Census: Widening Income Gap as Blacks Leave Cities

Part of the income divide falls along age and education, with higher unemployment rates for young men and those who lack a college degree. Last year, about 19% of men ages 25 to 34 were "idle" — neither working nor attending school — up 5 percentage points from 2007, according to the Population Reference Bureau. About 31% of young black adults were disconnected from school and work, compared with 27% for Latinos and about 19% each for whites and Asians.

Blacks also were more likely than other groups to live in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 40% or more, roughly 1 in 9.

Other findings:

• Counties with the greatest income gaps between non-Hispanic whites and Latinos included New York, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and the Washington, D.C., suburbs, as well as smaller, more rural counties in the South and West where the numbers of Mexican immigrants have been growing.

• 13% of Latinos and 18% of blacks held at least a bachelor's degree last year, compared with 31% of non-Hispanic whites and 50% of Asians. That is up from 2000, when 10% of Hispanics and 14% of blacks completed college.

• Less than half a million people speak a North American tribal language at home, compared with 60 million who speak a different language other than English and 227 million who speak English only. About 65% of those tribal speakers lived in three states — Alaska, Arizona and New Mexico. The most commonly spoken tribal language was Navajo, followed by Yupik and Dakota.

The figures come from previous censuses and the 2010 American Community Survey, which samples 3 million households. For places with fewer than 20,000 people, the ACS figures from 2006-2010 were averaged to help compensate for otherwise large margins of error.