Inclusive American Economic History:Containing Slaves, Freedmen, Jim Crow Laws, and the Great Migration

Trevon Logan and Peter Temin ()
Additional contact information
Peter Temin: MIT

No 110, Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking

Abstract: This paper records the path by which African Americans were transformed from enslaved persons in the American economy to partial participants in the progress of the economy. The path was not monotonic, and we organize our tale by periods in which inclusiveness rose and fell. The history we recount demonstrates the staying power of the myth of black inferiority held by a changing white majority as the economy expanded dramatically. Slavery was outlawed after the Civil War, and blacks began to participate in American politics en masse for the first time during Reconstruction. This process met with white resistance, and black inclusion in the growing economy fell as the Gilded Age followed and white political will for black political participation faded. The Second World War also was followed by prosperity in which blacks were included more fully into the white economy, but still not completely. The Civil Rights Movement proved no more durable than Reconstruction, and blacks lost ground as the 20th century ended in the growth of a New Gilded Age. Resources that could be used to improve the welfare of whites and blacks continue to be spent on the continued repressions of blacks.

Keywords: Economic History; Slaves; Freedmen; Jim Crow; Great Migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 N31 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 78 pages
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-lab and nep-pke
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Logan ... king-Paper-final.pdf (application/pdf)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3536068 First version, 2020 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:thk:wpaper:110

DOI: 10.36687/inetwp110

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pia Malaney ().