Building a New Educational State: Foundations, Schools, and the American South

Building a New Educational State

Building a New Educational State

Foundations, Schools, and the American South

Joan Malczewski

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-39462-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-39476-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226394763.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Malczewski, Joan, author.

Title: Building a new educational state : foundations, schools, and the American South / Joan Malczewski.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016001730 | ISBN 9780226394626 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226394763 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Education—Southern States—Finance. | Endowments—Southern States.

Classification: LCC LA230.5.S6 M35 2016 | DDC 371.2/060975—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016001730

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1  The Thrill of This State-Building Work

2  Organize in Every Community

3  There Are at Least Two Souths

4  The Splendid Support of Private Interests

5  Working with Them a Step at a Time

6  Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the many people who made this work possible. I am fortunate to have had great teachers and mentors throughout my life, including Dorothy Fordyce, Bud Woods, and Patricia Woods, who inspired me to learn, helped me to find opportunities, and provided an important example of the significant role that teachers and schooling can play in the lives of rural students. My career path has not been conventional, and a number of people encouraged and supported my academic pursuits, including Mary Brabeck, Robby Cohen, Tom James, Ron Robin, Steve Thornton, Diana Turk, and Jonathan Zimmerman.

The arguments for this book have been developed over a number of years. Many colleagues both encouraged the work and helped me to refine my arguments with extremely valuable comments at conferences and in response to written work. Those individuals include Brian Balogh, Elisabeth Clemens, Adam Fairclough, James Leloudis, Tracy Steffes, and Christine Woyshner. The writing group at New York University has provided me with detailed and constructive comments on my work, as well as invaluable career support from colleagues, including Gretchen Aguiar, Lisa Andersen, Zoe Burkholder, Victoria Cain, Ansley Erickson, Cody Ewert, Nick Juravich, Rachel Lissy, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, and Jon Zimmerman. I appreciate the invaluable comments that I received on the introduction from Christopher Loss, Jim Fraser, and Tracy Steffes, and useful information from Larry Kramer and David Yaffe that helped me to shape my arguments. In addition, I am especially grateful to Jonathan Zimmerman and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann for providing feedback on significant sections of the manuscript, and to Robby Cohen and Richard Arum for graciously agreeing to read and comment on the entire manuscript, which included reviewing some sections more than once.

I was fortunate to receive a grant from the Spencer Foundation that supported numerous trips to the archives, as well as research assistance. Thanks to the archivists at the Atlanta University Center, Robert Woodruff Library, the State Archives of North Carolina, Special Collections at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Special Collections at Fisk University, and Special Collections at the University of Chicago, and in particular to Tom Rosenbaum at the Rockefeller Archive Center. Jordan Mylet, Hannah Hendler, Jennifer Villarosa, Amy Karwoski, Daniel Hyman-Cohen, and Jade Bettine are incredibly talented students who were instrumental to me completing the work. I am particularly indebted to Jade, who remained with the project to the end. Thank you also to the Steinhardt School at New York University, which provided an IDEA Grant and encouraged me to pursue my interest in this topic. Special thanks are also due to Timothy Mennel at the University of Chicago Press, who shepherded the manuscript through publication, and to Carol McGillivray for her detailed copyedits. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose extremely helpful and detailed feedback strengthened the book in numerous ways.

Anyone who has written a book knows how consuming a project it can be. Fortunately, I have an incredible family that supports everything that I do. My parents taught me to work hard and to make good choices, even difficult ones. My brothers and sisters remind me to have a sense of humor. Sydney, Eero, Luke, Zora, and Elias may bring some added work to my life but, with Sam, also bring endless joy and balance. Finally, thanks to Richard, who has been a constant source of encouragement and support.

Introduction

William C. Chance established the Parmele Industrial Institute in Martin County, North Carolina, in 1910.¹ A local newspaper reported that the school was located in a region where the percentage of black illiteracy was high and the greatest hope for the colored race is in their being trained to the habits of industry, thrift, and economy.² Chance, an experienced educator who had studied law at Howard University and took classes at the Hampton Institute, the North Carolina College for Negroes at Durham, and LaSalle University in Chicago, appealed to students at the institute’s first commencement exercises to aspire to lofty ideals, and at all times cultivate such habits as go to make real men and women.³ However, it was difficult in 1910 in the Jim Crow South to sustain an independent black school with such aspirations. Chance advertised regularly in local papers to attract students and financial contributions. While state reports on the institution indicated that he was doing good work, with guidance from a board of directors that included prominent white southerners, many southern whites were opposed to black schooling in the South.⁴ In 1914, Chance’s house was dynamited, substantially damaging the structure though he escaped without injury.⁵ It was in that year that he decided to accept annual foundation and county contributions to the institute in exchange for turning the school over to the county, which the state would then develop to provide teacher training to rural blacks in the region surrounding Martin County. While Chance would remain principal of the school, he would report to the county superintendent.

