Abstract
The US South maintained a distinctive economic and political structure from the demise of slavery in the 1860s to the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s. Racial wage differentials in the unskilled labour market were small. But blacks were virtually absent from higher-paying skilled jobs. Disfranchisement led to a drastic fall in relative expenditures on black schooling between 1890 and 1910. The effort to protect cheap labour reinforced regional isolation, depriving the South of dynamic stimulus from new migrants, enterprise and ideas. Conflicts between recruitment of capital and demands for racial justice were resolved only by federal intervention.
Keywords
- Agriculture
- Arrow, K.
- Becker, G.
- Black-white wage differentials
- Civil rights movement
- Convict labour
- Economic development
- Human capital
- Internal migration
- Jim Crow South
- Key, V.
- Minimum wage
- Racial discrimination
- Regional development
- Schooling
- Segregation in labour markets
- Slavery
- Trade unions
JEL Classifications
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Anderson, J. 1988. The education of blacks in the south, 1860–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Arrow, K. 1973. The theory of discrimination. In Discrimination in labor markets, ed. O. Ashenfelter and A. Rees. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Becker, G. 1957. The economics of discrimination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bond, H. 1934. The education of the Negro in the American social order. New York: Prentice-Hall.
Cobb, J. 1982. The selling of the south: The Southern Crusade for industrial development, 1936–1980. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Connolly, M. 2004. Human capital and growth in the Postbellum South. Journal of Economic History 64: 363–399.
Higgs, R. 1977. Firm-specific evidence on racial wage differentials and workforce segregation. American Economic Review 67: 236–245.
Higgs, R. 1978. Racial wage differentials in agriculture: Evidence from North Carolina in 1887. Agricultural History 52: 308–311.
Jacoway, E., and D. Colburn (eds.). 1982. Southern businessmen and desegreation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Key, V.O. 1949. Southern politics in state and nation. New York: A. A. Knopf.
Kousser, M. 1974. The shaping of southern politics: Suffrage restriction and the establishment of one-party south, 1880–1910. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Margo, R.A. 1990. Race and schooling in the south, 1880–1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Perlman, J., and E. Frazier. 1937. Entrance rates of common laborers in 20 industries, July 1937. Monthly Labor Review 45: 1491–1510.
Smith, J. 1984. Race and human capital. American Economic Review 74: 685–698.
Sundstrom, W.A. 1990. Half a career: Discrimination and railroad internal labor markets. Industrial Relations 29: 423–440.
Whatley, W., and G. Wright. 1994. Race, human capital, and labour markets. In Labour market evolution, ed. G. Grantham and M. MacKinnon. New York: Routledge.
Woodward, C.V. 1955. The strange career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wright, G. 1986. Old South, New South: Revolutions in the southern economy since the Civil War. New York: Basic Books.
Wright, G. 1999. The civil rights revolution as economic history. Journal of Economic History 59: 267–289.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
About this entry
Cite this entry
Wright, G. (2018). Jim Crow South. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2009
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2009
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-95188-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-95189-5
eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences