Racial and ethnic differences in economic opportunity
The Philadelphia Social History Project was a pioneering study that documented the historic social, economic, and demographic dynamics of Philadelphia over time. The data derived from the project provides a detailed history of different ethnic groups, including the African American community in an urban environment of the 19th century. Apart from providing a block-by-block description of the population of 2.5 million persons from the 1850s through the 1880s, the series documents the history of immigration to Philadelphia at three time points, taken from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and Society of Friends Manuscript Census Schedules in 1838, 1847, and 1856.
The data on African American communities from the Philadelphia Social History Project provides an opportunity to study the lives of free Black people before the Civil War. Hershberg (1971) overviews this historic data source on life in free African American communities in Antebellum Philadelphia, which is based on a repeated census of the city’s Black population in the 19th century. Philadelphia had the second greatest free Black population after Baltimore at the time. In 1837, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society decided to conduct a census to defeat the planned disenfranchisement of “free colored people” that would be written into the new state constitution. Even though this endeavor didn’t succeed, the Society repeated the census in 1847 and 1856. Based on these censuses, Hershberg found considerable deterioration in the living circumstances of free Black people from the 1830s to the Civil War. Anti-Black riots and smaller mob actions contributed to the decrease of the Philadelphia African American population in these decades. After 1838, the per capita wealth of Black people in the city and the share of property owners among them declined, while their residential segregation rose considerably. The lack of job opportunities for adult men and the fact that one-fifth of Black adults lived and worked in White households contributed to the weakening of family structures. The job opportunities were scarce for this group and it faced increasing competition from Irish immigrants in the middle of the 19th century.
Hershberg et al. (1979) provides a comparative history of different immigrant groups in Philadelphia, through the lens of access to opportunity. The authors determine the place of different ethnic groups in the city’s “opportunity structure” to see if Black Americans had to contend with the same or different difficulties as the other ethnic immigrant groups who arrived in the city before them. They used the vertical distribution of occupations as a proxy measure for the place an ethnic group occupies in this structure. The authors questioned the view that the African Americans, most of whom arrived relatively late to the city, after World War II, were experiencing increased residential segregation and were removed from more opportunity because they arrived later than the “old” immigrants of British, Irish, and German descent or the “new” immigrants of Italian, Jewish, and Polish ethnicities. In Philadelphia’s case, the organizing principle for residential distribution was proximity to the different industries, however, the only exception to this was the African American population. Based on Hershberg and his co-authors’ analysis of the Philadelphia Social History Project data, in 1880 the average Black worker lived within one mile from more manufacturing jobs than workers from any other ethnic groups. Despite their proximity to jobs, African American workers were often denied manufacturing jobs and almost 80 percent of them worked in unskilled occupations at that time. The authors attributed this denial of opportunity to racism and noted that contrary to other ethnic groups, the Black workers lived segregated from their coworkers in the same occupations.
The Reconstruction era brought unprecedented opportunity for African Americans to enter into politics and induce policy change. The newly enfranchised group of Black men sought office on every level, from local to state politics. Logan (2020) analyzed the effects of Black politicians’ entry on public finance and individual outcomes. The author relied on multiple datasets found at ICPSR, including data from Haines 2010, the United States Historical Election Returns, 1824-1968, the Historical Transportation of Navigable Rivers, Canals, and Railroads in the United States, and the Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races 1840-1972. Using data on local tax revenues from the 1870s and on election returns from the 1870s and 1880s, the author found a strong positive effect of the election of Black office holders on within-state per capita county tax revenue.
The opposition to Black politicians in the South during the Reconstruction took the forms of violent attacks. Using the same datasets as in the 2020 article, Logan (2019) investigated the relationship between tax policy changes and violence against African American politicians during the 1870s and 1880s. The analysis found a strong relationship between a more aggressive tax policy and violent acts committed against Black politicians. As Logan found, “the likelihood of a violent attack increased by more than 25% for each additional dollar in per capita tax revenue collected in 1870.” The need for increased public expenditure for humanitarian assistance for former slaves, rebuilding and building infrastructure after the Civil War, and investment in schooling all necessitated more taxation, which met resistance from the White landowners. Politically motivated violence that meant to intimidate Black voters was widespread in the South during the Reconstruction. Logan conducted the first study that found that political violence was at least partially motivated by tax policies pursued by Black politicians.
The study, Aging of Veterans of the Union Army: Military, Pension, and Medical Records, 1820-1940, is part of an historical project that constructed datasets for the longitudinal study of factors affecting the aging process of Union Army veterans. It includes lifetime military, medical, and socioeconomic data. According to Wilson (2010)’s analysis of the data, the pension system was “an early experiment in colorblind social policy,” however, the legacy of slavery and discrimination against Black recruits of the Union Army hindered the access of African Americans to their pension benefits. While the pension system was designed to be racially equitable, the lower rates of hospitalization of injured Black soldiers resulted in the lack of the medical records requested for the pension approvals. This opened a gap between White and Black veterans for 25 years after the Civil War, up until 1890, when the elimination of wartime medical records in application for the pension led to a surge in enrollments of African Americans. However, by that time many of the Black veterans had died, therefore, the policy change came too late. Despite the change, Southern Black applicants were approved for pension at considerably lower rates than their Northern counterparts. Wilson concludes that a “colorblind” policy change cannot be successful when too much discretion is granted for its execution and when it doesn’t take into account the obstacles African Americans faced from the legacy of slavery and ongoing discrimination.
