Sharing the Prize

The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South

Gavin Wright

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674076495
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Wirtschaftsgeschichte

Winner of the Alice Hanson Jones Prize, Economic History Association
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the YearThe civil rights movement was also a struggle for economic justice, one that until now has not had its own history. Sharing the Prize demonstrates the significant material gains black southerners made—in improved job opportunities, quality of education, and health care—from the 1960s to the 1970s and beyond. Because black advances did not come at the expense of southern whites, Gavin Wright argues, the civil rights struggle was that rarest of social revolutions: one that benefits both sides."Wright argues that government action spurred by the civil-rights movement corrected a misfiring market, generating large economic gains that private companies had been unable to seize on their own."
— The Economist "Written…with the care and imagination [Wright] displayed in his superb work on slavery and the southern economy since the Civil War, this excellent economic history offers the best empirical account to date of the effects the civil rights revolution had on southern labor markets, schools, and other important institutions…With much of the nation persuaded that a post-racial age has begun, Wright's analytical history…takes on fresh urgency."
—Ira Katznelson, New York Review of Books

CHAPTER 1

CIVIL RIGHTS, ECONOMICS, AND THE AMERICAN SOUTH

The Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s is firmly embedded in American civic culture, an inspiring example of virtue and courage rewarded and age-old injustices finally set right. Accounts and pictures of the Montgomery bus boycott, the Greensboro sit-ins, the Freedom Riders, and Martin Luther King’s soaring speech at the Lincoln Memorial feature in textbooks and classrooms throughout the nation, including those in the southern states, where most of these famous events occurred. Civil Rights heritage sites in Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, and other cities attract more than a million tourists each year, who come to see and hear tales of the epic struggle and to absorb lessons in what one historian calls the “new regional civic ideology” of tolerance.1

Those who lived through the era know that these popular histories are highly condensed and simplified, conveying little sense of the raging controversies of the time or the perspective of the white southerners who resisted the revolution so strenuously. But one can hardly object to the veneration of Civil Rights heritage on these grounds. Textbook histories are always simplified, and to some degree one can measure a country’s character by the quality of its mythic narratives. American Civil Rights stories are fundamentally true and powerful, and their propagation has served laudatory purposes ever since. Domestically the revolution for African American rights offered a model and an inspiration for the campaigns for women’s rights, gay rights, and the rights of the disabled. Around the world, the Civil Rights revolution has been invoked and emulated by liberation movements in such disparate lands as Northern Ireland, South Africa, eastern Europe, China, and, most recently, the Middle East.2

The question remains, however, whether the substantive accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement measure up to its iconic status. Specifically, was it an economic as well as a moral and legal revolution? Did it bring significant advances in the material well-being of ordinary people? Did it open new opportunities in education, employment, and occupational status for African Americans? Perhaps most challenging, did the revolution live up to the oft-repeated claims that the movement was “good for the white South,” that by accepting black rights white southerners would “lift a burden from [their] own shoulders, too.”3 These are the questions explored in this book. And if all three can be answered in the affirmative—as will be argued here—then an economist is obliged to address a further question: Why did white southerners defend so passionately and for so long an inefficient system that evidently failed to serve their own best economic interests?

One of the obstacles to understanding this history is that acquiescence in the Civil Rights revolution has been so complete, at least in public discourse, that it is difficult to find white southerners willing to acknowledge, much less explain and defend, their earlier choices. One black southerner who remembered the Jim Crow era all too well complained, “when [segregation] ended you can’t find a single white person who remembers it.”4 Historian Jason Sokol writes, “Many years after the Civil Rights movement, white southerners made a concerted effort to forget the very past that continued to define them.”5 Some political figures whose segregationist past could not be denied offered abject apologies. A dramatic example was Mayor Joe Smitherman of Selma, Alabama, of whom it was said, “He can do the reformed redneck segregationist almost better than anybody.” Smitherman once confessed to a local congregation, “My hands are as dirty as the others. I ordered the arrest of Dr. King. We were wrong. I did it. I’m sorry.”6 Similarly the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Mississippi’s most influential newspaper and an outspoken supporter of “massive resistance” to desegregation in the 1960s, declared two decades later, “We were wrong, wrong, wrong.”7 How many revolutions win such uncoerced testimonials from spokesmen for the ancien régime?

