Gavin Wright has used the obligatory gerund phrase (i.e. Bearing the Cross, Parting the Waters) for titling his history of the civil rights movement, but there is nothing else that is predictable in this fine and original interpretation of the nation's great movement for racial justice. One of the leading American economic historians, Wright has spent his career evaluating the significance of race in the United from an economic-history perspective, with long looks in previous works at the economics of slavery and the post-Civil War South. His work is rigorously empirical, full of statistical analysis, and yet it is easily understandable for those of us who don't think naturally in quantitative ways. He writes as clearly as any non-quantitative historian. In Sharing the Prize, Wright is good at assessing the large human motives and actions at work with regard to race in America. His announced subject is the economic aspect of civil rights, but his judgment about the historical dynamics of race reach much farther to assess what changed in human relations at the level of feelings, including the irrational. He is a sophisticated intellectual and one with a clear moral commitment to racial justice. More important, he has the courage to confront the hard truth that progress toward an equal, just society seems to have stalled of late. At the same time, his commitment to empiricism seems never to falter.
Sharing the Prize addresses very fundamental questions: "What were the historical origins of segregation and other forms of race discrimination, and how did these persist over time? How did Civil Rights legislation and enforcement alter these practices, and did resistance to change intensify or diminish over time? How did gains for African Americans affect the economic well-being of white southerners?" (258)
Wright sees no clear economic causes of the civil rights movement, whereas some others have suggested, wrongly I think, that the mechanization of cotton agriculture undermined the need for segregation and brought on the movement. Wright credits the advancement of universalist values, the natural right of every human being to justice and equality, by Martin Luther King and movement activists for pushing the nation to a crisis in 1963 that suddenly yielded monumental works of reform legislation. Given Wright's ability to synthesize scholarship, I wish he had spent some time on the causes matter, but his brief is economics, and that wasn't the cause.
Wright's great addition of value to the understanding of the civil rights movement comes with his evaluation of the impact of the movement. Both blacks and whites made big gains in income after 1965, which belied the broad presumption among American whites that racial change was a zero-sum game. White businessmen had to be coerced to change, but when they did, they did not suffer. The civil rights revolution was a not a program of redistribution of wealth but a circumstance in which both blacks and whites gained. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act had a large impact on ending job discrimination. The opening of jobs to blacks in the textile industry, formerly an all-white preserve, was an astonishing development. The migration of two million blacks to the South after the 1960s was strong indication that the civil rights movement had made meaningful changes. Lyndon Johnson's anti-poverty programs and his intervention in blacks' access to hospitals resulted in a drastic improvement in the health profile of black southerners. American corporations adopted affirmative action goals and maintained them even after Ronald Reagan effectively killed the government's commitment to equal job opportunities. Black business managers hired other blacks fairly, and the number of blacks in managerial and professional occupations rose dramatically, thus transforming the size and influence of the black middle class in southern cities. But again, whites did not suffer, as they assumed they would; their incomes grew at the same rate as blacks, which they maintained at overall higher levels.
Wright spends a lot of time on the impact of civil rights changes on schools, summarizing social science literature and emphasizing again to the huge impact of Johnson's legislation, the in-tandem effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Elementary and Secondary School Act, which provided the first significant surge of federal funds to local school systems. Black children did better in integrated schools, white children did just as well, and busing orders worked in some places. With regard to the effects of expanded voting rights, blacks got tangible gains of employment as a result of black elected officials who pursued federal aid. Wright sees acceptance of black representation and power as encouraging urban revitalization.
Having shown the positive effects of the movement on American and southern life, Wright ends on a somber note. The South has returned to being a one-party region, and that party is decidedly a white one. Republicans have no incentive to care about blacks, and certainly not poor ones. Wright provides evidence of the harsh impact of regressive consumption taxes on the poor. Republicans in the South do not compete for black votes because they do not have to. In my state, ninety-five percent of white men voted Republican in the recent Presidential election. A high proportion of them were, realistically, voting against their economic interests. Would that they all could read this excellent book and take it to heart.
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Kenneth Robert Hughes
GREAT AND NECESSARY BOOK.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 9, 2016
