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African-American Economic Mobility in the 1940s: A Portrait from the Palmer Survey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2012

William J. Collins
William J. Collins
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University, Box 35-B, Nashville, TN 37235. E-mail: william.collins@vanderbilt.edu.
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Abstract

I use retrospective work histories from a unique dataset to follow workers in six cities through occupational, industrial, and geographic moves, thereby characterizing aspects of black economic mobility during the 1940s that cannot be viewed through the Census data. Relatively few migrants were drawn directly from the southern agricultural sector. Black occupational upgrades were larger than white upgrades on average but black upgrades were smaller than those of observationally similar whites.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , September 2000 , pp. 756 - 781
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2000

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