Racial Violence and Socioeconomic Changes Among Blacks in the United States

Abstract

This paper reports an inquiry into the relationship between racial violence and the socioeconomic gains among blacks that occurred in the United States during the 1960s. The few previous studies of the effects of racial disorders are limited in scope and are marred by methodological problems. We take the resource management framework, which conceptualizes violence as a potential political resource for its users, as a substantive warrant to examine this relationship. We also locate the analysis in the general (though largely neglected) arena of violence and social change. We argue that the effects of violence are likely conditional on other factors, and develop hypotheses concerning the differential influence of racial disorders according to the political structure of American cities and the public versus private sector location of socioeconomic changes. We analyze the effects of racial violence frequency and severity on changes between 1960 and 1970 in three socioeconomic variables: nonwhite income, unemployment rates, and the racial composition of selected occupations. These analyses are estimated separately for cities in the South and those in other regions. Our results consistently indicate no relationship between racial violence and black socioeconomic gains at the local level. These findings suggest that earlier evidence of reform responses to disorder in some cities may have reflected attempts to cool out black protest but did not result in substantive changes. Our conclusions on the effects of racial violence therefore parallel those on its causes: if there were socioeconomic consequences, they must have operated at the national level and affected blacks uniformly across local communities. *Financial support for this research was provided by NIMH Grant # MH29817-01 to the authors for a study of Racial Violence and Social Change: U.S. Cities, 1960-75. The Political Science Research Laboratory and the Quantitative Methods Training Program (Department of Sociology), Indiana University, also provided financial assistance in acquiring portions of the data used here. We are grateful to Larry Griffin, Paula Hudis, Larry Isaac and an anonymous referee for comments. All views expressed here are solely the responsibility of the authors. ? 1980, University of North Carolina Press. 0037-7732/80/030739-60$02.20