For Americans living in the Southern United States, poverty rates above the national level, lower rates of economic mobility, and high rates of economic inequality are persistent features of life. A key factor explaining these trends, especially among children, is the Southern economic development model. This model emerged from the efforts of wealthy Southerners to continue extracting un- or undercompensated labor from freed Black men and women following the end of the Civil War, when it became largely illegal to enslave African Americans (Childers 2024a; Mast 2025).1
