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Black Americans’ Landholdings and Economic Mobility after Emancipation: Evidence from the Census of Agriculture and Linked Records

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2024

William J. Collins Open the ORCID record for William J. Collins [Opens in a new window] ,
Nicholas Holtkamp  and
Marianne H. Wanamaker
William J. Collins
Affiliation:
Terence E. Adderley, Jr. Professor of Economics, Vanderbilt University, 2201 West End Ave, Nashville, TN 37235, and Research Associate, NBER, 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138. E-mail: [email protected].
Nicholas Holtkamp
Affiliation:
Economist, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 200 Independence Ave., SW Washington, DC 20201. E-mail: [email protected].
Marianne H. Wanamaker*
Affiliation:
Professor, The University of Tennessee-Knoxville, 524 Stokely Management Center, Knoxville, TN 37996-0550, and Research Associate, NBER, 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138, and the University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch Central, Stellenbosch, South Africa.
*
E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

Large and persistent racial disparities in land-based wealth were an important legacy of the Reconstruction era. To assess how these disparities were transmitted intergenerationally, we build a dataset to observe Black households’ landholdings in 1880 alongside a sample of White households. We then link sons from all households to the 1900 census records to observe their economic and human capital outcomes. We show that Black landowners, relative to laborers, transmitted substantial intergenerational advantages to their sons, particularly in literacy and homeownership. However, such advantages were small relative to the racial gaps in measures of economic status.

Type
Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 84 , Issue 4 , December 2024 , pp. 963 - 996
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association

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Footnotes

Collins acknowledges support from National Science Foundation grant SES 1156057. Wanamaker acknowledges support from National Science Foundation grant SES 1156085. This paper has benefited from the feedback of seminar participants at Stellenbosch University, University of Warwick, Yale University, Duke University (Sanford School), Stanford University, University of Oxford, George Washington University, University of Michigan, George Mason University, University of California-Berkeley, the Atlanta Fed’s Southeastern Micro Labor Workshop, the ASSA Annual Meeting, and the Virtual Economic History Seminar. Suggestions from Jeremy Atack, Paul Rhode, James Fenske, Bob Margo, Laura Salisbury, Gavin Wright, Ariell Zimran, and three anonymous referees were particularly helpful. Bokseong Jeong, Sharonda Adams, Lauren Bamonte, Blane Kassa, Dinan Liang, Bryson Lype, Musa Subramaniam, and Jim Teal provided valuable research assistance. Collins completed work on this manuscript while he was a visiting scholar at the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Any opinions presented in this paper are those of the authors only and do not represent the views of their employers or the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

References

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