The New Promised Land: Black-White Convergence in the American South, 1940-2000

The black-white earnings gap has historically been larger in the South than in other regions of the United States. This paper shows that this regional gap has closed over time, and in fact reversed during the last decades of the twentieth century. Three proposed explanations for this trend focus on changing patterns of selective migration, reduced discrimination in Southern labor markets, and lower levels of school segregation and school resource disparities in the modern South relative to the North. Evidence suggests that reductions in Southern labor market discrimination explain rapid regional convergence in racial wage gaps between 1960 and 1980. The more recent decline and reversal of the regional difference appears to be related to narrower disparities in school quality and lower segregation levels in the South. Controlling for region of birth and region of residence, young adult blacks and whites who were educated in the South have the narrowest disparities in earnings and other socioeconomic outcomes. *Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Box 90245, Durham NC 27708. Phone: (919)613-7354. Email: [email protected]. I thank Rebecca Blank, John Bound, Charles Clotfelter, James Ziliak, and seminar participants at the University of Kentucky for helpful comments, and Carrie Mathews and Troy Powell for exceptional research assistance. This project is supported with a grant from the UK Center for Poverty Research through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, grant number 02ASPE417A. The opinions and conclusions expressed herein are solely those of the author and should not be construed as representing the opinions or policy of the UKCPR or any agency of the Federal government. 1 Bound and Freeman (199 2) present the most noteworthy existing regional analysis of black-white earnings gaps. 2 For sake o f brevity, the three C ensus region s other than the South (N ortheast, M idwest, and W est) will occasionally be referred to as “the North” in this paper. 1