Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets
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Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets
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Overview
From 1940 to 1970, nearly four million black migrants left the American rural South to settle in the industrial cities of the North and West. Competition in the Promised Land provides a comprehensive account of the long-lasting effects of the influx of black workers on labor markets and urban space in receiving areas.
Traditionally, the Great Black Migration has been lauded as a path to general black economic progress. Leah Boustan challenges this view, arguing instead that the migration produced winners and losers within the black community. Boustan shows that migrants themselves gained tremendously, more than doubling their earnings by moving North. But these new arrivals competed with existing black workers, limiting black–white wage convergence in Northern labor markets and slowing black economic growth. Furthermore, many white households responded to the black migration by relocating to the suburbs. White flight was motivated not only by neighborhood racial change but also by the desire on the part of white residents to avoid participating in the local public services and fiscal obligations of increasingly diverse cities.
Employing historical census data and state-of-the-art econometric methods, Competition in the Promised Land revises our understanding of the Great Black Migration and its role in the transformation of American society.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400882977 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/25/2016 |
| Series: | National Bureau of Economic Research Publications , #39 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Competition in the Promised Land
Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets
By Leah Platt Boustan
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-8297-7
CHAPTER 1
Black Migration from the South in Historical Context
In an historical note to the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Fences, August Wilson describes Pittsburgh in the early twentieth century as an industrial machine powered by the sweat of European immigrants. Pittsburgh, a city of a "thousand furnaces and sewing machines, [a] thousand butcher shops and bakers' ovens," was home to "the destitute of Europe," he writes, but "the descendants of African slaves were offered no such welcome" (1991, 103). Indeed, in 1910, the workforce in northern cities was nearly 40 percent foreign born and only 3 percent black. At the time, nearly fifty years after emancipation, 86 percent of African Americans still lived in the South.
The mobility of black southerners began increasing in the birth cohorts born immediately after the Civil War. Many of these moves took place within the South. Despite plentiful industrial jobs in the "thousand furnaces" of nothern cities at the turn of the twentieth century, the potential wage benefits of settling in the North was dampened by the absence of a migrant network that southern blacks could use to secure employment upon arrival. Large flows of northward migration awaited a period of abnormally high economic returns, which arose during World War I. Circa 1915, northern factories supplying the war effort experienced a surge in labor demand, coupled with a temporary freeze in European immigration, which encouraged northern employers to turn to other sources of labor.
Once black migration from the South got underway, the first pioneers facilitated later moves of friends and family. Furthermore, northern employers gained experience with and became more open to hiring black workers. With these conditions in place, black migration to the North accelerated rapidly, doubling from the 1900s to the 1910s and then doubling again by the 1920s. Migration peaked in the 1940s and 1950s; during these two decades alone, 28 percent of the southern black population left the region. By 1970, for the first time in American history, a majority of the country's black residents lived outside the South, with 45 percent living in the Northeast and Midwest and 8 percent in the West.
Black departures from the South were greatest from counties that specialized in cotton agriculture and that were characterized by particularly strong segregationist sentiment (as proxied by support for Strom Thurmond in the 1948 presidential election). Settlement in the North and West was concentrated in the top five destinations: New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Outside of these gateway cities, black migrants were widely distributed throughout northern and western metropolitan areas, underscoring the broad social and economic consequences of black migration throughout the region.
A Long View of Southern Black Mobility: The Birth Cohorts of 1810–1970
The Great Black Migration is usually dated to 1915, the first year of substantial black in-migration to the North. However, the rate of interstate mobility among southern blacks rose steadily, starting with the birth cohort of 1860. Initially, the majority of these moves took place in the South, with some rural blacks moving to urban areas and others seeking agricultural opportunities further west (Gottlieb 1987, 118; Cohen 1991, 248–73; Cobb, 1992, 47–68). In this long-term perspective, the Great Black Migration appears to be a continuation of previous mobility trends, marked by acceleration (rather than a discontinuous jump) in the rate of interstate migration and a gradual shift toward northern destinations. This long-term trend is not consistent with the view that black southerners were uniquely stuck in place through binding credit relationships with landlords and local merchants (Ransom and Sutch 1977, 194; Berlin 2010, 142).
Using multiple waves of Census data, I define migration as living outside of one's state of birth or, alternatively, as living outside of the South altogether. I mostly follow the Census definition of the South, which includes the eleven states of the former Confederacy, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, but I exclude the District of Columbia and the border states of Maryland and Delaware, which experienced net black in-migration in the twentieth century. For brevity, I often refer to the non-South as the "North," even though this region also includes the western states. Migration figures are calculated for blacks and non-blacks. In this southern context, "non-black" is nearly synonymous with "white," and I use these two terms interchangeably. For the year 2000, when the Census introduced the option to select multiple races, I group all individuals who report being black and some other race into the category "black."