The decision to turn the institute over to the state was more complicated than it might seem because black educators and white southerners did not necessarily agree on how best to educate rural blacks. Chance hoped to provide educational opportunity to the region’s black students and believed in academic and industrial training. However, the foundations and the state hoped to bring independent black schools into a public system and to dictate the type of education made available. The Parmele Industrial Institute was renamed the Martin County Training School, a precursor to regular public high schools for rural blacks in the South. Chance made a difficult choice to grant formal control of the institution to the public system, but hoped he could have enough control to expand educational opportunity for blacks in the region.

Chance understood what he was up against. A few months before his decision to give up Parmele as an independent institution, he had joined prominent black educators from across the state at the First North Carolina Conference for Negro Education. He was named secretary of the conference, reflecting the respect that black and white educators had for his work. The conference was organized by Nathan Newbold, the white state agent for Negro education in North Carolina’s Division of Instruction, to promote black teacher training in industrial education and greater standardization of public schooling.⁶ Conference presentations by white educators focused on the need for an education system that differentiated between black and white students. Newbold had been instrumental in working to transfer the Parmele Industrial Institute over to Martin County.

Newbold’s salary was paid by the General Education Board (GEB), a white northern philanthropic fund that promoted southern education reform. Other foundations, including the Rosenwald Fund and the Negro Rural School Fund, also appointed agents throughout the South to promote education reform at the state and local level and sent representatives to the conference. Newbold’s report of the proceedings was one of hundreds submitted to northern philanthropists by education field workers located within state and local political systems with salary provided, at least in part, through funding from northern philanthropists. The result was an array of public-private collaborations that helped to develop an education infrastructure for rural blacks, and created institutional arrangements that strengthened state and local governance capacity in some regions of the South. The stories of those efforts are the focus of this book, which explores rural black school reform, the nature of foundation power, and the relationship of both to political development in the early twentieth century.

Scholarship in the history of education has considered the important influence of northern foundations on southern reform. Much of that work has presented a more instrumentalist view of foundation work, rather than one that acknowledges its relationship to broader national goals of state building. That scholarship demonstrates that foundations sought to impose their own education vision on southern communities, one that would promote their own power and serve their business interests by stabilizing both the labor force and the economy.⁷ It has also provided evidence that philanthropists gave significantly less funding to programs for southern blacks than whites and promoted an inferior industrial-education curriculum in local segregated schools.⁸ In fact, on the eve of World War II, decades after foundations began their work in the South, a report on southern black schools in Mississippi made clear that the profound inequities in that state had not been addressed. There was a dire need for furniture and teaching materials—comfortable seating facilities, stoves, blackboards, erasers, crayons, supplementary reading materials, maps, flash cards, and charts . . . in hundreds of rural schools there are just four blank, unpainted walls, a few old rickety benches, an old stove propped up on brickbats, and two or three boards nailed together and painted black for a blackboard.⁹ This was not the case in most white communities, where the state had been building a more modern public system of education since the early part of the century.

Such anecdotal facts paint a compelling picture of the extent to which foundation programs failed to address adequately the gross inequality between black and white schooling in the South. However, northern foundations expanded schooling and were important to southern education and political development, contributions that are apparent when viewed through the lens of progressivism and state building in the early twentieth century. Foundation leaders collaborated with black and white reformers from both the North and the South, and sought to modernize the South by creating an education infrastructure at the state and local level. In the process, a reform dynamic developed that precluded merely a top-down process, simultaneously influencing not just education reform but also the interest groups and institutions that promoted it. Schooling was an essential component of state formation in the South, especially in rural black communities. It provided a central organizing venue for creating stronger ties among local, state, and federal governance, and an important conduit for disseminating education ideals not just to children in classrooms but also beyond school walls and into the homes of community members. Blacks promoted rural education with or without foundation funding. However, collaborative action created a dynamic process for reform and opportunities to move black participation outside the boundaries of rural communities into formally established institutional sites that might sustain reform over the longer term and create new opportunities to expand political participation. Schooling provided institutional venues for philanthropists and rural blacks to promote a variety of goals that were sometimes contradictory and sometimes complementary.

