To arrive at a tenable interpretation of black history, it is important to resolve the conflict between my measure-retrospective years of schooling completed-and Robert Margo's measure-prospective accumulation across ages of cohort-specific attendance rates. My series reconciled the apparent inconsistency between the stagnant pre-1940 black-white income ratios and what scholars had previously thought was a steady narrowing of racial education differences. Margo's series not only would restore that incon

Among the many disturbing changes in the structure of wages in recent years, the stagnation in the male racial wage gap may be the most disheartening. Race remains America's oldest and most persistent cause of social and economic disparity, but many of us had been encouraged by the steady and significant economic progress since the Second World War. The recent stagnation challenges that optimism. In this paper, I attempt to identify the reasons why the wage stagnation took place. Many Americans, particularly those in the media and political arena, believe they already know the reason. According to them, this stagnation is the predictable consequence of the affirmative-action policies associated with the Reagan administration. One reason why many believe that the Reagan era deserves principal responsibility for the racial stagnation is the belief that Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) resources were gutted during this period. EEOC inflation-adjusted budgets grew almost 15 percent per year during the 1970's. While there was some slowdown in the last half of the decade, constantdollar EEOC budgets expanded by 7.2 percent per year during the Carter administration, and almost 1,400 budgeted positions were added to the EEOC (a growth of 50 percent) between 1976 and 1980. There is no question that the Reagan era witnessed an abrupt end to the growth in resources that would have taken place. EEOC constant-dollar budgets actually fell during this period, and the number of positions declined by almost one thousand; and as EEOC resources and personnel fell during the 1980's, so did the measurable outputs. The sharp break in the 1980's was not so much in the aggregate level of activity, but in its composition and the resources available per case. Spurred by the passage of the Age Discrimination Act in 1979, age came into its own during this decade. Starting with only 14 cases in the year after passage of the act, the number of age cases rose at an astonishing pace to over 30,000 by 1992. Even without this explosion in age-related charges, the significance of race was declining. While the number of race charges increased by 10 percent after 1980, sex charges were expanding by 40 percent. By 1992, only 40 percent of all cases involved race issues, compared to 85 percent of all charges in 1970 and 61 percent in 1980. The declining importance of race in the EEOC's agenda reflects a more general dilution of race as the core civil-rights labormarket concern. Since 1965, the road to equal rights has become very crowded. The quest for racial justice was the clear moral force behind the civil-rights act with women added in an unsuccessful attempt to scuttle the legislation. Subsequently, Hispanics have begun to rival blacks in their political clout, and protected minority-group status was extended to men over 40, those with a disability, and gays. The end result is that more than three-quarters of today's labor force enjoy protected minority-group status. Blacks are now a minority within the protected minority class, which itself represents the majority.

While contemporary rhetoric often highlights differences between races, the data show that blacks are becoming less distinguishable from whites in at least one relevant index of performance-market earnings. Relative to white males, black male earnings have gradually increased, and the rise during the 1960's and the early 1970's is larger than that observed earlier. (See Table 1.) Yet, it is clearly the contrast between white and black females that is extraordinary. Twenty years ago the average black woman employed full time was earning approximately half the wage of a similarly employed white woman. By 1975, almost complete racial parity among women had been achieved. In a recent article (1977), Finis Welch and I argued that the advance in the relative income of black males between 1960 and 1970 was due mainly to converging educational distributions by race and a narrowing in wage differentials between regions. Skill levels were relatively constant within cohorts and convergence was accomplished as increasingly similar racial cohorts entered labor markets while other less similar cohorts retired. Finally our test of affirmative action pressures indicated that before 1970 they had little impact. My first objective is to update our previous research to determine if the events of the last decade for males have continued unabated into the mid1970's. Since a complete understanding of the dynamics of blackwhite changes necessitates explaining the patterns for females, my second goal is to expand the wage comparisons to include women. The major explanations for narrowing in racial wage differences can be placed under four general categories. The central idea of the vintage hypothesis is that more recent black cohorts begin their job experiences with larger initial stocks of human capital, relative to whites, than previous cohorts. The second explanation involves migration. The rural-South to urban-North migration has partly been superceded by southern blacks moving to what are by now economically vibrant southern cities. The third category involves the effects of government affirmative action. Since 1970, it is alleged that a series of court cases imposing severe financial penalties on firms for noncompliance with affirmative action goals have added sharp teeth to government jaw boning. Finally, changes in other aspects of market work may be important in narrowing relative wages. This factor is more relevant for women than men and includes the choice of partor full-time work, unique characteristics of certain occupations, and biases due to limiting comparisons solely to working women.

Thirty years ago, Gary Becker in his now classic work, Economics of Discrimination, sparked renewed interest in an economic analysis of racial income disparities. The volumes of research papers that built on Becker's contribution over the last three decades added a great deal to what we know about the reasons for the wide income differences between the races. One reason was the emergence of several large scale micro data sets of which the 1960 census was the first. Today, analysis is based not only on the 1980 census file but also on several longitudinal data sets best represented by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Parnes National Longitudinal Surveys. Ironically, it is the release of micro data files from two pre-Becker data sets that appears to offer the greatest potential for answering the important questions that remain. In this paper, we use these two data sets-the 1940 and 1950 census files-in combination with the three subsequent census files to describe long-run trends in black poverty. We begin by describing purely labor market developments, but supplement that depiction with a broader look at events that impacted on the black family. The paper concludes with an examination of the downside of black economic progress-the increasing disengagement of many black men from the labor market.