And yet, during this long and harrowing period of state-sanctioned exclusion, the chasm began to narrow. Ellora Derenoncourt, an economist at Princeton, has documented this slow convergence. In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, white Americans held fifty-six times the per-capita wealth of Black Americans. Within a decade, that ratio had been reduced to twenty-three to one. By 1920, it was ten to one. By mid-century, it was seven to one. The crowning legislative victories of the civil-rights era—the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act—came in the mid-nineteen-sixties, a full century after Emancipation. By then, the gap stood at roughly six to one.