From the choice of schools to safety to access to green spaces and healthy food, the neighborhood where a child is raised can play a determining role in their future health. And because structural racism can systematically silo nonwhite people in certain neighborhoods, those local factors shape the health of millions of people of color in the United States. Now, census data link Black children’s neighborhoods and mortality rates in the early 20th century, exposing segregation’s devastating impact on health more than 100 years ago.
The study shows segregation drove racial health disparities “not just today, but [also] in the past,” says New York University community psychologist Adolfo Cuevas, who was not involved in the work.
John Parman, an economist at the College of William & Mary, says the new results are striking because they document the impacts even before the makings of the Jim Crow era in the late 19th century, which legalized and enforced racial segregation and is known to have exacerbated health inequities.
A growing body of evidence has shown that, today, neighborhoods with majority nonwhite residents tend to have poorer health—the result of many accumulated social and environmental inequalities such as systematic overcrowding, higher noise levels due to industrial projects, and exposure to toxic hazards. But how early such residential segregation began to affect health was not clear, says J’Mag Karbeah, a health services researcher at the University of Minnesota (UM) who led the new study. “What is really missing is this crucial period post-Emancipation and before the formalization of Jim Crow legislation,” she says.
So Karbeah and J. David Hacker, a demographic historian at UM, set out to correlate early segregation with child mortality, a proxy for the health of the entire population. “If you don’t have a healthy young population, you won’t have healthy working-age adults, [and] you will not have healthy seniors,” Karbeah says. “It’s really predictive of the quality of your society in the next 40 or 50 years.”
The researchers used census data from 1900 and 1910 that were recently processed by the Minnesota Population Center at UM. The lists, which together cover about 168 million people, include information on literacy, race, and whether the individual lived in a rural or urban area. Census takers also asked each surveyed woman who had ever been married how many children she had given birth to and how many were still alive.