Arranging Census data by birth cohort reveals substantial swings in black (and white) mobility during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Figure 1.1a graphs predicted migration for each birth cohort by age thirty, and Figure 1.1b reports the share of these moves occurring within the South. The underlying estimation procedure is described in Appendix Equation 1. Most cohorts are observed at multiple ages, thereby allowing separate identification of the effects of both age and birth cohort on migration. Although migration can occur at any time in the life cycle, individuals are most likely to move in their twenties (Johnson et al. 2005). I therefore interpret the estimated migration activity as taking place around twenty-five years after the cohort's year of birth.
Migration rates were particularly high in the early nineteenth century among southerners of both races. Fifty percent of whites and nearly 40 percent of blacks in the birth cohort of 1810 left their birth state by age thirty. For blacks, most of whom were in slavery, nearly 90 percent of these moves took place within the South. High mobility occurred in the context of rising demand for cotton, as planters pushed westward from the older cotton region of the South Atlantic into the fertile land in the Mississippi Delta and Texas. Fogel (1994, 65) reports that 835,000 slaves, nearly one in four, were moved west by their owner or a slave trader from 1820 to 1860.
As the new cotton frontier became settled, the mobility of both white and black southerners declined. By the birth cohorts of the mid-nineteenth century, the share of black southerners living outside of their state of birth had fallen from 40 percent to 25 percent. The low point in black mobility was reached in the birth cohort of 1857, who were "of age" to migrate in the early 1880s. This decline in black mobility followed a wider national trend rather than indicating race-specific barriers to mobility after emancipation. The share of whites, both southern and non-southern born, living outside of their state of birth declined to much the same degree in the mid-nineteenth century.
Although the mobility of southerners of both races moved in tandem, a small racial gap in overall mobility is apparent throughout the nineteenth century. The enforcement of anti-enticement and vagrancy statutes designed to limit black mobility provides one explanation for this racial gap. Anti-enticement laws prevented employers from hiring away workers who already held a job contract, while vagrancy laws made it difficult for workers to leave one job and spend time searching for another (Cohen 1991). Naidu (2010) estimates that doubling the fine for vagrancy decreased the probability of moving in a sample of black sharecroppers by 5 percentage points, the right order of magnitude to explain the observed racial gap in mobility.
The birth cohort of 1890 was the first to come of age during the Great Black Migration to the North, which began in 1915. However, black southern mobility started to rise in the birth cohort of 1860 and increased steadily for eighty consecutive birth years, peaking in the cohort of 1940. The pace of black migration accelerated — but did not jump upward — in the birth cohorts of the 1890s, suggesting that the Great Black Migration was part of a longer mobility trend. In contrast, white migration rates remained low for southern whites until the birth cohort of 1890 and for non-southern whites until the birth cohort of 1925, most of whom would have moved after World War II. Indeed, the racial mobility gap had closed completely by the birth cohort of 1880, before the Great Black Migration to the North got under way. The share of black migrants who settled in the North also rose steadily, increasing by around 1 percentage point in every cohort after the Civil War, with no obvious break in trend. Thus the Great Black Migration to the North appears to be an acceleration of existing black mobility rather than a novel form of black movement.
In the late nineteenth century, 70 percent of interstate moves initiated by black southerners took place in the South. Some of these early black migrants moved to southern cities. The share of black southerners living in an urban area increased from 10 percent in 1880 to 22 percent by 1910. But many intra-southern moves occurred between agricultural regions. Steckel (1983) argues that the migration of agricultural workers tended to follow lines of latitude within climatic zones, which allowed farmers to use their accumulated experience in planting particular crops. Migration between rural areas may have contributed to black occupational mobility up the agricultural ladder. Alston and Ferrie (2005) document that 40 percent of blacks working as farm laborers or sharecroppers moved into farm tenancy or ownership during the 1920s.
Black Migration to the North in the Twentieth Century
Few blacks moved North before 1915, despite the higher wages and greater social equality available in the region. The role of migrant networks in facilitating migrant flows to new destinations provides one convincing explanation for low rates of black migration to the North before World War I. High potential returns to migration in the North notwithstanding, actual returns to migration may have been substantially lower because new arrivals had difficulty finding a well-paid job without the help of an existing migrant community. When networks are important for migration activity, low migration rates can persist indefinitely absent a catalyst that provides the particularly favorable economic conditions necessary for migration to begin. In the case of the black migration, these conditions arose circa 1915 as a result of the combination of heightened labor demand in northern factories during World War I; a sharp decline in immigration from Europe, following a wartime disruption in shipping; and bad harvests and falling labor demand in southern agriculture due to the boll weevil, a cotton pest.
Labor demand in northern cities was abnormally high during World War I, as military orders kept factories running at full capacity. From 1915 to 1919, the growth in manufacturing employment rose above its already steep trend, leading to the (temporary) creation of two million new positions. Many of these jobs had minimal skill requirements; in 1920, for example, a quarter of men employed in northern manufacturing worked as common laborers. In peacetime, slots in northern factories were often filled by recent foreign arrivals. But as the war disrupted transatlantic shipping lanes, the migration flow from Europe dropped from 1.2 million to only 100,000 annual entrants. The loss of typical labor supply encouraged some industrial firms to send labor recruiters to the South for the first time. Collins (1997) estimates that a decline in labor supply of this magnitude would have encouraged 100,000 southern blacks to move north; this figure can account for half of the uptick in black migration from the 1900s to the 1910s (see Figure 1.2a).
