and disenfranchised them politically. In the course of the second half of the twentieth century, slowly and sometimes with violent opposition, the situation of African Americans changed dramatically. Courts and Congress—prodded by a massive social movement, national embarrassment on the world stage during the Cold War, and the electoral concerns of urban politicians—extended political and civil rights.4 Affirmative action and new “welfare rights” contributed to the extension of social citizenship—guarantees of food, shelter, medical care, and education.5 By the end of the century, legal and formal barriers that had excluded blacks from most institutions and from the most favorable labor market positions largely had disappeared. Black poverty had plummeted, and black political and economic achievements were undeniable.6 Eight years later a black man was elected president of the United States.
Yet, for many people—both white and black—the sense remained that racism still pervaded American society, operative in both old and new ways, removing some barriers but erecting others. Observers found discrimination in racial profiling by police; verbal slips by members of Congress; disproportionate poverty, incarceration, and capital punishment; and the workings of institutions and public policies that disadvantaged blacks. Racism, they maintained, kept African Americans like Herbert Manes and Shorty residentially segregated and clustered disproportionately in the least desirable jobs, if not out of the workforce altogether, and circumscribed their opportunities for education, high incomes, and the accumulation of wealth. Far more often than whites, African Americans lived in poverty. Most black children were born out of wedlock, and a very large fraction of them grew up poor. And in the 1980s and 1990s, some indices of black economic progress began to reverse direction, accelerating downward during the Great Recession that marked the new century’s first decade.
Two books captured the debate over black progress. In Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, political scientist Andrew Hacker stressed the continued force of racism in American life. In America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, written partly in response to Hacker, historian Stephan Thernstrom and political scientist Abigail Thernstrom emphasized its attenuation.7 Hacker highlighted the continued obstacles confronting blacks; the Thernstroms focused on black progress. Hacker intended his analysis to buttress affirmative action; the Thernstroms wanted to undercut its legitimacy.8 Economic inequality was only one among several topics considered in each book. But it was crucial—fundamental to the story of progress, or its absence. Was the glass half empty or half full? Could past black achievement be projected into the future, or had it stalled, leaving this enduring categorical inequality etched deeply into the soil of American life?9 What did the contrasting histories of Shorty and Barack Obama signify?
Trying to understand black inequality in the terms posed by the Hacker-Thernstrom debate, or focusing on whether America has become a post-racial society, takes us in the wrong direction. The question should not be framed in either/or terms or assessed on a single scale of progress. Rather, the historic pattern of black inequality based on social, economic, and political exclusion largely shattered during the course of the century—replaced by 2000 with its features rearranged in a new configuration of inequality. In the early twentieth century, the sources and results of America’s black/white divide overlapped with and reinforced one another. What stands out about the new pattern of inequality is the cumulative process from which it results and the internal differentiation which is its product. inequality among African Americans no longer grows out of a massive and mutually reinforcing, legal and extralegal, public and private system of racial oppression.10 Rather, it is a subtler matter, proceeding through a series of screens that filter African Americans into more or less promising statuses, progressively dividing them along lines full of implications for their economic futures.
Throughout the twentieth century, despite repeated contractions and expansions in the degree of economic inequality, the income and wealth pyramid remained durable and steep, with continuities in the distribution of rewards by work, ethnicity, and gender. Yet, immense individual and group mobility accompanied this structural durability. The coexistence of structural rigidity with individual and group fluidity is the paradox of inequality; it is resolved by the process of internal group differentiation or splintering as individuals divide along lines of occupation and income. Differentiation is one of the principal mechanisms through which inequality has been, and continues to be, reproduced in modern American history.
The history of black economic inequality is also very much a story about gender—although gender has not received nearly as much systematic analysis as it deserves. Historians, by and large, have written about either black men or black women, paying only incidental attention to their comparative experiences over time. inequality, however, has proceeded differently for African American women and men. In the middle of the twentieth century, African American women fared much worse than African American men or white women; by the century’s close, they had vaulted ahead of men in educational and occupational achievement, and they closed the gaps between themselves and white women more successfully than African American men reduced their distance from white men. This story of African American inequality, thus, is not only about the relation between blacks and whites. It also traces the emergence of the gender gap between black men and black women.11
Public and quasi-public (privately controlled but government-funded) employment also has played a crucial role in the history of African American inequality and mobility. Especially for women, public employment has been the principal source of black mobility and one of the most important mechanisms for reducing black poverty. It has not received anything like the attention it deserves from historians or social scientists. Yet, its erosion in recent decades is one of the primary forces undermining black economic progress.
There is a widespread assumption that black men’s labor market problems result from deindustrialization. This idea needs to be questioned and modified. Midcentury discrimination denied most African American workers access to steady work in the manufacturing economy. Thus, their disadvantage was evident much earlier than often assumed, and the timing of the collapse of agricultural employment played a much larger role in their subsequent labor market difficulties than historians have appreciated. Nor have writers on African American history sufficiently grasped the paradoxical role of education. Contrary to much common wisdom, education has served as a powerful source of upward mobility for African Americans, who, at the same time, have suffered, and continue to suffer, from structural inequalities that leave them educationally disadvantaged. These arguments about inequality and mobility are not intended to ignore or deny the force of racism. Many scholars have documented the persistence of racist attitudes and changes in public opinion. The intent, rather, is to shift the focus away from individualist interpretations and toward structures and processes that result from racism but, once set in motion, operate with a logic of their own.
The rest of this chapter reconstitutes the history of African American inequality through five lenses.12 The lenses are (1) participation—the share of African Americans who worked; (2) distribution—the kind of jobs they held and the amount of education they received; (3) rewards—the income they earned and the wealth they accumulated; (4) differentiation—the distance between them on scales of occupation and earnings; and (5) geography— where they lived. Because it underlies the other forms of inequality, geography comes first.
Geography
Throughout American history, African Americans have clustered disproportionately in the nation’s most unpromising places. Because the sources and features of inequality have always been tied so closely to where they have lived, changes in the spatial distribution of African Americans have mapped the reconfiguration of inequality among them. The consequences of African American migration have been immense as blacks, primarily a Southern and rural people at the start of the twentieth century, became, at its end, an urban population distributed far more equally throughout the nation. Movement off of Southern farms resulted in a mixed legacy for black inequality. It brought them closer to more rewarding sources of work, but, in the end, it left them isolated in America’s new islands of poverty.
