Accounting for Racial Differences in School Attendance in the American South, 1900: The Role of Separate-But-Equal

Everyone knows that public school officials in the American South violated the Supreme Court's separate-but-equal decision. But did the violations matter? Yes, enforcement of separate-but-equal would have narrowed racial differences in school attendance in the early twentieth century South. But separate-but-equal was not enough. Black children still would have attended school less often than white children because black parents were poorer and less literate than white parents.

^*Published: Review of Economics and Statistics, vol.69, no.4, pp661-666, November 1987

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