According to a study released on Thursday, unemployment among African-Americans in Wisconsin last year was the highest of all the 50 US states.

The report released by the center-left Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC, revealed that present employment rate in Wisconsin is 19.9%, which is three times higher than the highest state white unemployment rate.

It is also higher than the national black unemployment rate of 11%. The report also showed that Wisconsin's black unemployment rate is twice the overall national unemployment rate at the peak of the recession.

The findings are consistent with more than a decade of statistics and studies that showed that African-American in Wisconsin and its largest city, Milwaukee, often find themselves at the economic and social extremes as compared to rest of the nation.

This has been the case with a wider range of social distress indicators, from infant mortality and poverty to high school dropouts and incarceration.

According to Marc Levine, professor of history, economic development and urban studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the issue is most acute in metro Milwaukee, home to 72% of the state's working-age African- Americans.

He further said that the official unemployment rate is misleading measure because it excludes the one those who quit looking for work, which statistically removes them from the official labor force.

"If we include all those who are of working age but are not employed, essentially what we call the 'non-employment rate,' the level of black joblessness in Milwaukee is actually much higher than the official rate", Levine said.

The report showed that after Wisconsin, the states with the highest black unemployment rates in 2014 were Nevada with 16%, Michigan 15.8%, followed by the District of Columbia 15.7%.