Black Economic Progress

In 1964 the United States federal government began attempts to eliminate racial discrimination in employment and wages: the United States Congress enacted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, prohibiting employers from making employment decisions on the basis of race. In 1965 President Johnson issued Executive Order 11,246, which direct monitoring of minority representation in contractors’ work forces.

Nonetheless, proponents of the “continuous change” hypothesis believe that United States federal law had a marginal impact on the economic progress made by black people in the United States between 1940 and 1975. Instead they emphasize slowly evolving historical forces, such as long-term trends in education that improved segregated schools for black those attending black schools increased relative to the earning potential of those attending white schools.

However, there is no direct evidence linking increased quality of underfunded segregated black schools to these improvements in earning potential. In fact, even the evidence on relative schooling quality is ambiguous. Although in the mid-1940s term length at black schools was approaching that in white schools, the rapid growth in another important all age groups in the United States is more consistent with a decline in employment discrimination.

An additional problem for continuity theorists is how to explain the rapid acceleration of black economic progress in the United States after 1964. Education alone cannot account for the rate of change. Rather, the coincidence of increased United States government antidiscrimination pressure in the mid-1960s with the acceleration in the rate of spite of the vigorous resistance of many Southern leaders, suggests its importance for black economic progress.