Harlem women, circa 1925

Source: Public Domain

While reading a new study by Lukas Althoff and Hugo Reichardt, Jim Crow and Black Economic Progress After Slavery, about how it is better for African Americans today to be descended from ancestors who were freed before slavery and/or lived after the Civil War in the north or upper south rather than in the Cotton Belt of the deep south, I got to thinking about geography.

First, though, here is the economists’ abstract:

This paper studies the long-run effects of slavery and restrictive Jim Crow institutions on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. We track individual-level census records of each Black family from 1850 to 1940, and extend our analysis to neighborhood-level outcomes in 2000 and surname-based outcomes in 2023.

For example, in 1860, 99 percent of blacks named “Du Bois” were free, while only 5 percent of blacks named “Lincoln” were free. Not surprisingly, blacks named Du Bois remain more likely to be members of W. E. B. Du Bois’ “Talented Tenth” today than are blacks named Lincoln.

Du Bois (1868–1963), himself, was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which is currently a ski resort town in the Berkshire Mountains, which sounds nice.

Whether Du Bois’ titanic career under difficult circumstances was a product of nature or nurture is of course worthy of debate. But clearly he benefited from an unusually benevolent climate for the times in which his college tuition was paid for by his fellow Congregationalist congregants, and he was mentored by great academics such as William James at Harvard and Max Weber in Germany.

We show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth than Black families whose ancestors were free before the Civil War.

Of course, blacks who were free before the Emancipation Proclamation tended to be northerners, plantation owners’ children, extremely enterprising slaves who earned enough to purchase their own and their loved ones’ freedom, or daring runaways.

For instance, in Zora Neale Hurston’s first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, set in the late-19th-century south, the main character, modeled on Zora’s father, is a tall, handsome, broad-shouldered light-skinned black youth whose mother tells him to look for help from her former owner, a tall, handsome, broad-shouldered white planter. Although the two never seem to quite notice that they are obviously father and son, they immediately take a liking to each other. The rich plantation owner repeatedly comes through with cash in Zora’s dad’s times of need.

The disparities between the two groups have persisted substantially because most families enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery ended. In a regression discontinuity design based on ancestors’ enslavement locations, we show that Jim Crow institutions sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress in the long run.

For example, blacks growing up during the Jim Crow era near the Louisiana-Texas border did worse in life if they were born in Louisiana, a hard-core Jim Crow state, than if they were born in Texas, a state that cared more about making money than imposing a weird, Hindu-like Jim Crow caste system.

A simple measure of how much white voters cared about Jim Crow is the share won in the 1968 presidential election by third-party candidate George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama. Wallace, running on a “preserve Jim Crow” platform, won Louisiana with 48 percent of the vote, but earned only 19 percent in more modern Texas. Under Richard Nixon, the south’s last major vestiges of Jim Crow, segregated schools, were swept away by 1970.

The south has advanced economically without Jim Crow holding it back.

Students of American history have long been obsessed, not unreasonably, by differences between the north and the south, or, secondarily, between the rainy east and the sunny west beginning at about the 98th to 100th meridian on the edge of the Great Plains.

But in studying the homicide rate, I’ve become interested in a pattern less often remarked upon. Of course, the murder rate correlates closely with the black share of the population, but in this century the black homicide rate is particularly high in the middle of the country, whether south, border, or north, such as the cities of New Orleans, St. Louis, and Milwaukee: in other words, the vast Mississippi and Great Lakes watersheds.

In contrast, black murder rates in recent years have been lower in some places in the east, such as Boston, New York, and Charlotte, and some fast-growing Sunbelt states, such as Texas and Florida.

My initial explanation for this has been that the now-decaying industrial Rust Belt was located on water routes so barges could bring heavy raw materials like coal and iron.

Of course, today, prosperity doesn’t care about water transport. For example, four decades ago I lived on the 21st floor of a Chicago high-rise with great views of Lake Michigan. In those three years, I saw a single freighter go by, compared with tens of thousands of sailboats. By the yuppie era, sailing’s appeal to white-collar executives appeared to contribute far more to Chicago’s prosperity than did that lone freighter.

But I now think that the middle of the country’s current troubles with homicides may have deeper roots than technological and policy changes that have left industrial cities washed up.

Looking at this map, it appears that in 1860 there were far fewer free blacks in the cotton-growing slave states that had opened up in the 19th century than in the older states, slave or free.

My guess would be that free blacks tended to accumulate in a place generation by generation, due to masters freeing their children, manumissions by humanitarians, and self-buyouts.

But the south-central Cotton Belt was populated by a large-scale migration from the southeast as the Indians were pushed out in the 19th century. This migration from the Eastern Seaboard west appears to have served as a selection event, with free blacks and blacks with the most sophisticated urban talents being left behind.

The authors argue that there wasn’t selection of slaves who were forced to migrate by their masters’ moving west to plant cotton. But, in truth, there was clear selection on the black population as a whole, with very few free blacks and other members of the Talented Tenth moving into the Cotton Belt.

Further, there was probably selection among urban slaves being left behind, with relatively fewer city-dwelling masters than plantation masters moving west to grow cotton, which likely made the Cotton Belt slave population more rural and less urbane than the Eastern Seaboard slave population.

For example, say you are a Virginia tobacco plantation owner who is moving to Mississippi in 1850 to cash in on the King Cotton boom. One of your slaves has perfect pitch, so you’ve been letting him live in Richmond and find work for himself as an expert piano tuner in return for a cut of his income. Do you drag him off with you to rural Mississippi to pick cotton?

Of course not. Where’s the profit in that?

This cotton migration selection event probably had some effect on the post–Civil War trajectory of Jim Crow, with whites in states like Mississippi with black majorities and virtually no Talented Tenth bourgeois black pre–Civil War freedmen to act as intermediaries being especially extremist about rigging Jim Crow laws to keep blacks down.

Further, when immigration from Europe was cut off during the economic boom of World War I and blacks started moving north in large numbers, southeastern blacks tended to move to the northeast, helping set off the famous Harlem Renaissance.

In contrast, south central blacks from the cotton states tended to take the Illinois Central railroad to the north central region.

These initial internal migrants from the cotton states were hardworking people looking for a better life in northern factories.

But after a couple of generations, the generous welfare fad of the 1960s attracted the sluggards of Mississippi to, first, Chicago. Then, when the Windy City’s Irish politicians woke up in the 1970s to what was happening, the Mississippi tide surged into German Milwaukee, and then finally into Swedish Minneapolis, with consequences that are still playing out in the 2020s.