Description: Since the early 1900s, there has been a decline in overall cancer death rates among black Americans but they're still higher than the rates for whites, says an American Cancer Society report released Thursday.

In 2003, black men had a 35 percent higher cancer death rate than white men, and black women had an 18 percent higher rate than white women, according to the report, Cancer Facts & Figures for African Americans 2007-2008.

But cancer death rates among blacks decreased by an average of 1.7 percent a year from 1995 to 2003, compared to 1.0 percent a year among whites from 1992 to 2003.

Of the 1.4 million cases of invasive cancer that will be diagnosed in the United States in 2007, 153,000 will be among blacks. And blacks will account for about 63,000 of the estimated 560,000 cancer deaths in the United States this year, the report said.

Prostate, lung and bronchus, colon and rectum are the most common kinds of cancers diagnosed in bl