The geography of opportunity after the Civil War: Black and white Americans’ intra- and intergenerational mobility into property ownership

This paper examines historical black-white disparities in wealth and economic mobility using linked census records. First, we compare black and white men’s mobility into property ownership between 1870, the first census taken after the Civil War, and 1900. Conditional on not owning property in 1870, black men’s mobility rate was far lower than white men’s. Equal mobility rates would have nearly closed the black-white home ownership gap in 1900. Second, we show that black men located in cotton-intensive counties in 1870 were far less likely to attain home ownership than black men located elsewhere. This difference is consistent across national samples and samples restricted to the former Confederacy, with and without controls; it is also evident in IV estimates. The pattern is connected to the prevalence of sharecropping and high black population shares. For white men, the difference in upward mobility between cotton-intensive and other areas was much smaller and less robust. Many black households acquired land and homes of their own in this era, an important channel for economic advance. Yet their geographic concentration in areas with fewer opportunities to acquire property implied low aggregate rates of upward mobility.