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Title: The Labor Market Effects of the 1960s Riots: Preliminary Findings

Citation Type: Conference Paper

Publication Year: 2003

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Abstract: Although the United States has experienced race-related civil disturbances throughout its history, those that occurred in the 1960s were unprecedented in their frequency and scope. Between 1964 and 1971, hundreds of riots erupted in American cities, resulting in large numbers of injuries, deaths, and arrests, as well as in considerable property damage that was concentrated in predominantly black neighborhoods. Ending the riots required extraordinary law enforcement efforts, sometimes including the mobilization of National Guard units. In retrospect, the riots marked a turning point in American racial politics, as the carefully orchestrated demonstrations of the early Civil Rights Movement gave way to violent, chaotic civil disturbances.At the time of their occurrence, the riots prompted congressional investigations into their proximate and underlying causes and into their immediate consequences in the form of looting, property damage, arrests, injuries, and deaths (U.S. Senate 1968). Subsequently, a large sociology literature developed that attempted to identify city-level correlates of the occurrence and severity of riots (see, inter alia, Wanderer 1969, Spilerman 1971, Lieske 1978, Carter 1986, and Myers 1997). But there have been comparatively few studies of a systematic, econometric nature that examine the impact of the riots on the relative economic status of African Americans, or on the neighborhoods in which the riots took place (Aldrich and Reiss 1970, Frey 1979, Kelly and Snyder 1980, King 2001).In this paper we study the impact of the 1960s riots in the context of long-term racial disparities in labor market outcomes. Among full-time male workers, the racial gap in earnings narrowed in the aggregate up to 1975, with periods of sharp convergence (e.g., the 1940s) alternating with periods of relative stasis (e.g., the 1950s and early 1960s). Since 1970, racial convergence in earnings has slowed markedly, and a substantial part of the observed convergence has been driven by the selection of low-income black males out of the full-time labor force (Brown 1984, Chandra 2000). Over the same period, the proportion of blacks living in high poverty neighborhoods increased sharply (Wilson 1987), and black ghettos turned increasingly bad in the sense that residential segregation led to increasingly poor socioeconomic outcomes among young blacks (Cutler and Glaeser 1997, Collins and Margo 2000).

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Authors: Collins, William J.; Margo, Robert A.

Conference Name: Brookings-Wharton Conference on Urban Affairs

Publisher Location: Cambridge, MA

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Crime and Deviance, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other

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