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Title: Black Economic Progress in the Jim Crow South: Evidence from Rosenwald Schools

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2021

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Abstract: This paper explores the role of human capital and labor market barriers in driving the racial gap in occupational standing in the Jim Crow South. To disentangle these two factors, we study the labor market impact of the Rosenwald Schools Initiative, a large-scale school construction program aimed at improving educational opportunities for Blacks in the rural South during the early 20th century. We build a novel dataset linking Social Security application records to the 1920 and 1940 U.S. Censuses, allowing us to estimate the impact of childhood exposure to Rosenwald schools on outcomes in adulthood for rural Black men and women. We first confirm that Rosenwald schools had a significant positive impact on the educational attainment of rural Blacks, consistent with prior work. We then show that these gains translated into greater labor force participation and higher occupational standing among rural Black women, but that the occupational standing of rural Black men did not improve. In addition, we find no evidence that rural Black men and women broke into jobs from which they tended to be excluded, such as sales or clerical jobs. Overall, our findings suggest that labor market discrimination limited Black upward mobility in the Jim Crow South.

Url: http://ssha2021.ssha.org/uploads/210655

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Authors: Mohammad, Shariq; Mohnen, Paul

Publisher: University of Michigan

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Race and Ethnicity

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