Following an altar call offering prayers for unemployed churchgoers seeking jobs earlier this month, Pastor Jamal Bryant of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia, announced that the church has since connected some 300 of them with job offers.
“Last week, those of you who were in worship, you saw we had a pop-up job fair in the middle of worship service. … We prayed for those who were seeking employment, those who were out of employment, brought them to the altar,” Bryant told the predominantly black 10,000-member congregation on Sunday.
During the Sept. 7 service, Bryant asked hiring managers and business owners who had job opportunities to share those with the congregation during the altar call.
“Right in that moment, organically, we found managers who were in our church, directors, supervisors, even owners who were in our church, and we took them in the back after services was over,” Bryant recalled on Sunday.
“New Birth, you ought to be pleased and proud to know we were able to offer 300 job opportunities last Sunday,” he said as he pointed to concerns about growing unemployment in the black community.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of August, black unemployment stood at 7.5%. It is the highest it has been since Oct. 2021, when it stood at 7.6% during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Black unemployment has also jumped 1.5% since May, when it was 6%. It’s also just over double the white unemployment rate, which was 3.7% in August. The overall unemployment rate was 4.3% in August.
Researchers cited by Bloomberg have blamed the rising black unemployment on the combination of two factors. The first is that a slowdown in the labor market is generally felt by black workers first. Cuts in the federal workforce have also hit black workers harder because they are overrepresented in the sector.
“There are a number of ways the [Trump] administration’s policies are slowing down the economy and hurting black people in America, I would say, disproportionately hard,” Algernon Austin, director of race and economic justice at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told the news service. “Black America is, I think, being hit first by the downturn.”
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, told the news outlet that the Trump administration has been seeking to address black unemployment with tax cuts passed in July and mass deportations.
“President Trump is implementing the same America First economic agenda that delivered historic job and wage growth — including record-low black unemployment rates — in his first term,” Rogers said. “The passage of the Working Families Tax Cuts will unleash economic growth through tax reform, deregulation, and incentives for job creation in the private sector that will benefit all Americans.”
Austin insisted to Bloomberg that deportations of illegal immigrants will not solve growing black unemployment.
“The black unemployment rate has been increasing steadily over the past three months, so there are no positive signs from deportations there,” he said. “Immigrant workers generally do not replace native-born workers. They help expand the economy and increase the number of jobs,” he argued.
