Lukas Althoff

Lukas Althoff PhD candidate from Princeton University will present his article: The Geography of Black Economic Progress After Slavery.

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Abstract:
With slavery ending in 1865, four million people (90 percent of the Black population) were freed. How has the socioeconomic status of Black Americans who were enslaved up to 1865 evolved compared to those who were already free before the Civil War? To answer this question, we propose a new strategy to accurately identify descendants of free and enslaved Black Americans in Census data. Our strategy builds on the fact that before 1870, only free Black Americans were recorded. Using linked full-count Census data and administrative death records, we construct family histories for both free Black Americans (1850-2005) and formerly enslaved Black Americans (1870-2005). We find that the socioeconomic disadvantage faced by the formerly Enslaved persisted across all generations in our sample. In 2000, the gap between descendants of the Free and the Enslaved accounts for half of the Black-white gap in income and wealth. We show that the persistence in this gap is driven by the fact that enslaved ancestors were endowed with locations of slow Black economic progress after slavery. Using the circumstance that the Enslaved did not enjoy freedom of movement before 1865, we identify each Southern county’s intergenerational effect on their descendants. The effects are large and persistent. A county's intergenerational effect is tightly linked to whether it provided education to a large fraction of Black children during the Reconstruction Era (1870).