Buffalo has highest unemployment rate in nation for black males

The Buffalo News reported on October 15, 2008 that Buffalo, NY has the highest unemployment rate in the nation for Black males at 51.4%. Here is a snippet from that article:
When an economics professor in Milwaukee studied the issue of black male unemployment, he found that his city had the second-highest such jobless rate in the nation last year.

Guess who finished first:

Buffalo.

The Buffalo metro area topped the list among 35 large American cities with a staggering black male jobless rate of 51.4 percent, according to figures cited by Professor Marc V. Levine of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Milwaukee finished a close second, at 51.1 percent, with Detroit third, St. Louis fourth and Chicago fifth.

“It’s nothing less than a civic outrage to have these levels of joblessness,” Levine said in a telephone interview Tuesday.

The study didn’t take Buffalo city officials by surprise.

“I knew there was a high unemployment rate in the black male population, which is why we have worked so hard to enhance the employment environment in Buffalo,” Mayor Byron W. Brown said. “This is an inherited problem, which is decades in the making.”