It is now widely accepted that the precipitous slide of the American economy during the last three months is the worst economic crisis America has faced since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

A seemingly unending drumbeat of statistics from all sectors of the nation’s $14 trillion economy – grimly tolling our economic peril – have pushed us,  as historian Niall Ferguson writes in the December issue of Vanity Fair, “so close to a rerun of the 1930s.”

That welter of data is led by the Federal Labor Department’s monthly employment report for November. Released Friday, December 5, it found that during the month 533,000 jobs had vanished, the largest job-loss since 1974, and that the overall unemployment rate had risen to 6.7 percent.

As worrisome as those blunt figures are, their deeper meanings are even more alarming. For one thing, the number of jobs the economy is losing on a monthly basis has sharply accelerated. Since January, the economy has lost a total of 1.9 million jobs, with two-thirds of that loss having occurred in the last three months. Since September, the  unemployment rate has jumped six-tenths of a percent.

Further, if one includes those “too discouraged” to look for work any longer, the “truer” overall unemployment rate rises to 12.5 percent.

Surveying our immediate future, Bernard Baumohl, chief economist for the Economic Outlook Group, an economic advisory firm in Princeton, N.J., told the New York Times, “For the average American it’s going to be devastating for the next 6 to 12 months. I have not seen anything particularly hopeful right now, which tells me we have a ways to go.”

What the data detailing our economic crisis make equally obvious is that it may be no exaggeration to say that black Americans face their greatest test since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.

That decision, which validated Jim Crow laws and customs throughout the land, sought to make blacks submit once and for all to second-class status. Instead, blacks began the long, arduous task of constructing the 20th-century freedom struggle that secured their civil rights and, in the process, corrected the most grievous flaws of the larger American society.

Today, black America’s status in American society is far better in many respects. But the magnitude of the economic peril already washing across its landscape – propelled by blacks’ disproportionate holding of unsustainable sub prime mortgages and their disproportionate job loss – cannot be overstated. For example, one likely result of America’s larger economic calamity will be a marked reduction in the size of the black middle class and, concomitantly, a sharp increase in the number of blacks living at or below the poverty line, defined by the United States Department of Health and Human Services as an income of $21,200 for a family of four.

Ironically, it is a challenge made all the greater because of the progress blacks have forged in recent decades. That progress brought into being a complex dynamic that shadows every facet of black America’s affairs. On the one hand, a large segment of black Americans enjoy a broad range of opportunities that, as recently as the 1960s, were merely the stuff of dreams.

On the other hand, institutional and individual racism still limit the advancement of black Americans as a group and play a predominant role in keeping one-quarter of black Americans in poverty.

In an adjoining column, John Payton captures the “play” of this dynamic perfectly by borrowing Charles Dickens’ famous first line from A Tale of Two Cities. For black Americans this is indeed both the best of times and the worst of times.

America’s economic crisis has underscored the tension inherent in this dynamic – call it the Complexity of Black Progress – and made it sharper than ever. At the very moment of the extraordinary triumph of the election to the Presidency of a self-described black American of mixed heritage, a severe recession has exposed black America’s profound economic weakness.

Recall for a moment the difference between the official overall unemployment rate of 6.7 percent and the truer rate of 12.5 percent. For Black Americans that means that its truer unemployment rate is more than 16 percent – and for young black males, it may be considerably higher than that.

In other words, the dire scenarios affecting black America conjured up by America’s severe recession, make it incumbent upon black America’s civic and political leadership, and the black masses, to let neither the exhilaration of Barack Obama’s election nor the economic pain of the larger society obscure the fact that black America feels the pain most acutely.

Blacks and their allies must realize that the extraordinary political determination and sophistication black America has displayed over the past two years was just the first step in constructing a 21st-first century black America. The second step is ensuring that black Americans gets their fair share of the benefits the new administration’s rescue of the American economy will provide.

– The Editors