Evaluating the Role of Brown V. Board of Education in School Equalization, Desegregation, and the Income of African Americans

Abstract

The public profile of the Brown v. Board of Education decision tends to overshadow the well-established fact that racial disparities in school resources in the South began narrowing 20 years before the Brown decision and that school desegregation did not begin on a large scale in the Deep South until ten years after the Brown decision. We instead view Brown as a highly visible marker of public policy's mid-century reversal on matters of race. When we examine the labor market outcomes of male workers in 1990, we find that southern-born blacks who would have finished their schooling just before effective desegregation occurred in the South fared poorly compared to southern-born blacks who followed behind them in school by just a few years, relative to northern-born blacks in same age cohorts.