African American Intergenerational Economic Mobility Since 1880

We document the intergenerational mobility of black and white American men from 1880 through 2000 by building new historical datasets for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and combining them with modern data to cover the middle and late twentieth century. We find large disparities in mobility, with white children having far better chances of escaping the bottom of the distribution than black children in every generation. This mobility gap was more important in proximately determining each generation’s racial gap than was the initial gap in parents’ economic status.