to the all-time low of 23 percent. The poverty rate for
black children dropped from 46.1 percent in 1993 to
33 percent in 2000. Throughout the decade, never-
theless, the black poverty rate continued to be al-
most three times as high as the rate for whites. The
disparity in wealth was even more striking. In 1995,
the median net worth for black families was only
$7,073, compared with $49,030 for white families.
Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson’sWhen
Work Disappears(1996) focused attention on the lack
of opportunities for the “underclass” in the central
cities.
Racial Violence The 1990’s saw a large number of
violent incidents involving African Americans. By
far, the most high-profile event was the Los Angeles
riots of April, 1992, which was precipitated by the ac-
quittal of four officers accused of beating Rodney
King the preceding year. The rioting and looting re-
sulted in fifty-three deaths, ten thousand arrests, and
3,700 burned-out buildings. That same year, a
smaller riot occurred in the Crown Heights neigh-
borhood of Brooklyn, New York, after a grand jury
refused to indict a white Jewish driver who had acci-
dentally struck and killed a seven-year-old boy of Af-
rican ancestry.
New York police officers were responsible for two
incidents that infuriated the African American com-
munity. On August 9, 1997, Haitian immigrant Ab-
ner Louima was brutally beaten and sodomized with
a stick by officers in a police station. Two officers fi-
nally pled guilty to the crime, but many observers
suspected that other officers were protected by a
“code of silence.” Two years later, four New York po-
lice officers fired forty-one rounds into Amadou
Diallo, an unarmed black immigrant, because they
mistakenly thought he was reaching for a weapon.
The acquittal of the officers resulted in angry dem-
onstrations and the arrests of more than 1,700 pro-
testers.
Many states in the 1990’s enacted hate crime laws
(or bias crime laws), which usually increased penal-
ties for offenders who intentionally choose a victim
on the basis of race, ethnicity, or gender. In the case
ofWisconsin v. Mitchell(1993), which involved a
black offender, the Supreme Court upheld the con-
stitutionality of such laws. In 1998, a particularly
shocking hate crime occurred in Jasper, Texas, when
three white supremacists chained a black hitchhiker,
James Byrd, Jr., to their pickup truck and dragged
him until his body broke into pieces. Some people
criticized Texas for not having a hate crime law, even
though two of the offenders were sentenced to
death and the third man was sentenced to life im-
prisonment.
Civil Rights The passage of the Civil Rights Act of
1991 resulted from congressional dissatisfaction
with several Supreme Court interpretations that had
limited aggressive enforcement of existing civil
rights statutes. The act focused on employment
qualifications having a disparate impact on blacks
and other protected groups. Employers were re-
quired to demonstrate a close connection between
such qualifications and the ability to perform the job
in question. The law also clarified that plaintiffs
might sue even if discrimination was only one of sev-
eral motivations involved in an employment practice.
After liberal justice Thurgood Marshall retired
from the Supreme Court in 1991, Clarence Thomas,
a black conservative, was named as his replacement.
In spite of the strong opposition from civil rights
leaders, combined with Anita Hill’s allegations of
sexual harassment, the Senate approved the nomi-
nation by a narrow margin. This, combined with
other changes in the Court’s membership, resulted
in a majority that was more conservative than the
preceding decade. In a series of school desegrega-
tion cases, for instance, the Court allowed school
boards to end court-ordered busing plans, even
though segregation continued to exist as a result of
residential housing patterns.
Affirmative action programs, which usually in-
cluded race-based preferences in employment or
admission to competitive schools, became increas-
ingly controversial. InAdarand Constructors, Inc. v.
Peña(1995), the Supreme Court overturned a fed-
eral set-aside program for minority contractors, and
the decision gave notice that any programs involving
racial preferences might be vulnerable to a constitu-
tional challenge. The next year in California, Ward
Connerly, an African American businessman, led a
successful campaign in favor of Proposition 209,
which prohibited race-based preferences in all state-
sponsored activities. When Washington State voters
approved a similar measure in 1998, the future of
affirmative action appeared questionable.
Impact Although the social and economic condi-
tions of African Americans improved marginally
during the 1990’s, the problems of unemploymentThe Nineties in America African Americans 11