Bonilla-Silva, 2018, p. 45). For those who were able to find jobs, the gap in wage disparity between white and Black men with similar characteristics (education, training, etc.) was 14 percent in 1980 and had grown to 16 percent in 1985 (p. 45). Further studies have demonstrated that at every educational level whites earn more than Black people and, in fact, the farther up the organizational ladder a Black worker moves the greater the increase between the salary of a white versus a Black person becomes (p. 46).

Despite the efforts of local organizations like the Human Development Corporation (HDC) and federally-funded programs like the Office of Economic Opportunity, Head Start, Upward Bound, Job Corps, and Volunteers in Service to America, African Americans in St. Louis continued to struggle with the lack of educational and employment opportunities.

While white skilled workers benefited from defense industry jobs with contractors like McDonald-Douglas, Black workers were continually shut out of such opportunities, relegated to the lowest paying and least stable positions.

Lang found that “98 percent of the company’s black workers were in the most menial, dispensable categories, and of the two thousand people who had been laid off that year an estimated 60 percent were black” (2009, p. 211). Lang further wrote that “In January 1970, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission held public hearings in St. Louis to review the employment policies of not only McDonald-Douglas, but also the Chrysler Corporation and Mallinckrodt Chemical Works” (Lang, 2009, p. 212).