Weak State, Stronger Schools: Northern Philanthropy and Organizational Change in the Jim Crow South (Report‪)‬

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IN THE UNITED STATES, the South lagged behind the North in the provision of public education and had a limited infrastructure for delivering it, especially in rural areas. In spite of the complicated southern social and political structure, a group of reformers that included northern philanthropists worked to promote change in the region's educational system. One philanthropic fund, the General Education Board (GEB), asserted in 1911, "The agency to which the South must look for the education of the masses of its people of the negro race as of the white is the state system of schools supported by public taxation and administered as a public business." (1) This principle was important not just to the education agenda of the philanthropists but also to southern political development more generally. The effort to create a public school system took place within a set of collaborative relationships between private interests and the public sphere, illustrating an important characteristic of political development across the South at the state and local level. These collaborative relationships were manifested in a complicated array of institutionalized programs that differed by region. In some areas of the South, the state had a stronger role in promoting education reform than in others, where private interests took the lead. As a result, educational and political development took place inconsistently, with changes occurring at different times and in different forms across the South. Progressive philanthropists were state builders who established centralized administrative capacity in the lower tiers of government and undermined the strength of sectional interests in setting educational policy. In this process, educational policy making specifically, as well as political development generally, occurred from the "bottom up."