Help wanted sign (Photo credit: andjohan)

By Artgur Delaney

Tatia Pritchett’s 2002 Hyundai Sonata blew a tire early on a Friday morning in June when she was on her way to work.

“I was driving and all of a sudden, KAPOW,” she said.

She pulled over and started trying to change the tire, but after removing the first lug nut she couldn’t budge the rest. Her mobile phone getting no reception, morning dissolved into afternoon as she waited for help and wondered.

“I had to really think, is this worth it?” Pritchett said. “I’m spending $150 a week in gas because it takes half a tank of gas to get to work and home every day. I’m paying $85 a month in parking.”

Pritchett’s job is in Baltimore, more than 60 miles from her house, and the trip can take two hours in the D.C. area’s awful rush hour traffic. The job pays $14.44 an hour. Subtract the cost of commuting, she’s left with near-poverty wages. But she never seriously considered quitting because unemployment would be worse.

“I did that already,” she said.

Wonder turned to worry that her unplanned absence could get her suspended or fired. A blown tire away from financial disaster, Pritchett is nevertheless among the luckier ones: At least she has a job.

Blacks bear a disproportionate share of the unemployment burden. The national jobless rate is 7.6 percent; for African Americans, it’s 13.7 percent. Since 1979, the unemployment rate for blacks has tracked the same ups and downs as the overall rate, but it’s usually been at least twice as high. At the same time, it gets half the attention.

In the fall of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate topped 10 percent for the first time in a quarter century, causing policymakers and analysts to lament the catastrophe that had befallen the American public. Yet throughout that entire prior period the average rate of African American unemployment had been 12.2 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. And while the gap between poverty for blacks and whites has narrowed over decades, at 27.6 percent the black poverty rate is nearly double the overall rate of 15 percent.

Read More Black Unemployment Drives ‘Perpetual, Slow-Moving Recession’.