part of a series of events and changes that finally broke the
mold in the South and led to a fundamental change of
institutions. As we saw in chapter 12, after the Civil War,
southern landowning elites had managed to re-create the
extractive economic and political institutions that had
dominated the South before the Civil War. Though the
details of these institutions changed—for example, slavery
was no longer possible—the negative impact on economic
incentives and prosperity in the South was the same. The
South was notably poorer than the rest of the United States.
Starting in the 1950s, southern institutions would begin to
move the region onto a much faster growth trajectory. The
type of extractive institutions ultimately eliminated in the
U.S. South were different from the colonial institutions of
pre-independence Botswana. The type of critical juncture
that started the process of their downfall was also different
but shared several commonalities. Starting in the 1940s,
those who bore the brunt of the discrimination and the
extractive institutions in the South, people such as Rosa
Parks, started to become much better organized in their
fight against them. At the same time, the U.S. Supreme
Court and the federal government finally began to intervene
systematically to reform the extractive institutions in the
South. Thus a main factor creating a critical juncture for
change in the South was the empowerment of black
Americans there and the end of the unchallenged
domination of the southern elites.
The southern political institutions, both before the Civil
War and after, had a clear economic logic, not too different
from the South African Apartheid regime: to secure cheap
labor for the plantations. But by the 1950s, this logic
became less compelling. For one, significant mass
outmigration of blacks from the South was already under
way, a legacy of both the Great Depression and the
Second World War. In the 1940s and ’50s, this reached an
average of a hundred thousand people per year.
Meanwhile, technological innovation in agriculture, though
adopted only slowly, was reducing the dependence of the
plantation owners on cheap labor. Most labor in the
plantations was used for picking cotton. In 1950 almost all
southern cotton was still picked by hand. But the
mechanization of cotton picking was reducing the demand