Charts show how Black Americans' economic progress has stalled

"The wealth gap, the income gap, the earnings gap."

The typical Black household has less than one-tenth the wealth of the typical White family -- almost the exact same ratio as existed in the 1960s, according to an analysis by Moritz Kuhn, an economics professor at the University of Bonn in Germany.

Lower home ownership rates among Black Americans, as well as smaller incomes and inheritances, account for much of the difference.

The wealth chasm narrowed somewhat in the intervening years, until the financial crisis just over a decade ago.

Congress enacted the Fair Housing Act in 1968 with the goal of prohibiting racial discrimination.

"They were slammed a lot harder than White families by the house price collapse," Wolff said of Black homeowners.

This helped shrink the difference between the median incomes of Black and White families during that time, experts said.

Also, a broadening of federal minimum wage coverage to agriculture, restaurants, nursing homes and other services -- where nearly a third of Black workers were employed -- helped narrow the earnings gap between Black and White Americans during that period, said Derenoncourt, who researched the impact of the 1966 Fair Labor Standards Act.

And while Black Americans have acquired more education, they are still underrepresented in higher-skilled, better-paying jobs.

By 2019, the average earnings ratio between Black and White Americans had fallen back to where it was in the 1970s for both men and women, according to an analysis by Samuel Myers, Jr., director of the Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations and Social Justice at the University of Minnesota.

"We have failed to change the mechanisms by which we reproduce wealth, by which we reproduce skills, by which we reproduce market outcomes," Myers said.