Effects of Colorism on Mortality in 19th Century North Carolina

Tiffany Green, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Tod G. Hamilton, Harvard University

This research seeks to look at the ways in which colorism may have contributed to and exacerbated historical inequalities in health outcomes after the Civil War. To examine these issues, we use a unique new dataset comprised of existing sources, including the 1880 North Carolina Census Death Records and the entire 1880 North Carolina Census. Preliminary results indicate that there were persistent gaps between blacks, mixed-race blacks, and whites in areas such as infant mortality, life expectancy and death from infectious diseases. We continue to investigate the role of gender in determining intra- and inter-group mortality differences.