Because the economic and political motivations for these statements are often transparent, they invite the suspicion that the so-called revolution may have been merely superficial, a change in tone but not substance. Many observers are inclined to support this skepticism, suggesting that little of economic consequence actually occurred. The distinguished historian Leon Litwack writes, “Even as the Civil Rights Movement struck down legal barriers, it failed to strike down economic barriers. Even as it ended the violence of segregation, it failed to diminish the violence of poverty.”8 After a lengthy stint in the South, New York Times correspondent Peter Applebome concluded that although the Civil Rights revolution was “the best thing that ever happened to the white South,” it was “a mixed blessing for Southern blacks,” for whom pining for the old segregation era is “a common theme across the South.”9 Of race and schooling, historian Raymond Wolters states flatly, “Integration has been a failure.”10 The catalogue of similar sentiments could be extended almost indefinitely.

Because this book reaches very different conclusions, it makes sense to begin by identifying and elaborating the core propositions underlying the analysis. The most important are these: (1) the Civil Rights revolution was in essence a southern regional phenomenon, calling for a consistent regional focus in assessing its impact; (2) from the beginning the Civil Rights Movement had economic motivations and goals, which were primarily realized in the South; (3) it was a true revolution, that is, a fundamental break with past trends and behavior that cannot be explained away as the inevitable consequence of market forces or modernization; (4) the landmark federal legislation of 1964 and 1965 was essential for the success of the revolution, but although some effects were almost instantaneous, the longer-term consequences required ongoing political and legal mobilization and played out only across many decades.

WHY THE SOUTH?

At one level, a focus on the South hardly requires extended explanation: this was the region with a legacy of slavery, segregation, disfranchisement, and violent racial suppression. Southern denial of basic constitutional rights to African Americans is where the Civil Rights Movement got its name. Into the 1960s, national political campaigns for racial justice overwhelmingly targeted the South.

It was of course well-known that African Americans also experienced prejudice, discrimination, and various forms of exclusion in northern and western states, phenomena dating from before the Civil War. Not only did economic and political inequities in these areas persist through the Reconstruction and Progressive eras, but in many respects, race relations and practices worsened with the onset of massive black inflows from the South during and after World War I. The reality of northern discrimination is undeniable, but regional differences in racial structures and in the rigidity of these structures were also fundamental. Outside of the South, blacks were not denied the vote, so they could organize politically and in time exert significant pressure on city, state, and national policies. One result was that many northern cities and states passed (or revived) laws against discrimination in public accommodations such as restaurants, hotels, and theaters. Such segregation practices had been common, though never as pervasive as in the South. The mobilization of legal infrastructure and moral pressure supported significant progress on this front during the 1940s and 1950s.11

In labor markets, racial discrimination prevailed in all parts of the country, but its forms differed by region. Job categories in the South were explicitly racial (though rarely codified legally) and by the 1920s were marked by a visible “racial wage differential.” In contrast, employers outside the South rarely differentiated wages by race explicitly, but blacks were commonly excluded outright from a wide range of occupations and firms. In Philadelphia, for example, most manufacturing companies did not hire a single black worker until the late 1930s. In some ways, the southern structure might have been preferable, and indeed, even before the Great Depression, unemployment rates in northern cities were 50 to 100 percent higher for blacks than for whites. In the South the rule may have been “Know your place,” but in the North it was not clear that the economy really had a place for black workers.12

But the northern structure was more susceptible to change in response to economic, political, and moral pressure. Economic historian Warren Whatley shows that for Cincinnati firms that first hired African Americans during World War I, the learning experience had a lasting effect on employment policy. The Ford Motor Company broke the color line in the auto industry in the 1920s and profited in so doing. Political mobilization led to greater black representation in municipal jobs in such cities as Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. According to William Collins’s detailed econometric study, the Fair Employment Practices Committee established in 1941 had substantial positive effects on black employment in defense-related industries, but only outside the South. Subsequently most northern states with large black populations adopted fair employment laws with at least modest impact on employment opportunities for black men and women. The cumulative result of these forces was that black occupational attainment as of 1950 in northern states—limited as it was—markedly exceeded that of black southerners.13