In the early twentieth century, many southern blacks worked in cotton agriculture, which was still planted and harvested by hand. Labor demand in cotton fell in the decade before World War I with the spread of the boll weevil. The weevil arrived in southern Texas in 1892 and slowly moved east, crossing the Mississippi River by 1908. Lange, Olmstead, and Rhode (2009) document that cotton-producing counties experienced a 30 percent decline in population in the years immediately following the weevil infestation, an indication of large out-migration flows. Although black workers displaced by the weevil did not necessarily move to the North immediately, they represented a pool of potential migrants ready to move when job opportunities became available in northern factories.
Black out-migration from the South accelerated in the 1920s, peaked in the 1940s, and declined thereafter. Figures 1.2a and 1.2b present new estimates of migration rates out of and into the South by race. Migrant counts are calculated with Census survival methods. Net migration from a location — say, a state — can be approximated by counting members of a sex-race-birth year cohort over two consecutive Census periods (Kuznets and Thomas 1957; Vickery 1977, 140–88). A cohort can only expand or contract over time through mortality or through net migration from that state. Therefore, after estimating the number of deaths during a given Census period, any remaining difference in cohort size can be attributed to net migration. Following Gregory (2005), I extend this technique to estimate gross migration flows to and from a location by constructing cohorts by sex, race, birth year, and region of birth using Census microdata.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, only 200,000 blacks left the South out of a population of nearly eight million, an out-migration rate of 2.5 percent. Migration doubled in the war decade of the 1910s and then nearly doubled again in the 1920s. Although the abnormally strong labor demand that arose during World War I did not persist, migration rates remained high; perhaps once a migration network was in place, early arrivals were able to facilitate the moves of their friends and family. Existing migrants helped newcomers by sending detailed letters describing conditions in the North; distributing northern newspapers with help-wanted ads throughout the South; providing housing and job referrals for new migrants upon first arrival; and contributing to formal institutions like the Urban League that offered job training and employment placement services (Grossman 1989, 66–97; Marks 1989, 24–32; Gottlieb 1987, 40–43). Furthermore, the first black migrants to "get their foot in the door" of northern factories during World War I enabled the hiring of additional black employees in northern industry, both by providing referrals and by dispelling common stereotypes about black workers.
Black migration from the South slowed in the 1930s, with the out-migration rate falling from 8 percent to 3.5 percent. This temporary shortfall in black migration mirrored a national decline in mobility during the Depression. The disproportionately low rates of black migration in the Depression decade were due, in part, to high black unemployment in northern cities. With only 59 percent of black residents in the North able to find work outside of public relief, there was little incentive for new in-migration.
Black migration resumed as employment conditions in northern cities improved with the outbreak of World War II. Nearly 1.4 million blacks left the South in the 1940s, a migration rate of 14 percent, with many moving in response to strong labor demand in northern factories. Migration continued after the war, in part because of the effect of wartime service on both the skills and the aspirations of southern blacks. Modell, Goulden, and Magnusson (1989, 838–39) argue that "military service influenced the structure of [black] aspirations in a way that contributed to their unwillingness to accept the prewar structure of racial dominance and ... enhanced the likelihood of interregional migration."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Competition in the Promised Land by Leah Platt Boustan. Copyright © 2017 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xiiiIntroduction 1
1 Black Migration from the South in Historical Context 14
2 Who Left the South and How Did They Fare? 39
3 Competition in Northern Labor Markets 65
4 Black Migration, White Flight 93
5 Motivations for White Flight: The Role of Fiscal/Political Interactions 122
Epilogue: Black Migration, Northern Cities, and Labor Markets after 1970 154
References 165
Index 187
What People are Saying About This
"In Competition in the Promised Land, Leah Boustan brings original arguments and new evidence to the study of the Great Migration of southern African Americans. The welcome result is an innovative and significant contribution to the literature that demands the attention of all scholars interested in the African American experience."—Stewart Tolnay, University of Washington"A masterful contribution to understanding twentieth-century black and American history. Combining new data sources with sophisticated historical and economic analysis, Boustan presents important new interpretations of the causes and consequences of black migration from South to North and of 'white flight' from northern urban areas to the suburbs."—Stanley L. Engerman, University of Rochester"Competition in the Promised Land revisits the economic history of black migration from the American South using state-of-the-art tools from empirical economics applied to fresh historical data. The book's analysis goes far beyond those provided by previous scholars and Boustan is able to reach sharper and more robust conclusions. The writing is exceptional."—Robert A. Margo, Boston University"The first book-length economic historical treatment of the Great Migration, Competition in the Promised Land offers new findings in a number of areas. Although migration offered a substantial positive return to black Southerners, there were losers as well as gainers. Relying on sound scholarship, Boustan backs her findings with a more rigorous quantitative approach than that of previous studies."—Gavin Wright, Stanford University