Only One Place of Redress: African-Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal.

• Author: Margo, Robert A.
• Position: Book Reviews

Only One Place of Redress: African-Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal

By David E. Bernstein Durham, N.C.: Duke University. Press, 2001. Pp. xii, 191. $39.95 cloth.

The role of nonmarket discrimination in shaping the historical evolution of racial economic differences has long been a central issue in economic history and labor economics. In Only One Place of Redress, David E. Bernstein takes a fresh look at how labor regulations affected black economic status prior to the modern Civil Rights era. The overarching framework of the book is that of public-choice theory in the context of so-called Lochnerism. This term refers to Lochner v. New York, the famous 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision that in a relative sense limited the ability of government to regulate contracts. The operative word here is relative because even during the Lochner era (1905-37) courts routinely did permit regulation that, according to Bernstein, significantly inhibited the ability of blacks to earn a living and to accumulate wealth. Because blacks were largely disenfranchised, their ability to use the political process to block government discrimination was circumscribed.

Only One Place of Redress has five substantive chapters. Chapter I focuses on the emigrant-agent laws enacted in the South after the Civil War. Emigrant agents arranged the transportation of individuals, often blacks, from a part of the South where labor was abundant to another part (or sometimes outside the region) where labor was scarce. Such agents were especially useful at a time when information about economic opportunities elsewhere might be limited and where potential migrants were unskilled and illiterate, as were many adult African Americans during Reconstruction. White planters in low-wage areas viewed the agents with horror for the obvious reason that if the agents were successful, wages would rise. The planters pressured governments to pass laws limiting the activities of the agents. One such agent appealed his conviction under a statute enacted in Morgan County, Georgia. When his appeal was rejected by the state supreme court, the case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1903 (pre-Lochner), the Court ruled that governments did have the fight to tax businesses, including emigrant agents, out of existence. Bernstein contends that in the wake of the decision, the activities of the agents were curtailed, and black geographic mobility--an...