In contrast to this path of steady though slow racial progress, the white South dug in its heels in defense of its racial order. Writing in 1942, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal observed “an increased determination on the part of white Southerners to defend unchanged the patterns of segregation and discrimination.”14 Taking a long view, one may cite various positive trends even in the South, such as improved health, higher relative school spending, and the decline of lynchings. But blacks were severely underrepresented in the growth of southern nonfarm employment between 1900 and 1950, a gap that cannot be explained by differences in education.15 On matters of policy, there was little sign or promise of change. Myrdal quoted a letter from a white liberal southerner who had previously been hopeful: “The South is becoming almost unanimous in a pattern of unity that refers to white unity. The thousands of incidents and accidents in the South are being integrated into the old pattern of Southern determination against an outside aggression.”16 The growing regional isolation noted by Myrdal is what made the southern Civil Rights revolution both necessary and possible.17

The preceding paragraphs may not be particularly surprising or contentious. It is well-known that the pre–Civil Rights South was more overt in its racism, and it is perhaps not unexpected as a corollary that its racial economic constraints were also more severe. An issue arises in the late 1960s, however, when historical coverage tends to follow the attention of the media in shifting from political confrontations in the South to the violent upheavals in northern cities. With the “discovery” that the race issue was not confined to one region, subsequent analysis typically draws upon national data, conveying the impression that the landmark legislation of 1964 and 1965 was ineffective and unappreciated. The “civil disorders” in Watts, Newark, Detroit, and many other cities were certainly major events in American racial history, but they were far more frequent and severe outside of the South.18 Civil rights legislation had little immediate impact in these areas, and this neglect may be justly criticized. The question raised here is this: Where is the follow-up on the economic and political effects within the South, which was the primary target of the new laws? Subsequent chapters will show that the historical substance of the Civil Rights revolution looks very different, and on the whole more encouraging, when viewed from a southern regional perspective.

As incorrigible as the white South seemed during the 1960s, an oft-heard comment within the movement was that the South had a better chance to “make it” in race relations than the rest of the nation. Benjamin Muse, tireless organizer for the Southern Regional Council, wrote in 1968, “Over the South as a whole a gentler wind was blowing. There were indications, in fact, that this region might yet arrive at a Negro-white relationship of equality and friendship sooner than any other.”19 The precise basis for such hopeful observations was often unclear. White southerners, presumably hoping to encourage racial goodwill, often suggested that after centuries of coexistence, black and white southerners “know and understand each other more fully.”20 This analysis may contain some truth, but because dubious claims to “know the Negro” were themselves a long-standing southern tradition, they cannot be taken at face value.

A more plausible basis for regional differentiation lies in the quality of southern black political leadership and organization, traceable to the experience of the movement itself. Leslie Dunbar, executive director of the Southern Regional Council from 1961 to 1965, wrote, “If we try to make clear what we mean by the ‘Civil Rights Movement,’ I think we must say that it was defined by Southern problems and given character by the qualities of Negro Southerners. The movement did, of course, spread beyond the South, but always the cohesion was the South.”21 Distinguished interpreters such as Clayborne Carson, Aldon Morris, and Charles Payne have argued that the southern movement drew upon indigenous black organizing traditions that reached back for decades, if not longer.22

One of the hallmarks of the souther...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Civil Rights, Economics, and the American South
• 2. The Political Economy of the Jim Crow South
• 3. Southern Business and Public Accommodations: An Economic-Historical Paradox
• 4. Desegregating Southern Labor Markets
• 5. The Economics of Southern School Desegregation
• 6. The Economic Consequences of Voting Rights
• 7. The Downside of the Civil Rights Revolution
• 8. Civil Rights Economics: Historical Context and Lessons
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index