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Quote: New York Times November 18, 1996 (A1) Quality of Life Is Up for Many Blacks, Data Say By STEVEN A. HOLMES INDIANAPOLIS -- Four years ago, officials here in Marion County decided to make an all-out effort to curb the stubbornly high level of births among unmarried women, a problem that affected a cross-section of the county, but was particularly acute for blacks. The health department, public and private social service agencies, the schools, even the local prosecutor's office, all joined in to help. Last year the effort seemed to pay off: 358 fewer babies were born to unmarried black women than in 1992, a drop of more than 12 percent, within a 4 percent overall decrease in Marion County. The county's success in confronting what was a seemingly intractable problem among its black population is a small victory but not an isolated one. Without much fanfare, a remarkable and little understood change is occurring among the nation's 33.5 million African-Americans. After a decade of rising drug use, growing violence, disintegrating families and declining measures of health among some segments of the black population, things are starting to turn around in many ways. While there is much debate on whether the gains are temporary, and although wide gulfs in opportunity, incomes and education still exist between blacks and whites, signs of improvement abound: The black teen-age birth rate fell by 9 percent in 1995 and has dropped by 17 percent since 1991. Last year, the percentage of black babies born out of wedlock fell to 69.5 percent, from 70.4 percent, the first drop in the proportion of black children born outside of marriage since 1969. For the first time since the Census Bureau began keeping track in 1959, the poverty rate fell below 30 percent of all blacks in 1995. Median income for black households rose by 3.6 percent, far faster than the 2.2 percent increase for white households. (Census data show that many of the strongest gains in earnings are at the bottom, rather than at the top, of the black income scale.) Blacks are the only group whose inflation-adjusted median income exceeds what it was in 1989, the year before the last recession. In 1989, households headed by black married couples earned 79 percent as much as their white counterparts. By 1995, the gap was 87 percent. The rate at which black people were victims of murder dropped an estimated 17 percent last year, and the average life expectancy for black men rose to 65.4 years, the highest since 1984, when crack cocaine and accessibility of weapons like assault rifles began to engulf many black communities. The proportion of young black adults, age 25 to 29, who have completed high school has reached that of young white adults. Verbal scores on Scholastic Assessment Tests and performance on other national tests have been rising faster for black students than for whites, but African-American students still score much lower than white students. "I think that this is a short period of really very substantial and significant gains," said Milton Morris, vice president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington group that tracks trends among African-Americans. "In the heat of the political debates and atmosphere of the last year or so, very few people have been paying serious attention. And yet when you do, you see that by virtually every measure of well-being, African-Americans have been on a significant uptrend during the '90s."