Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 201 of Thomas Sowell’s superb 1981 volume, Ethnic America: A History (footnotes deleted):

In the post-Civil War era, southern white employers and landowners sought to band together to restrict the money and discretion they had to give to blacks. Yet, despite the economic strength, political power, and organizational advantages of the whites, these restrictive agreements failed repeatedly in the face of competition for laborers and sharecroppers. Black income grew at a higher percentage rate than white income during the last third of the nineteenth century.

DBx: The three footnotes not shown in the above quotation are all to Robert Higgs’s remarkable 1977 book, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914.