Today, in the year 1997, three years before the next millennium, an outcry can be heard from many who feel there is great racial discrimination in society. The thought of crossing the bridge to the year 2000 with this problem persisting in the womb of a nation about to be reborn is disheartening. There is a need to at least establish where we as a nation stand on this racial issue. Has the country made any progress towards equality of races or is there still a discrepancy between white America and black America? The African Americans have been a people imprisoned by the chains of early American slavery and have had to fight through the Civil Rights Movement of the fifties and sixties to be treated as "Americans". I find that since America is associated with the land of opportunity that to examine these opportunities taken would be the best way to identify any differences between the two races. It is through employment that a person can support oneself, a family, etc., and find the means to participate in society in one way or another. There is no guarantee that income will provide happiness, but there is the fact that one needs income to be self-sufficient. This self-sufficiency is what opportunity provides and I am interested on focusing my study on how evenly distributed these opportunities have been.