Collaborative Research: Southern Lynchings and Children's Educational Outcomes

Stressors in a child’s environment, among other things, can have significant adverse effect on the child’s educational attainment, as well as other possible outcomes. Exposure to violence, especially violence targeted at the child’s own demographic, social or faith community, can be a severe environmental stressor. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw widespread patterns of racially motivated violence, particularly in the South. This project will use newly digitized historical records from early 20th century Mississippi to study how lynchings affected the educational choices of local Black children and their families using. The research will combine county level lynching data with detailed school enrollment and attendance record of every child in Mississippi from 1927 to 1957. This detailed data set, and the exogenous nature of lynchings will allow the researchers to identify how lynchings affect children’s educational outcomes. Given the critical importance of education in reducing inequality and progressing toward racial equity in the U.S., identifying how exposure to lynchings affected educational attainment can improve our understanding of the evolution of Black-White inequality in the mid- to late-20th century South. The research results can therefore guide policies to improve educational outcomes of racial minorities, hence narrow the racial achievement gaps in the US.

This project will digitize and link the Mississippi Enumeration of Educable Children, 1850-1892; 1908-1957, a newly discovered set of records created by the Mississippi Department of Education to inform allocation of state education funding across counties. These records include the school enrollment and attendance status for every child in Mississippi, biennially from 1927 to 1957, as well as information on the town of residence, school attended, and sibling links. Using these unique records, the PIs will construct a measure of historical educational attainment that will be more accurate than the self-reported educational attainment variable present in the 1940 and 1950 decennial censuses. The constructed data will allow the PIs to observe which children had completed their schooling at the time a lynching occurred in their community. The PIs will use the lynching data in the state of Mississippi and the constructed educational attainment data to estimate the causal effect of lynching on the educational attainment of different racial groups in communities where lynchings occurred during the study period. The research results can guide policies to improve educational outcomes of racial minorities, hence narrow the racial achievement gaps in the US.