Convocation: Gavin Wright

Gavin Wright, Stanford University professor of American economic history, is perhaps today's leading economic historian on the American South. Using the tools of economics to interpret historical developments, his research has looked at the history of slavery, the cotton economy, the California gold rush, and the origins of American technological preeminence. In recent years he has turned to the Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s, interpreted as an economic phenomenon. Focusing on the American South, Wright asks whether the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s produced genuine economic advances for African-Americans, and whether these gains were broadly shared among low-income groups, rather than benefiting mainly the middle class. Wright also examines whether these gains came at the expense of whites, or as part of an economic restructuring that generally enhanced the wellbeing of most southerners. The title of his presentation was "The Civil Rights Revolution as Economic History: Who Gained? Who Lost?"