Black Economic Progress in the Jim Crow South: Evidence from Rosenwald Schools

Paul Mohnen, University of Michigan
Abdul Raheem Shariq Mohammed, University of Michigan

This paper explores the role of human capital and labor market barriers in driving the racial gap in occupational standing in the Jim Crow South. To shed light on this question, we study the labor market impact of the Rosenwald Schools Initiative, a large-scale school construction program aimed at improving educational opportunities for blacks in the rural South during the early 20th century. We build a novel dataset linking Social Security application records to the 1920 and 1940 U.S. Censuses, allowing us to estimate the impact of Rosenwald schools on outcomes in adulthood for both men and women. Using a triple difference strategy, we show that exposure to Rosenwald schools led to greater educational attainment among rural black men and women, consistent with prior work. We find that these gains led to greater labor force participation among black women, and a higher propensity to work in white collar jobs among black men. However, we find no evidence that black men broke into white collar jobs that involved interacting with whites (e.g. sales jobs), in line with accounts that they tended to be excluded from those jobs. Our findings suggest that while human capital barriers played an important role, labor market discrimination limited the gains to education for blacks.

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 Presented in Session 220. Race, Region, Place,