Changes in the distribution of income
The next focal point will address the changes in the differences in income distribution over time, which is tied to the above mentioned studies of opportunity. The Great Depression brought about an unprecedented shock to the American economy that also contributed to changes in wealth inequality. In their National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER) working paper, Feigenbaum et al. (2020) used demographic data from Haines 2010 to analyze the distribution of income and the resulting changes in inequality at the city and county levels between 1929 and 1940. When it comes to racial and ethnic inequality, “areas where the number of [B]lacks rose experienced rising inequality, while areas where the number of foreign-born rose experienced lower inequality.” The authors attributed the low levels of inequality among immigrants to the strict quotas put on immigration during the 1920s, which prevented the arrival of more foreign-born people. By 1930 and 1940, the foreign-born population had spent a longer time in the US and established their living, facing less competition for jobs from newcomers.
According to the NBER working paper by Aizer et al. (2020), in 1940, the prime-age Black men, between the ages of 25 to 54, received half as much yearly income as their White counterparts, since more than three quarters of African American workers were employed in unskilled occupations. The authors used data from Haines 2010 and the County and City Data Book [United States] Consolidated File: City Data, 1944-1977 to assess the effects of World War II domestic expenditures on the Black-White earnings gap. The gap had lessened. The authors found that many employers changed their earlier discriminatory practices due to the severe labor shortage during WWII, which led to reductions in the Black-White earnings gap during the 1940s, with persistent effects lasting well into the 1970s. Aizer et al. also found that the WWII expenditures led to increases in schooling of Black children, specifying the increase in family income as the main driver behind this phenomenon. The authors conclude that policy changes aiming to benefit the overall socioeconomic standing of African American people can also have a large positive effect on closing the gaps in educational attainment.
The Great Migration
The Great Migration, which took place between 1910 and 1970, was a defining period for change in the lives of African American citizens, providing both an escape from the Jim Crow South and better jobs, mainly in manufacturing. The following overview of publications using ICPSR data focuses on the first phase of the Great Migration, from 1910 to 1940.
Starting from 1910, nearly six million African Americans left the South to seek opportunities in the Northern states. As Stuart and Taylor (2019) mention, there were a few destination cities, such as New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., that saw marked increases in their ratios of Black population. The authors consider social networks to be the defining factor in destination choices of Black Americans during the Great Migration’s first phase. Using demographic data from Haines 2010, they found that social networks strongly influenced the destination choices of Southern African Americans, since for each migrant originating from a certain hometown, on average an additional 1.9 migrants moved to the same destination county in the North. The authors’ analysis also showed that African American migrants tended to gravitate toward locations that had a lower marginal Black–White wage gap in the 1940s, where networks might have helped selecting for destinations with less labor market discrimination.
An important driver of the Great Migration was the abundance of job opportunities in the North. As Xie (2017) contends using data from the 1919 and 1929 Censuses of Manufacturing found in Haines 2010, in part this was due to the strict immigration policies that were put in place in the beginning of the 20th century. Looking at the period between 1920 and 1930, Xie found that the decrease in immigrant labor had a strong positive impact on the wages in the manufacturing sector, as well as on the inflow of African Americans into these manufacturing jobs.
The Great Migration also led to rearrangements in the racial composition of several northern cities. Tabellini (2019) used historical census data partially found in Haines 2010 to build on the natural experiment brought about by the northbound migration of more than 1.5 million African Americans. The author showcased how the change from predominantly White to racially heterogeneous populations affected public spending, tax revenues, and property values in some cities. As Tabellini observed, the destination cities in the North cut their public spending mostly as a result of decreasing tax revenue. Since around the time of the Great Migration almost all city tax revenue came from property taxes, a drop in property values easily set back funding resources for public spending, even without a change in tax rates, as Tabellini found. According to another explanation by the author, the White majority’s residential decisions could also mediate the effects of the Great Migration on public finances. The cities receiving the greatest inflow of Black migrants had a slower rate of new home constructions than other metropolitan areas, which could also be a result of increased suburbanization, mostly driven by the movement of White city dwellers. This work, building on historical demographic data, touches on the origins of the segregation pattern driven by suburbanization of the American cities. Tabellini’s findings can inform research on the current state of uneven allocation of public goods and the social issues deriving from that.
Conclusion
Reviewing the literature based on historical data can lead a researcher in many possible directions to assess the impact of major historical events, discriminatory policies, and other factors that might impact access to economic opportunity. Hence, the present Spotlight is not meant to be an exhaustive overview of all aspects of the racial and ethnic differences that had an effect on economic outcomes in the 19th and 20th century history of the United States.
To see how each of the ICPSR studies mentioned in this Spotlight has been examined in other scholarly literature, to gain ideas for extending prior research, or to conduct a larger literature review, you can search the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature. Using search terms like “historical data,” “racial discrimination” or “Great Migration” will lead you to search results containing publications linked to the study data analyzed in them. Discovering data via the literature in this way can begin your investigation of the existing and potential uses of the data distributed by ICPSR.
When authoring publications that include your secondary analysis of study data downloaded from ICPSR, be sure to cite the study in the publication’s references section, using the provided data citation and unique identifier (in the form of a URL containing a DOI). Once your paper is published, submit its citation to the ICPSR Bibliography via this form, so it can be added to ICPSR’s collection of linked data-related literature, enabling others to find, learn from, and cite your work.