This book considers the dynamic process of black education reform in two southern states, North Carolina and Mississippi. Extensive archival research that explores the initiatives of foundations and reformers at the top, the impact of that work at the state and local level, and the voices of southerners, including those in rural black communities, demonstrates the importance of schooling to political development in the South and challenges us to reevaluate the relationships among political actors involved in education reform. Leaders of the modern foundations were self-conscious state builders and policy entrepreneurs who aimed to promote national ideals through a public system of education, efforts they believed to be critical in the South, and black education reform was an important component of this national agenda. Through extensive efforts to create a more centralized and standard system of public education that would bring isolated and rural black schools into the public system, schooling served as an important site for expanding state and local governance capacity. Schooling provided opportunities to reorganize local communities and affect black agency in the process. Foundations could not unilaterally impose their education vision on the South, particularly in local black communities, and the collaboration that developed between foundation agents and local citizens could expand schooling and open political opportunity structures in rural areas. Unfortunately, this potential was realized in only a limited number of southern regions. While foundations were effective at developing the institutional configurations necessary to education reform, they were less effective at implementing programs consistently in local areas due to each state’s distinctive political and institutional context.

Public Education and the South

Northern efforts to reform southern education began with Reconstruction, when philanthropists and denominational organizations descended upon the South in an effort to promote educational opportunities for free blacks.¹⁰ Education programs, coordinated by the Freedmen’s Bureau and staffed by black and white teachers from both the North and the South, sought to equip the freed men and women for citizenship and promote self-reliance, self-discipline, and spiritual and moral regeneration.¹¹ Private organizations provided support for teachers and initiatives that included small rural schools, denominational academies, higher-education institutions, and teacher-training programs.¹² These efforts represented the first comprehensive effort to create a public system of schooling in the South.

The South had been relatively unaffected by the nineteenth-century common school movement in the North. Most antebellum southern whites attended denominational or subscription schools or were part of the plantation elite and educated by private tutors. Wealthy plantation landowners who relied on tutors also dominated southern politics and had little interest in educating poorer whites.¹³ Some antebellum southern states, typically the more progressive states that were closer to the Mason-Dixon line, considered public-school legislation by the middle of the nineteenth century, but North-South sectionalism in the decade preceding the war made southerners deeply suspicious of northern institutions, and many linked abolitionist sentiment with northern free-school advocacy.¹⁴ The development of public schooling after the war was a monumental task given the economic devastation and the lack of an existing education infrastructure. Many southerners were reluctant to pay taxes or establish state-level supervisory mechanisms for common school systems, especially if based on northern institutions and funding.

White supremacy posed the most important impediment to the expansion of public education both before and after the war. Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion led to severe restrictions on education for slaves and free blacks, ensuring that most blacks in the antebellum South would be illiterate.¹⁵ It was illegal for enslaved African Americans to learn how to read and write, and severe penalties were legislated not just for the slaves who attempted it but also for the freed blacks who tried to teach them. However, laws that prevented black literacy simultaneously reinforced southern white perceptions that the black race was inferior, and created in southern blacks the perception that education was the antithesis to slavery. The very feeling of inferiority forced upon southern blacks by slavery gave them an intense desire to be educated, a hunger met by northerners after the war who hoped to make provisions for it.¹⁶ In a context in which many southern whites failed to see the benefits of expanded educational opportunity for either race, It was only the other part of the laboring class, the black folk, who connected knowledge with power; who believed that education was the stepping-stone to wealth and respect, and that wealth, without education, was crippled.¹⁷ Efforts to expand educational opportunity in the black community came from blacks themselves, who established their own schools with or without outside support.

While there were education gains after the war, by the end of the nineteenth century northern interest waned, and the planter class regained power. The expanded education infrastructure created during Reconstruction, when most southern states had established racially segregated schools, was effectively dismantled. The end of Radical Reconstruction, the emergence of Jim Crow segregation, a stronger Democratic Party, and the plantation sharecropping economy made it virtually impossible to create a public school system, especially one that included blacks in any meaningful way. In addition, those earlier reforms had not reflected any agreement about the relationship of schooling to southern progress. Some reformers had promoted education as the foundation of a new egalitarian order that supported free labor, while others believed that education was best used to address racial limitations in segregated schools, rather than as a vehicle to modernize and reconstitute the South.¹⁸ Yet, education remained an important vehicle by which reformers from both the North and the South hoped to shape southern society.

