IowaWatch (https://www.iowawatch.org/tag/blacks-in-iowa/)
This IowaWatch collaboration with four Iowa newspapers, published in fall 2013, is particularly pertinent during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday period. It tells you how and why gaps exist in home ownership, jobs and pay, education and crime exist among white, black and Latino Iowans.
Two of every five black Iowans didn’t always live in poverty. In the 1970 and 1980 censuses, for example, their poverty rate was 28 percent. It jumped to 37 percent in 1990, and was at 32 percent at the turn of this century in 2000. But the 2010 census showed 43 percent of black Iowans living in poverty – 7 percentage points from being half of the state’s black residents. The poverty rate for white Iowans, meanwhile, dropped from one in four in 1960 to one in 10 in 1970 through the 2010 census.
White Iowans have made strong gains in high school and college graduation rates, lowering poverty levels, median family income and home ownership since 1960. But black and Latino achievements have grown far more slowly, or in some cases declined, widening an opportunity gap among the races, an IowaWatch-led investigation with five other news organizations shows.