Black Baby Boomers' Income Gap Cited

• Study Says Economically, Generation Has Not Improved Over Its Parents'

Forty years after the end of the baby boom, black Americans born between 1946 and 1964 "are no better off relative to whites than their parents and grandparents" were in terms of income, according to a new Duke University study.  Black baby boomers are still earning about 66 percent of what their non-Hispanic white age peers earn, Duke sociology professors Angela M. O'Rand and Mary Elizabeth Hughes wrote in "The Lives and Times of the Baby Boomers," which was released Wednesday. That is about equal to the income earned by foreign-born Hispanics, O'Rand and Hughes said.  Black baby boomers did not close the income gap, even though they were the first generation to come of age after the civil rights era, the researchers said.  "African Americans have made their way more into the middle class than before," Hughes said in an interview. "But when you look across the board, you don't see the type of equality Americans would like to see. It suggests there are very deep root causes here, not one-answer causes." [more]