The idea that education could shape American society was certainly not new. Education had also been critical to state formation in the early days of the Republic when legislators and reformers across the nation regarded the common school as the sine qua non of republicanism, and the safest branch of the government.¹⁹ Schooling was important to addressing the social tensions and risks of industrialization, when reformers believed that it could safeguard democracy and provide for the individual and collective welfare of children.²⁰ By the end of the nineteenth century, when American farmers expressed their dissatisfaction with rural life through such populist movements as the Grange, education was considered important to addressing agrarian concerns. The Country Life Commission, organized by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, recommended public education in rural areas, along with better roads and rural free delivery of the mail to address the relative isolation of these communities.²¹

While the commission’s work was national in scope, the South presented a difficult context, given a majority black population in many rural areas and white southern attitudes about both public schooling and race. Most southerners, if they even supported black education, believed that white education was the first priority. Many southern states promoted legislation at the beginning of the twentieth century that would serve rural whites, including consolidated school districts that would benefit from economies of scale and a wider tax base to support better facilities and teachers. However, strict parameters for education reform limited progress, and southern blacks were mostly unaffected by comprehensive efforts to make rural life more palatable in a modern age, except in the case of federally mandated rural free mail delivery.²²

Problems of taxation and local governance also impeded reform. States across the nation in the early twentieth century were considering tax legislation that would place a greater burden on corporations and railroads, address rising income inequality through inheritance taxes, and equalize property values in order to increase tax revenues and have citizens share equally in payment.²³ Southerners shared these concerns, but their conversations about tax reform reflected important regional differences. Southern states also relied on property tax revenues, but most states relied on regressive taxes, particularly the poll tax, to fund education. Statewide property taxes that were collected locally augmented the school revenues raised through the poll tax. However, poll-tax revenues decreased after Jim Crow disfranchisement, making it difficult to find sufficient funding for education. Many southerners were deeply suspicious of tax increases after the Civil War and Reconstruction, when they were taxed heavily to cover the costs of war and its related debts. As a result, post-Reconstruction southern constitutions typically disallowed local tax levies or placed strict constitutional limits on the combined total of state and local levies.²⁴ In addition, unequal assessments across counties within states ensured that local communities would fight for scarce resources, which always went to benefit white schools first.²⁵ White supremacy complicated conversations about tax reform across the region and limited what was available to black communities.

It was difficult to separate conversations about tax reform from the problems of governance. Local governance in the South, where most people lived in areas that were relatively rural, was based on a county system that relied on patronage politics and single-party rule, and was generally managed by part-time officials with limited expertise. The region had relatively less administrative capacity than the North, limited funding to invest in county governance structures, and little incentive to alter them. The Brookings Institution issued a series of reports beginning in 1928 that explored the administrative capacity of a number of states across the nation and indicated that many in the South failed adequately to distribute duties and responsibilities between the state and its political subdivisions, including county governments, or to direct and control the provision of public services. The administrative oversight of county finances, taxation, health and human services, schooling, and roads was often underdeveloped.²⁶

Local governance issues created particular problems for school reform. The rural nature of the South meant that many regions lacked town centers and did not perceive that schools were a central defining feature of their communities. The smaller, rural communities that had developed their own schools were generally isolated from formal governance structures. The lack of state standards for a public system of schools, combined with limited managerial or education expertise at the local level meant that there was minimal oversight, little data available, and wide variation in school terms, teacher training and remuneration, curriculum and pedagogy.²⁷ Further, southerners during Jim Crow were against policies that would lead to a loss of local control and threaten the racial state.

The US commissioner of education reported in 1910 that the the percentage of illiteracy was greatest in the South, negro population largest, and urban population smallest, [with] the percentage of the school population enrolled, the ratio of average daily attendance, average length of school term, average salaries of teachers, and per capita expenditures for schools smaller than any other region.²⁸ The average year for enacting compulsory schooling was 1912 in the South as compared to 1870 in the North, and there were typically not measures in the South guaranteeing enforcement, especially for rural black students, with school terms shaped by agricultural cycles well into the 1930s.²⁹ The total budget for public schooling was significantly smaller in the South where schools met on average one hundred days fewer than northern schools with barely more than one-third of school-age children enrolled.³⁰ The South was significantly behind in developing a public system of schools that extended to rural areas and included members of both races.

