In this paper we discuss a framework for evaluating the effect of the Supreme Court’s landmark
1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education on the welfare of African Americans in the labor market.
The public profile of the Brown decision, however, tends to overshadow the well established fact that
racial disparities in school resources in the South began narrowing 20 years before the Brown decision
and that school desegregation did not begin on a large scale in the Deep South until ten years after the
Brown decision. Viewing Brown as a highly visible marker of public policy’s mid-century reversal on
matters of race, rather than as a discrete program, we study the long-term labor market implications of
school resource equalization before Brown and school desegregation after Brown. For cohorts born in the
South in the 1920s and 1930s, we find that racial disparities in measurable school characteristics had a
substantial influence on black males’ earnings in 1970, albeit one that was smaller in later cohorts.
Because disparities in school resources had greatly narrowed in most states by 1950, there may have been
few direct economic gains associated with a continued pursuit of the “equal” part of the “separate but
equal” doctrine. When we examine the labor market outcomes of male workers in 1990, we find that
southern-born blacks who would have finished their schooling just before effective desegregation
occurred in the South fared poorly compared to southern-born blacks who followed behind them in school
by just a few years (relative to northern-born blacks in same age cohorts).