Throughout the twentieth century, despite repeated contractions and expansions in the degree of economic inequality, the income and wealth pyramid remained durable and steep, with continuities in the distribution of rewards by work, ethnicity, and gender. Yet, immense individual and group mobility accompanied this structural durability. The coexistence of structural rigidity with individual and group fluidity is the paradox of inequality; it is resolved by the process of internal group differentiation or splintering as individuals divide along lines of occupation and income. Differentiation is one of the principal mechanisms through which inequality has been, and continues to be, reproduced in modern American history.
The history of black economic inequality is also very much a story about gender—although gender has not received nearly as much systematic analysis as it deserves. Historians, by and large, have written about either black men or black women, paying only incidental attention to their comparative experiences over time. inequality, however, has proceeded differently for African American women and men. In the middle of the twentieth century, African American women fared much worse than African American men or white women; by the century’s close, they had vaulted ahead of men in educational and occupational achievement, and they closed the gaps between themselves and white women more successfully than African American men reduced their distance from white men. This story of African American inequality, thus, is not only about the relation between blacks and whites. It also traces the emergence of the gender gap between black men and black women.11
Public and quasi-public (privately controlled but government-funded) employment also has played a crucial role in the history of African American inequality and mobility. Especially for women, public employment has been the principal source of black mobility and one of the most important mechanisms for reducing black poverty. It has not received anything like the attention it deserves from historians or social scientists. Yet, its erosion in recent decades is one of the primary forces undermining black economic progress.
There is a widespread assumption that black men’s labor market problems result from deindustrialization. This idea needs to be questioned and modified. Midcentury discrimination denied most African American workers access to steady work in the manufacturing economy. Thus, their disadvantage was evident much earlier than often assumed, and the timing of the collapse of agricultural employment played a much larger role in their subsequent labor market difficulties than historians have appreciated. Nor have writers on African American history sufficiently grasped the paradoxical role of education. Contrary to much common wisdom, education has served as a powerful source of upward mobility for African Americans, who, at the same time, have suffered, and continue to suffer, from structural inequalities that leave them educationally disadvantaged. These arguments about inequality and mobility are not intended to ignore or deny the force of racism. Many scholars have documented the persistence of racist attitudes and changes in public opinion. The intent, rather, is to shift the focus away from individualist interpretations and toward structures and processes that result from racism but, once set in motion, operate with a logic of their own.
The rest of this chapter reconstitutes the history of African American inequality through five lenses.12 The lenses are (1) participation—the share of African Americans who worked; (2) distribution—the kind of jobs they held and the amount of education they received; (3) rewards—the income they earned and the wealth they accumulated; (4) differentiation—the distance between them on scales of occupation and earnings; and (5) geography— where they lived. Because it underlies the other forms of inequality, geography comes first.
Geography
Throughout American history, African Americans have clustered disproportionately in the nation’s most unpromising places. Because the sources and features of inequality have always been tied so closely to where they have lived, changes in the spatial distribution of African Americans have mapped the reconfiguration of inequality among them. The consequences of African American migration have been immense as blacks, primarily a Southern and rural people at the start of the twentieth century, became, at its end, an urban population distributed far more equally throughout the nation. Movement off of Southern farms resulted in a mixed legacy for black inequality. It brought them closer to more rewarding sources of work, but, in the end, it left them isolated in America’s new islands of poverty.
Black migration from the South to the Northeast and Midwest represented a shift from rural to urban living. In 1900, only 16 percent of adult blacks, compared to 35 percent of whites, lived in a metropolitan area, but by 1960, blacks had become more urbanized than whites—a distinction they retained: in 2000, 86 percent of blacks and 78 percent of whites lived in metropolitan areas.13 Not only did blacks become more urban: over the course of the century, they concentrated more than whites in central cities. In 1900, 26 percent of white adults and 12 percent of black adults lived in central cities. This situation reversed between 1940 and 1950. By 2000, the African American fraction had climbed to 52 percent while the white share had dropped to 21 percent, a stunning reversal of metropolitan racial ecology.
In the decades after World War II, with whites leaving and blacks entering central cities, racial segregation increased, reaching historic highs by late in the twentieth century.14 As Chapter 1 observed, segregation in 2000 was much higher than it had been in 1860, 1910, or 1930, when, except for Chicago and Cleveland, in northern cities whites still dominated the neighborhoods in which the average African American lived. This situation reversed by 1970: between 1930 and 1970, the neighborhood in which the average African American lived went from 31.7 to 73.5 percent black. Affluent as well as poor African Americans lived in segregated neighborhoods. The segregation index went down after 1980, but still remained high. At the end of the twentieth century, the typical African American still lived in a neighborhood where two-thirds of the other residents were black.15
In the century’s last decade, black suburbanization increased modestly: the percentage of blacks living in suburbs rose from 34 percent to 39 percent. But most black suburbanization was movement to inner-ring suburbs, themselves segregated and developing the problems of inner cities. Between 1990 and 2000, there was no change in the segregation of blacks within suburbs; in both years, the average African American suburbanite lived in a neighborhood that was 46 percent black.16 Overall, postwar configurations of segregation and inequality remained mostly in place.
Racial segregation did not just happen as a result of individual preferences, the racism of homeowners, or the venality of realtors who practiced blockbusting—although all these influences were at work. It resulted just as much from government policy and action. All levels of government share the culpability. The underwriting practices of federal agencies that insured mortgages introduced “red lining,” which virtually destroyed central city housing markets, froze blacks out of mortgages, and encouraged white flight to suburbs. Governments also deployed interstate highway and other road construction to manipulate racial concentration by confining African Americans to inaccessible, segregated parts of cities. In the 1930s, when the federal government initiated public housing, its regulations forbade projects from disturbing the “neighborhood composition guideline”—the racial status quo. Thus, even before World War II, two-thirds of blacks in public housing lived in wholly segregated projects. In the years after the war, local governments found ways to use public housing to increase black isolation even further by locating developments only in segregated neighborhoods.17
The spatial redistribution of America’s black population in the twentieth century intersects African Americans’ history of economic inequality.18 Segregation, Massey and Denton show, is itself a force that initiates a vicious cycle that concentrates poverty and magnifies its impact.19 An overwhelming number of African Americans started the twentieth century clustered in America’s poorest spaces—rural southern farms; they also ended the century concentrated disproportionately in the nation’s least-promising locations—central cities, where only 21 percent of whites remained.
Participation
The geographic redistribution of African Americans focuses one lens on the reconfiguration of black inequality in the twentieth century; the altered relationship