Southern blacks faced a formidable challenge. While they continued to fight for expanded educational opportunity in spite of Jim Crow, the politics of white supremacy was especially significant at the local level and limited what they could do. The Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson legalized separate but equal, and its 1899 decision in Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education legalized segregation in the schools. However, segregated schools in the South were anything but equal. Expenditures for southern black students averaged only half of that for southern whites, with shorter school terms, fewer schoolhouses, and far lower pay scales for black teachers.³¹ A merely quantitative description of the disparities that existed between black and white schools does not adequately capture the social and political context of the Jim Crow South. Most southern whites could simply see no benefit in providing blacks with greater educational opportunity, regardless of whether expanded public schooling required higher taxes and a loss of local control. Black citizens across the South understood that, yet continued to fight for greater equality in education, often at great risk to themselves and their schools.

The Jim Crow environment shaped black behavior and raised the constant specter of white reprisals that could further limit resources and result in personal harm. Between 1889 and 1929, 2,785 blacks were lynched in the South, and inhabitants of the most sparsely populated regions were at a much higher risk than someone living nearer to urban areas.³² Civil rights activist Minnie Ripley recalled attending the Piney Woods boarding school for blacks in Mississippi in 1918. To establish that school he [founder Laurence Jones] had to go through some hardships with the landowners . . . because he bought that land, and a black man had problems buying land back then. . . . Sharecroppers was [sic] coming there to school, even grown people were coming there to school, and they attempted to hang him once about that. She recalled that students and teachers hoped to expose the plight of southern blacks to outsiders. We would publish a pamphlet, and we had to hide those pamphlets, and I wouldn’t let any of those pamphlets be thrown around on the campus, and these pamphlets would be sent up North.³³ Teacher reports from Mississippi in 1919 illustrate the severity and intractability of the problem. A teacher in Coahama County said that there were eighty-five black schools, but half were in churches and half were in lodges because most had been injured by storms and should be condemned. A teacher in Noxubee County noted that most of the sixty-three schools were in churches and shacks.³⁴ Black communities typically organized their own schools in makeshift spaces, with inadequate equipment, school terms tied to the agricultural cycle, and too few classrooms and teachers to meet the needs of rural communities.

Significant variation existed among states and among communities within the same states or regions in the South, providing evidence of the extent to which local politics determined and limited educational change.³⁵ Bura Hilbun, the white state agent for Negro education in Mississippi, who was also funded by the GEB, visited Carroll County in 1917 and found schools in a very unsatisfactory condition. He thought that the county Superintendent would do more for the negroes were it not for the fear of his losing his hold on the people in a political way.³⁶ Local politics made improving the black schools almost impossible in many regions. The appointment of Bura Hilbun in Mississippi suggests that northern foundations could exercise significant control over education reform in the South. Yet, most of Mississippi’s white politicians and constituents, echoing the beliefs of many across the South, adamantly opposed establishing a public, tax-supported universal system of education. Education reform, however, was not just a southern issue but also a national one that inspired foundation involvement.

Southern Education and the Emergence of the Twentieth-Century Foundations

The modern foundation emerged in the early twentieth century, guided by professional expertise and research to inform goals, and made direct efforts to influence public opinion.³⁷ While foundations had existed since the earliest days of the state, scholars have called the first half of the twentieth century the classic period of American foundations, in which a small group of philanthropic organizations played an outsized role in American life. Many focused on education and some continued a legacy of philanthropic giving in the South that began with emancipation. The newer foundations played critical roles in the dramatic transformation of several key areas in American life, underwriting policy work that was nonsectarian, secular, and science based. In the process, they helped to create institutions and agencies devoted to the study of particular sets of public problems, often in tandem with state universities and government agencies.³⁸ The GEB, Negro Rural School Fund (Jeanes Fund), and the Rosenwald Fund shared these important characteristics and contributed significant sums of money in the early twentieth century to build a publicly funded system of universal schooling in the South. Other philanthropists, including Anson Phelps-Stokes and Andrew Carnegie in the North and the Duke family in the South, also funded southern reform efforts. However, the trustees of the GEB, Jeanes Fund, and Rosenwald Fund worked closely together, and members often served simultaneously on more than one of the boards, creating an interlocking directorate that was a powerful force in education reform.

