When Social Security was first passed, benefits were largely denied to both agricultural and domestic workers. This move disproportionately affected blacks and other minorities,
who were overrepresented in those fields.
A recent study by the Center for Social Development at the Washington University in St. Louis attempts to estimate the economic and political consequences of this exclusion.
The excluded black workers lost $143.20 billion in today’s dollars; their white counterparts lost $460.80 billion this way. The report concludes that this exclusion stifled
the economic growth of the American South and preserved racist post-Reconstruction power structures.