OHIO ANALYSIS Blacks' income gap is wider

Mahoning County has the greatest gap between rich and poor blacks in Ohio.
COLUMBUS (AP) -- When Alfred Coward graduated from Youngstown's South High School in 1965, he and other black classmates had a variety of good, relatively high-paying jobs to choose from.
Coward started in a downtown department store, then worked for a furniture maker before hiring on at the General Motors plant for 14 years.
Today, he's a minister in one of Youngstown's largest black churches helping some of his area's poorest people close the income gap left after thousands of steel jobs were lost.
The income gap between rich and poor is wider among blacks in Ohio than among whites, according to a new analysis of census data that analyzes differences in household income among racial groups.
Biggest gap
The gap between rich and poor blacks in Ohio's biggest counties is greatest in Mahoning County and lowest in Franklin County, the analysis showed. The gap in both cases is still wider than income gaps between rich and poor whites in any of the six big counties.
"Those people who went to college and received their degrees and went into employment are going to make double what these other people are making now that are just basically trying to survive on welfare," Coward said. "And welfare is just basically being cut out."
The analysis does not measure income differences between blacks and whites and does not look at average income for either group.
The method used by the Census Bureau and most economists to calculate income disparity levels in a given population was developed in the early 20th century by the Italian demographer Corrado Gini.
The "Gini coefficient" measures the mathematical deviation from a perfectly equal distribution of income. A population with income distributed evenly would have a Gini coefficient of 0; one with the widest income disparity would have a Gini of 100.
Thus, the income gap for whites in Ohio was 43, according to the Gini coefficient, but 49 for blacks. It was 51 for blacks in Mahoning County and 46 for blacks in Franklin County.
For whites, the gap was 43 in Mahoning County and 42 in Franklin County.
How problems can arise
The more income is unevenly distributed, the more problems a community has, said Thomas Cook, a researcher with Case Western Reserve University's Center on Urban Poverty and Social Change.
"It decreases social cohesion and decreases people's sense of self-worth that can lead to certain behaviors if they're comparing themselves to others," Cook said.
He said social policies that cut the income gap for all groups is the best way to address inequalities among all racial groups.
The actual income gap is probably wider than the data shows, since the Gini coefficient doesn't capture people at the very end of each income branch, said Sourushe Zandvakili, an economist at the University of Cincinnati.
He said research overwhelmingly shows that education is key to closing the income gap in any group.
"It's not uncommon to see very educated African-Americans to excel and move up ladders of major corporations in the United States," he said. "When a lot have been left behind, the reason is pure and simple -- the access to the quality of education is basically what's holding them back."
Coward, 56, is senior assistant pastor at Mount Calvary Pentecostal Church in Youngstown and chairman of a city task force trying to reduce crime.
His $40,000 annual salary is considerably higher than Mahoning County's per capita income of about $18,800.
"We attempt here at our church to get everybody to further their education, to get as much education as possible," Coward said. "Even though this is 2003, African-Americans still have a hard time getting a foot into certain doors, certain occupations."