(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The nation’s capital is the capital of unemployment for Black men and Black women, the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank reported recently.

The Black jobless rate in March in the District of Columbia was 15.8 percent, 6.1 percentage points higher than prior to the Great Recession.

Before the recession from 2007 to 2009, D.C.’s Black unemployment rate was 9.7 percent. Black joblessness was 5.4 times higher than white unemployment, EPI said in report published May 6.

During the economic crash, which was caused by the failure of subprime lending and the U.S. financial crisis, African Americans and Hispanics lost an estimated 600,000 state and federal jobs.

Washington D.C.’s black unemployment rate surpassed Michigan’s, which reported the highest black jobless rate in 2014’s fourth quarter.

On the other hand, Virginia had the lowest black unemployment rate at 7.4 percent. The Black jobless rate in the Old Dominion State, however, was one percentage point higher than the highest white unemployment rate which was reported in Tennessee.

Since the economic recovery, the African-American unemployment rate is at or even below pre-recession levels in Connecticut, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee, EPI disclosed in a report, titled “So Far, the Black Unemployment Rate Has Only Recovered in States Where It Was Highest Before the Great Recession.”