cover image: Racial Diversity and Racial Policy Preferences: The Great Migration and Civil Rights

20.500.12592/tjgf4v

Racial Diversity and Racial Policy Preferences: The Great Migration and Civil Rights

2 Dec 2021

The Great Migration temporally coincided with the development and eventual success of the civil rights movement – a turning point in the history of race relations in the US – which culminated in the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. [...] Given the resistance of southern politicians to extend the franchise to Black Americans, north- ern legislators and grassroots organizations based in the North, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), played a key role in the process of enfranchisement (Lawson, 1976). [...] We expand on their findings by focusing on the US North rather than the South, and by analyzing one of the po- tential causes, rather than consequences, of the VRA – i.e., the response of northern politicians to the change in the characteristics and demands of their constituency due to Black in-migration. [...] In addition, we interact period dummies with several 1940 county characteristics (e.g., the Black and the urban share of the population, support for the Democratic Party, and the share of employment in manufacturing) and with time- invariant geographic controls (e.g., distance from the Mason-Dixon line, latitude and longitude, distance from the closest city where the Forty-Eighters settled).22 The. [...] We identify a lynching using the joint men- tion of the name and surname of the victim and the place where the lynching occurred in the same newspaper page.

Authors

Rebecca Souster

Pages
184
Published in
United Kingdom