George Foster Peabody had established the Peabody Fund in 1867 as the first large, secular foundation operating in the South, and John Slater followed in 1881 with the Slater Fund. These foundations served as a model for the newer foundations. The GEB, funded by John D. Rockefeller in 1902, contributed to a range of initiatives and helped to coordinate and oversee the work of all of the funds that were active in the South. The Jeanes Fund was established with a bequest by wealthy Quaker Anna T. Jeanes in 1907, and provided supervising teachers to rural communities. The Rosenwald Fund, established by Sears, Roebuck magnate Julius Rosenwald with initial gifts in 1912 and a formal endowment in 1917, is best known for its contributions for schoolhouse construction but also funded such education initiatives as the extension of school terms and school libraries.³⁹

The Conference for Education in the South, an annual meeting that began in 1898 in Capon Springs, West Virginia, shaped the agenda of these foundations. These meetings brought together leaders in farming, business, church, and education from both the North and the South and became an important venue for far-reaching collaboration between reformers, university scholars, northern businessmen, and southerners who represented state interests.⁴⁰ The conference established the Southern Education Board (SEB) in 1901, with sufficient funding for annual operating expenses to oversee the evolving work, but no endowment. The SEB provided executive oversight but did not fund specific education initiatives. That was left to the foundations. Edgar Garner Murphy, a clergyman from Arkansas who served as a vice president of the annual conference, encouraged philanthropic participation and believed their gifts were in service to the nation. When the people, through their government, educate themselves, they educate themselves for government. . . . Every true gift of a genuine philanthropy represents the thought of what is due not only to the child but to our country.⁴¹ The GEB was a direct outgrowth of conference efforts.⁴²

The main goal of the conference was to develop a universal system of education in the South, supported by public taxation and administered as a public business.⁴³ However, it was difficult to separate education goals for the South from loftier national ideals. As one prominent member of the conference pointed out, the common belief was that the great social duty of the age was the salvation of society, which began with the salvation of the child, and was intended to promote democratic values that would be dominant and universal. Thus, in a very special way, our political institutions unfold an inspired mission that deeply concerns the moral progress of the world. Thus the state should become the universal missionary of a political gospel both at home and abroad.⁴⁴ Conference participants also believed universal education should include both races.

The issues presented by the negro in American life are national . . . because of the principles, because of the industrial and political assumptions, which they involve. The national welfare is the larger context of every local problem; and while the negro question finds its locality in the South, it must find its ultimate adjustment—if it ever receives adjustment—in the conscience, the wisdom, the knowledge, the patience, the courage of the nation.⁴⁵

Reformers did not promote education equality, but universal education for conference participants meant the education of both black and white students, which they believed necessary for a stronger state. We declare such education to be the foremost task of our statesmanship, and the most worthy object of philanthropy.⁴⁶

While reformers were inspired by national goals, they also understood that the work had to take place locally. The foundations designed programs and bureaucratic structures that could enhance state and local governance capacity. Programs included the state agents for Negro education, Jeanes teachers, county training schools, and teacher-training programs. They also promoted tax reform, school consolidation, term extensions, minimum teacher salaries and standards for certification, and a philanthropic mode of funding that both coexisted with state and local budgets and operated discretely.⁴⁷ These initiatives helped to coordinate public schooling and overcome problems of administrative capacity, rationalize state education policy by creating minimum standards, and promote appropriate forms of oversight that connected local schools to state-level governance structures.⁴⁸ Foundation reformers hoped to create bureaucratic autonomy for public education based on education expertise rather than partisan and local rule.

Foundation reformers understood that an effective public system required an infrastructure supported by local citizens, and their programs encouraged such participation. They realized that philanthropic donations could never be adequate to building the education system that they envisioned; they understood that private donations and local taxation both transferred the burden of public schooling to the public and provided an avenue for citizens to demonstrate attitudes of self-help. Tax reform was an important means of promoting the connection between citizens and an emerging public system of schooling. The Jeanes teachers were central to foundation-based local reform because of their roles as community organizers, fundraisers, and supervisors of rural black schools. With the assistance of these local teachers, foundations promoted networks that extended across local and state boundaries and fostered dynamic relationships between white and black reformers.

