African-American economic mobility in the 1940s: A portrait from the Palmer survey

I use retrospective work histories from a unique dataset to follow workers in six cities through occupational, industrial, and geographic moves, there by characterizing aspects of black economic mobility during the 1940s that cannot be viewed through the Census data. Relatively few migrants were draw n directly from the southern agricultural sector. Black occupational upgrad es were larger than white upgrades on average but black upgrades were small er than those of observationally similar whites. Black veterans did no bett er than black nonveterans in terms of upgrading or wages. And black workers in war-related industries earned substantially more than observationally s imilar blacks.