NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Jealous has said that black Americans are doing far worse than when Obama first took office

The black unemployment rate was 12.7% when Obama took office. While the unemployment rate in the United States as a whole is below 8%, the Labor Department reported that the black jobless rate was up from 12.9% to 14% for December 2012. The worst during Obama’s first term was in September 2011, with 16.7% unemployment for blacks — the highest since 1983, the Department of Labor reports. The black teen jobless rate hit a staggering 39.3% in July 2012.