By the time Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 98% of non-southern blacks (40% of all blacks) already resided in states with “fair employment” laws prohibiting labor market discrimination. Using census data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, the author assesses the impact of fair employment legislation on black workers' relative income, unemployment, labor force participation, migration, and occupational and industrial distributions. In general, the fair employment laws adopted in the 1940s appear to have had larger effects than those adopted in the 1950s, and the laws had considerably smaller effects on the labor market outcomes of black men than on those of black women.
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