The plantation mode of agricultural production was widespread in the American South through the 1950s. In a recent publication in Social Science & Medicine, Cheryl Elman (Visiting Research Fellow), Matthew E. Dupre (Department of Population Health Sciences) and colleagues at the University of Alabama and Emory University, examined all-cause mortality in Non-Hispanic Black and White birth cohorts (1920-1954) drawn from REasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS), a national study.
We linked REGARDS to two U.S. Plantation Censuses (1916, 1948) to examine whether mortality rates and race-related differences in rates reflected birthplace exposure to Jim Crow-era economic inequalities associated with plantation farming. We additionally examined the life course timing of geographic exposure: at birth, in adulthood (study enrollment baseline), both portions of life, or neither.
Using stratified proportional hazards models, we found mortality hazard rates higher for self-identified Black compared to White participants, regardless of birthplace, and for the southern-born compared to those not southern-born (Black and White persons). In race-stratified models, we found birthplace-mortality associations fully attenuated among White (except in one Plantation South subregion) but not Black participants. Overall, mortality hazard rates were highest among Black and White REGARDS participants born in only one of two Plantation South subregions. It is in this subregion where pre-Civil War plantation production under enslavement was followed by high-productivity plantation farming, to the 1950s, under the southern Sharecropping System. The Black-White mortality differential was the largest in this birthplace subregion as well.