Last year, unarmed teenager Michael Brown was fatally shot by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. The incident drew attention to racially charged police brutality, and sparked outrage nationwide. Fatal police shootings involving black citizens, however, are only one of the consequences of racial inequality.

For decades, black Americans have faced higher poverty rates, lower incomes and higher incarceration rates than white Americans. While African Americans in every U.S. city face such problems, racial inequality is much worse in some parts of the country. By examining the disparities between white and black Americans in several economic and social measures, 24/7 Wall St. identified the 10 worst cities for black Americans.

Click here to see the worst cities for black Americans.

Click here to see our full methodology.

Four of the cities with the worst racial inequality are in Illinois, two are in Iowa, and all are in the Midwest. 24/7 Wall St. interviewed Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity, and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive think tank. Wilson associated the geographical clustering of these cities to the Great Migration — the relocation of millions of African Americans from the South to cities in the North and Midwest between 1916 and 1970.

Over that period, African Americans fled from the oppressive Jim Crow policies of the South, among other forms of racism, to cities such as Chicago and New York. These areas — the Midwest in particular — were undergoing a manufacturing boom at the time, and black and other Americans sought economic opportunities there. However, the industrial Midwestern economies have declined dramatically since 1970, and the region today is a part of what is commonly known as the Rust Belt.

The manufacturing industries in those areas offered relatively well-paying jobs to relatively uneducated people — many of whom were African American. As Wilson explained, “those industries have essentially dried up, and the opportunities are no longer there, but the people still are.”

These Midwestern cities have relatively small black populations. Compared to the national proportion, relatively few black people live in seven of the 10 worst cities for African Americans. Though small, these proportions still represent tens of thousands of people. Wilson explained that in cities with smaller minority populations, African Americans can actually suffer more at the hands of structural racism than in cities with larger black populations. The smaller group is almost always easier to exclude.

Areas with smaller black populations still have higher incarceration rates among black residents, Wilson added. This means the disproportionate incarceration, particularly among black males, “is going to affect an even larger percentage of the population there, even though the population itself isn’t as large as it is in some other places,” she explained.

Higher incarceration rates are just one of several factors that both feed further disparities and stem from a range of structural social problems. “Education, unemployment, wages, income, all of that affects your ability to build wealth,” Wilson said. “If one of those things isn’t working, it just sort of ripples into each of those other areas.”

In addition to income inequality between black and white Americans, wealth inequality helps perpetuate racial inequalities. Wealth — the value of property and financial assets — frequently passes from one generation to the next. African Americans, who have historically been prohibited from home and land ownership, are therefore at a considerable disadvantage when it comes to inherited wealth. For black families, “each generation essentially starts from zero and so as that happens across generations, that gap continues to persist,” Wilson said.

Just over 84% of African American adults have at least a high school diploma nationwide, versus the attainment rate of 92% for white Americans. The black population in only one of the 10 cities on this list has a high school attainment rate that exceeded the nationwide rate for black Americans. In no city was the black high school attainment rate higher than the white high school attainment rate. Similarly, the black unemployment rates in all of the worst cities for African Americans exceeded the white jobless rates. Only three of the 10 cities had black unemployment rates lower than the nationwide unemployment rate for black Americans of 13.2%. By contrast, the unemployment rate among white members of the workforce is 5.8%.

A good education is key to economic mobility, although it is less of a guarantee for African Americans than it is for others. “An African American with a college education definitely earns more than an African American without a college education, but they still earn less than a white person who has a college education,” Wilson said, adding that raising educational attainment rates is not enough to eliminate racial disparities.

These are the worst cities for black Americans.

10. Waterloo-Cedar Falls, IA
> Pct. residents black: 7.0%
> Population: 169,993
> Black median household income as pct. of white: 54.9%
> Black unemployment rate: 24.0%
> Unemployment rate, all people: 4.9%

Based on a range of socioeconomic factors, Waterloo-Cedar Falls is the 10th worst urban area for black Americans. The metro area is at once relatively difficult to live in as a black person, and relatively favorable for white people. For example, the median income for black households was equal to less than 56% of income for a typical white household, which at $54,802 was slightly lower than the national median but still higher than in most metro areas.

While the Waterloo area labor market is relatively strong overall, black residents clearly do not have the same job opportunities as their white peers. The unemployment rate among black residents of 24% — the sixth highest among black city-populations — is in stark contrast with the white unemployment rate of just 3.9% — one of the lowest such rates.

9. Des Moines-West Des Moines, IA
> Pct. residents black: 5.0%
> Population: 611,549
> Black median household income as pct. of white: 57.1%
> Black unemployment rate: 10.6%
> Unemployment rate, all people: 4.2%

The more than 30,000 Des Moines residents identifying as black make up just 5% of the population. However, as Wilson suggested, African Americans in communities with relatively small black populations may be even worse off. In the Des Moines area, racial disparities are indeed especially pervasive. Just 33% of black households are owned by their occupants, for example, versus the homeownership rate of 72.2% among white families. Also, while 38.0% of white adults have at least a bachelor’s degree, 20.5% of black area adults have the equivalent education.

Despite the difficulties facing Des Moines black communities, the area’s black unemployment rate of 10.6% was lower than the national black jobless rate of 13.2% — one of only three of the 10 worst cities for African Americans with a black unemployment rate not exceeding the national rate. Still, the black jobless rate was several times higher than the 4.2% jobless rate among white residents, itself one of the lowest in the country.

Thank you for reading! Have some feedback for us?
Contact the 24/7 Wall St. editorial team.