The Geography of Opportunity after the Civil War: Black and White Americans' Intra- and Intergenerational Mobility into Property Ownership

We shed new light on historical black-white disparities in wealth and economic mobility by examining datasets of linked census records. First, we compare black and white men’s intra- and inter-generational mobility into property ownership between 1870, the first census taken after the Civil War, and 1900. Conditional on not owning property in 1870, black men’s mobility rate into property ownership was far lower than white men’s. If black men’s post-1870 mobility had mirrored that of landless white men, the black-white home ownership gap in 1900 would have been small. Second, we show that for black men located in cotton-intensive counties in 1870, the likelihood of owning property in 1900 was far lower than for black men located elsewhere. This is apparent in national samples as well as in samples restricted to the states of the former Confederacy, with and without extensive controls. This pattern is connected to the prevalence of sharecropping and relatively high black population shares. For white men, the difference in upward mobility between cotton-intensive and other areas was much smaller or non-existent. Many black households did acquire land and homes of their own in this era, an important channel for economic advance, but racism and discrimination slowed their mobility into property ownership.