Increasingly, researchers are recognizing that risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD) in adulthood is rooted in the social and material life conditions of childhood, and that these childhood conditions may predict risk for CVD above and beyond traditional adulthood indicators of socioeconomic status (SES) such as education, occupation or income. Nowhere is this life course perspective on CVD risk more important than in the case of African Americans, especially the generation that "came of age" in the U.S. South in the late 1950s and 1960s, the peak years of the modern Civil Rights Movement. While some African American members of this age cohort were able to take advantage of the new opportunities for economic advancement, some others were not, resulting thereafter in different life course trajectories of exposure to social and economic hardship. The relationship between variations in these social and economic life course trajectories, and CVD risk (specifically hypertension) in adulthood, has not been investigated in African Americans.