Black and White Fertility, Differential Baby Booms: The Value of Civil Rights

This paper presents new estimates of the benets of equal education opportunity for blacks over the period 1820-2000. For the better part of US history, blacks have enjoyed less access to schooling for their children than whites. This paper attempts to quantify the value of this discrimination. Our estimates of the welfare cost of this form of discrimination prior to the Civil War range between 1.7 and 10 times black wealth, and between 1.6 and 4 times black wealth prior to 1960. Further we find that the Civil Rights era was valued by blacks in the South by between 1 percent to 2 percent of wealth. Outside of the South we find significant costs of discrimination prior to 1960, ranging from 8 percent to 100 percent of black wealth! For these divisions from 1960-2000 blacks have attained rough parity in schooling access. The welfare magnitudes are similar to the hypothetical gains to blacks if they had white mortality rates.