Today’s South is boldly moving backward
By Nelson Lichtenstein
We used to call it the New South. That was the era after Reconstruction and before the Civil Rights laws when the states of the old Confederacy seemed most determined to preserve a social and economic order that encouraged low-wage industrialization as they fought to maintain Jim Crow.
What was then distinctive about the South had almost as much to do with economic inequality as racial segregation. Between roughly 1876 and 1965, the region was marked by low-wages, little government, short lives and lousy health not just for African-Americans but for white workers and farmers.
The Civil Rights revolution and the rise of an economically dynamic Sun Belt in the 1970s and 80s seemed to end that oppressive and insular era. The Research Triangle in North Carolina, for example, has more in common with Californias Silicon Valley than with Rust Belt manufacturing. The distinctive American region known as the South had truly begun to vanish.
This is the thesis of economic historian Gavin Wrights new book on the economic consequences of the civil rights revolution, Sharing the Prize. Ending segregation, Wright argues, improved the economic and social status of both white and black workers The South became far less distinctive as wages and government-provided benefits increased to roughly the national level.
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http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/06/18/todays-south-is-boldly-moving-backward/