Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South

The civil rights movement was also a struggle for economic justice, one that until now has not had its own history. Sharing the Prize demonstrates the significant material gains black southerners made--in improved job opportunities, quality of education, and health care--from the 1960s to the 1970s and beyond. Because black advances did not come at the expense of southern whites, Gavin Wright argues, the civil rights struggle was that rarest of social revolutions: one that benefits both sides. From the beginning, black activists sought economic justice in addition to full legal rights. The southern bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins were famous acts of civil disobedience, but they were also demands for jobs in the very services being denied blacks. In the period of enforced desegregation following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the wages of southern black workers increased dramatically. Wright's painstaking documentation of this fact undermines beliefs that government intervention was unnecessary, that discrimination was irrational, and that segregation would gradually disappear once the market was allowed to work. Wright also explains why white southerners defended for so long a system that failed to serve their own best interests. Sharing the Prize makes clear that the material benefits of the civil rights acts of the 1960s are as significant as the moral ones--an especially timely achievement as these monumental pieces of legislation, and the efficacy of governmental intervention more broadly, face new challenges.

About the Author :
Gavin Wright is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History at Stanford University.

Review :
The civil rights movement of the 1960s has had a lasting impact on American society. Although it has hardly been neglected by historians, until now there has been no comprehensive economic interpretation of these events. In this volume, Wright offers an important and illuminating reinterpretation of the civil rights movement and its consequences for both black and white economic progress in the subsequent half century.--J. L. Rosenbloom"Choice" (08/13/2013) Written by Stanford's Gavin Wright with the care and imagination he displayed in his superb work on slavery and the southern economy since the Civil War, this excellent economic history offers the best empirical account to date of the effects the civil rights revolution had on southern labor markets, schools, and other important institutions... With much of the nation persuaded that a post-racial age has begun, Wright's analytical history...takes on fresh urgency.--Ira Katznelson"New York Review of Books" (04/03/2014) By placing economics at the heart of his investigation of the central issues of the civil rights movement, Wright deepens and expands our understanding of what was at stake for those who participated in the civil rights movement as well as those who opposed it.--James C. Cobb, University of Georgia Gavin Wright has written a definitive study of the economic implications of the civil rights revolution in the American South. He shows that while highly useful, economic analysis must be richer and more socially oriented than usual in characterizing the nature of racial discrimination in the South.--Kenneth J. Arrow, Stanford University Sharing the Prize is an exceptionally rich study of the civil rights revolution in the American South and will immediately become the book on its economic dimensions.--Peter A. Coclanis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Sharing the Prize transforms quite dramatically our understanding of the economics of the civil rights movement in the South, showing how the civil disobedience of black Southerners wrought a transformation that improved the lives of whites as well as blacks.--Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Yale University