Foundation programs used schooling to promote collaboration at every level of government, which could strengthen governance in the process. Education field workers who were located within state and local political systems with at least partial funding from northern philanthropists helped to strengthen administrative oversight of both schools and local communities. Both state agents and Jeanes teachers had positions in the formal governance structure, but reported to their foundation benefactors and to white state and local politicians, including the county superintendent. Foundations believed that the county Jeanes teachers would be important for local initiatives, implementing foundation programs and promoting stronger administrative structures and oversight. They also believed that the teachers could help to end the isolation of rural schools because they were required in their positions to participate in the broader reform dynamic. Public-private collaboration was instrumental to developing an education infrastructure for rural blacks in some southern regions and to producing institutional arrangements that enhanced state and local governance capacity.

A Reconsideration of Reformers’ Goals

The profound racism of the South influenced the agenda for education reform. Southern blacks worked to enhance their own educational opportunities, often in ways that diverged from white conceptions of black schooling. However, rural blacks were politically marginalized and lacked resources—and as a result northern foundations had particular influence by virtue of their largesse and efficiency.⁴⁹ Yet a conversation that starts and ends with racism can diagnose the limits of what was possible in the South, but neglects other important dimensions of foundation work and black agency. Education reform influenced the southern social and political structure in ways that went well beyond schooling. We can better understand its impact by considering it in the context of progressivism and state building in the early twentieth century.

Many of the foundation objectives make sense in the context of progressivism. The particular goals of foundation reformers, including taxation, bureaucratic supervision, and standardization were in line with broader efforts during the time period to make government efficient. Municipalities across the nation reformed local governance structures to rely more on professional expertise and modern managerial theories. Reformers hoped to overcome a system of local and partisan representation that expanded representative government and grassroots impulses but that reformers considered inefficient and irrational.⁵⁰ Business leaders, including such philanthropists as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, objected to local and particularistic interests that dominated public institutions, and in New York in 1906 they provided the funding for the New York Bureau of Municipal Reform, which aimed to provide nonpartisan expertise on governance matters.⁵¹ In the South, similarly, northern philanthropists perceived egregious examples of local, partisan, and inefficient rule, and they believed that efficiently designed governance systems would provide greater opportunity to develop and implement policy decisions that reflected the best scientific knowledge available. This required state and county governments that were led by experts with modern managerial ability, tax policies that allowed for sufficient revenues to support both governance and public education, and administrative systems that could develop and implement the policies of a modern industrialized state.

Foundation reformers wanted governance structures run by experts, so that they might advance their own ideas about policy development. They acted similarly in their efforts to expand public health initiatives in the South. For example, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission, formed in 1909, found most state public health agencies inadequate to meet the demands of a rigorous campaign to battle the hookworm, a parasite estimated to have infected as much as 40 percent of the southern population in the early twentieth century.⁵² The commission recognized that the best way to promote an efficient and scientific campaign to eradicate the parasite was through a network of established state agencies—yet these had been mostly ineffectual in the South. The commission also recognized that the most glaring deficiency in the South’s public health system was the lack of county organization.⁵³ A first priority was to strengthen existing governance structures by appointing scientifically minded state and local agents who reported to the commission. A decade of education reform in the South provided a blueprint for this work.

Efforts to expand state authority over the general well-being of children in this time gave the state a defining role in both education and the lives of American families.⁵⁴ Foundations believed that the creation of a public system of education, with formal oversight by efficient state and local governance structures, would help them promote ideals in the most public of spheres. In this way, education reform and state building were inextricably linked.⁵⁵ Yet, education reform was a complicated terrain.

The development of rural black schools required compromises among groups that often held contrasting racial conceptions. Some southern whites, including Mississippi governor James Vardaman, incited violence against blacks and asserted that any money spent on their education was a waste, while other virulent white supremacists, including North Carolina governor Charles Aycock, believed that universal and unequal education for blacks and whites was a key to the state’s political and economic development. Foundation officials and other participants in the Conference for Education in the South were similarly divided between those who believed that blacks were capable and deserving of only an inferior education and those who believed that education might positively affect perceived racial differences over time. More broadly, all of these groups differed in their conceptions of how racial difference affected the strength of the American nation-state and translated into state and local education policy.

The dynamic nature of education change, especially in local communities where rural black citizens participated in reform, adds an important bottom-up dimension to these efforts. Indeed, assuming that philanthropists exercised hegemonic control over education obscures the important role of locals, especially rural black teachers. The decentralized nature of the public system of schooling that foundation reformers developed in the South during the first half of the twentieth century allowed for a broad range of ideas and practices from both southern whites and black reformers.

