tional attainment improved substantially during the
decade. By 1980, more than 1.3 million African
Americans were in college. By 1989, two-thirds of
African American adults aged twenty-five years or
older had completed high school, and 12 percent of
them had college degrees. These statistics repre-
sented a vast improvement over those of earlier
decades.
The 1980’s also witnessed the rise of a number
of prominent African American politicians. Harold
Washington became the first African American
mayor of Chicago in 1983. Six years later, David
Dinkins became the first mayor of African descent to
be elected in New York City. Thirty-one African
Americans were in mayoral positions in the United
States in 1984, representing many of the nation’s
largest cities, such as Philadelphia, Charlotte, Los
Angeles, Detroit, New Orleans, Birmingham, and
the District of Columbia. In 1989, L. Douglas Wilder
of Virginia was elected as the first African American
governor of a state. African Americans were also ap-
pointed to several high-profile government posi-
tions. Among them, General Colin Powell at age
fifty-two became the youngest person and the first
African American to be named chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest office in the na-
tion’s military.
The Reagan Years Despite African American gains
in representation and education, political conserva-
tives were often hostile toward African Americans as
a group, and they actively cultivated and exploited
such hostility in the electorate. African Americans
traditionally voted for Democrats, and the Republi-
can Party, rather than court African American votes,
chose instead to associate African Americans with
welfare, crime, and “reverse discimination” by the
affirmative action system, in an effort to appeal
to disgruntled white voters. The 1980 presidential
election of Ronald Reagan brought these conserva-
tive views to the White House. Reagan was opposed
to most entitlement programs, and he attempted to
reduce federal spending on such programs, as well
as on other social programs that aided African
Americans and other minorities. In 1981, more than
260,000 marchers participated in a Washington, D.C.,
rally known as Solidarity Day to protest Reagan’s pol-
icies toward organized labor and his reductions in
social programs.
Despite the conservative backlash against African
American progress, the nation took significant steps
to honor the life and contributions of Martin Luther
King, Jr., the key civil rights proponent of the twenti-
eth century. The Martin Luther King, Jr., Library
and Archives opened on October 19, 1981, in At-
lanta, Georgia. Coretta Scott King, King’s widow, led
the efforts to establish the facility to house King’s
many written speeches and other private and public
documents connected to his life and work. In 1983,
President Reagan signed into law a bill creating Mar-
tin Luther King Day as a national holiday to be ob-
served each year on the third Monday in January.
African American unemployment grew during
the 1980’s, and by the end of the decade, more than
one in every four adult African American men be-
tween the ages of twenty-four and fifty-four was out
of work. The rate was much higher for young African
American men in the inner cities, and the overall Af-
rican American unemployment rate was two and
one-half times higher than that of white unemploy-
ment. In 1983, African American unemployment
stood at a record high of almost 21 percent. Rising
unemployment had significant economic and social
consequences for many African Americans. The per-
centage of families headed by single women in-
creased, and single-parent households were almost
twice as likely to fall below the poverty line as were
two-parent households.
Not only did poverty and unemployment increase
for African Americans but the income gap between
African Americans and white Americans also grew
dramatically. That gap had decreased during the
1960’s and early 1970’s, but by 1984 the disparity had
returned to its 1960 level. A small number of middle-
class African Americans did become more economi-
cally secure, however, as the proportion of African
American households earning high incomes rose by
46 percent during the 1980’s. Debate continued
throughout the decade concerning the appropriate-
ness of employment affirmative action programs
and court-ordered compensatory remedies for his-
torically rooted patterns of discrimination. Despite
the significant backlash against such programs, civil
rights activists and others prevented them from be-
ing eliminated.
In 1981, theMorbidity and Mortality Weekly Report,a
journal of the Centers for Disease Control, featured
a story by doctors Michael S. Gottleib and Wayne
Shandera on the deaths of five gay men from what
was diagnosed as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia28 African Americans The Eighties in America