The share of southeastern black counties in the southern rural renaissance: were they bypassed by factory job gains, 1959-77?

Abstract

Some authors have suggested that a leading problem associated with US factory employment for blacks may be that the nonfarm jobs--specifically manufacturing--have tended to go to heavily white counties rather than to the mainly black counties of the Deep South. This study is limited to the 1959-1977 period, the time of the most vigorous nonmetropolitan employment growth. To test the hypothesis that factory jobs have bypassed heavily black counties, a 100% sample of nonmetropolitan counties was used from 13 Southern states for the 2 time periods, 1959-1969 and 1969-1977. Results show that the minority counties were not bypassed by Southern rural factory job growth either in the 1960s or the 1970s, but their gains were not as sizeable as those of more heavily white counties. Both the neoclassical economics of discrimination--with its individualistic "taste for discrimination"--and the stinging critique by Marshall in 1974 that such analysis ignores the important role of institutionalized racism--can "explain the empirical conclusions of this article." Traditional "smokestack-chasing" methods are by no means hopeless. While co-ops and community development corporation strategies can be combined with traditional methods, it is important that foundations, government agencies, anti-poverty programs, and black leadership also focus on projects to competitively attract jobs in the traditional fashion.