Broad collaboration occurred because there were important areas of consensus. Many white reformers agreed on the need to address a southern problem that both related to and transcended views about race and equality. The failures of Reconstruction had led to a reduction in labor-force productivity, a focus on separatist political power, and a general retardation of southern political and economic development.⁵⁶ Southern separatism and backwardness challenged the nationalist ideals that inspired northern reformers and philanthropists, who believed that American national strength depended upon regional unity.⁵⁷ Further, a dependent black labor force in a region that provided the world’s cotton supply threatened the nation’s economic supremacy and cultural authority.⁵⁸ Colonialism around the world in the early twentieth century influenced perceptions of southern backwardness and generated a discourse about the South, resulting in an enduring paradox of southern reform that was simultaneously compounded colonialism and a nation building project.⁵⁹

An early report on southern education is illustrative, claiming it was more than a Southern problem; it is a national problem. . . . We cannot afford to let a great section of the country, containing one-sixth of our entire population, remain longer in this condition. . . . The education of the people of the South is today the supreme national question.⁶⁰ Public schooling could transform rural blacks into citizens who might govern themselves in preferred ways, promote national unity by disseminating shared ideals, aid in efforts to rehabilitate the South by providing an institutional means to reach rural communities, and make government more efficient in the process.⁶¹

Concerns about southern rehabilitation and political development also reflected another important area of consensus. Many reformers recognized the problem of extreme white supremacy and found the views of people like Governor Vardaman to be not just embarrassing, but also economically problematic. Even Governor Aycock conceded that economic welfare depended upon an educated workforce that would simultaneously prevent black migration to other states and prevent race warfare, which would be inimical to investment. Many foundation collaborators had extreme racial views, but recognized the need to limit the reach of white supremacy. This agreement provided a space for political action, even though the people who occupied that space often had extreme views about race and differed in their conceptions of the purposes of schooling.

Southerners of both races who collaborated with foundation reformers made difficult compromises that they believed served their interests. This was true for white-supremacist politicians who considered foundation initiatives politically expedient. It was especially true, however, for southern blacks, who had to make difficult choices about how best to promote black progress. Beginning with Reconstruction, black southerners worked to change the southern caste system, often with the help of outside intervention. Some black educators believed that industrial education had its advantages and that it might lead to more schooling in rural black communities, while others adamantly opposed this curriculum on the grounds that it limited black opportunity and might lead to a system overseen by white reformers committed to the racial state.⁶² Rural black teachers stood to gain significant support if they promoted foundation policies, even when those policies contradicted their political ideals. They saw the decision to work closely with foundations and their agents as a Faustian bargain that might simultaneously expand educational opportunity and limit local control and individual aspirations.

Foundation programs provided opportunities for marginalized citizens to participate in extrapolitical alliances as democratic citizens despite white supremacy. They influenced how rural black communities understood their relations not only with the government but also with their fellow citizens.⁶³ Local control was also a powerful source of education development and innovation in rural black communities, just as it was in white ones.⁶⁴ This does not mean that local communities defined reform initiatives or that rural blacks had significant power in the reform dynamic. However, foundation programs affected rural black agency, in some regions more than in others, and education organizations affected political opportunity structures over the longer term. Because southern whites often abrogated responsibility for rural black schools, local black teachers had relatively greater autonomy than white oversight of schools would seem to provide, and their positions created avenues to join the professional middle class. They worked to meet simultaneously the needs of both the rural black communities that they served and their foundation benefactors.

In the long and perilous road to civil rights, southern blacks often had to make such difficult choices. Black reformers recognized that foundations offered a ray of hope for expanded education in the short term, and for new possibilities over the longer term. Historian Nelson Lichtenstein argues that southern black support for labor unions presented similar complexities. While national labor unions failed to promote black labor interests adequately, the unions provided opportunities to challenge entrenched local elites.⁶⁵ Blacks could not vote in the South, but were allowed to vote in union elections. Historian Robert Norrell argues that Booker T. Washington’s work with northern foundations and southern white politicians and educators reflected a sophisticated strategy whereby he hoped to link black progress with the fortunes of the South. Washington wanted blacks to acquire land, wealth, skills, health, and education; his gradualism reflected difficult compromises.⁶⁶ Rural black citizens who sought to expand educational opportunities faced similar dilemmas. Foundations failed to challenge the gross inequality of white supremacy, yet offered an opportunity to