• Corpus ID: 142026605

Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South

@article{Kousser2014SharingTP,
  title={Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South},
  author={J. Morgan Kousser},
  journal={Journal of Southern History},
  year={2014},
  volume={80},
  pages={768}
}

• J. M. Kousser
• Published 1 August 2014
• History, Economics
• Journal of Southern History

Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South. By Gavin Wright. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. [xiv], 353. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-674-04933-8.) Stanford University economic historian Gavin Wright's clear, accessible, and deeply researched book argues persuasively, first, that it was civil rights laws and federal court decisions from Brown v. Board of Education (1954) on that substantially enhanced the economic well-being of southern blacks after 1960. These improvements in black status, he demonstrates with both statistical evidence and qualitative case studies, would not have come about through the operation of market forces alone. Strong legal pressure from outside the region was necessary to shock and awe Jim Crow. Second, his simple, informative graphs and tables show that African American improvement did not come at the expense of southern whites. The civil rights revolution was not a zero-sum game; unleashing black talent made everyone better off. Consider the socioeconomic status and prospects of southern African Americans on the eve of Brown and the Montgomery bus boycott: While agricultural earnings for sharecroppers and wage laborers in the South seem to have been approximately equal for blacks and whites since Reconstruction, cotton cultivation was rapidly being mechanized in the 1950s, and the workforce was being laid off. As the southern economy modernized in the twentieth century, African Americans were excluded from decent jobs in whole industries, such as textiles, and the discrimination continued through the 1950s. White managers in companies large and small, national and regional, almost uniformly refused to hire black workers for skilled and managerial posts because they stereotyped blacks as incompetent. The frustrations of an economy in which blacks no longer had even a subordinate place drove many of the most ambitious and best-educated African Americans from the South. The most dramatic evidence for Wright's contention that the civil rights revolution was also an economic revolution is that net black migration to the South, negative since 1890, turned positive after 1970 and, like white net migration to the region, has continued strongly positive ever since. African Americans moved to a South in which public accommodations were desegregated. Although the widespread and often lengthy sit-ins and boycotts produced only uneven desegregation, these actions built support among citizens and chain stores for Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which compelled rapid regionwide compliance. Economic theory and rose-colored hindsight to the contrary, most white southern businessmen, before and often also after the wave of sit-ins, opposed desegregation because they feared alienating white customers with even token integration. The same economic theory would predict a market-driven breakdown of employment discrimination, because calculating employers would realize that at least some black workers were superior to some white workers and hire the blacks. …