Rural Free Delivery and Black Agricultural Productivity

The introduction of Rural Free Delivery, and the mail-order catalog industry it enabled, connected Black Americans in the rural South to a national marketplace beyond the discriminatory Southern country store. Using a novel data set of route locations and the plausibly quasi-random roll-out of rural postal routes, I provide the first evidence that the introduction of rural routes increased fertilizer expenditures in counties with higher shares of Black farmers. I utilize the linked census data to show that this is accompanied by an increase in literacy and school attendance for Black children exposed to rural routes.