Introduction | Literature Review | Data & Analysis | Conclusion | Sources

Historical Context

The historical context of education in the American South is essential in recognizing the patterns of education in the early 20th century. Before the Civil War, African Americans were largely barred from literacy. Legally, it was a punishable offense in Southern states to provide education to enslaved people (Margo, 1990). Following the end of the Civil War, during Reconstruction, literacy rates among African Americans in the South were staggeringly behind that of their uneducated white counterparts (Margo, 1990). However, the generational experience of having their right to education stripped from them caused a desire to become educated among African Americans in the South as a way of exercising their freedom (Edwards, 2020). southern whites did not ever share this feeling. They only began to take education seriously when their position as a dominant class in society was threatened around the turn of the 20th century (Anderson, 2005). This led southern whites to begin a campaign of educational discrimination.

Discrimination

As the literacy gap began to shrink between African Americans and whites in the South, around the turn of the 20th century, southern states began to allocate school funding based on race. For example, in Mississippi, African Americans made up 60% of the population but only received 20% of educational funding in 1910 (Anderson, 2005). Black communities of the South were “grossly underserved.” (Edwards, 2020; pg. 38). One area where this was particularly prominent was secondary education, which includes grades nine through twelve. By the latter half of the 1910s, secondary education in the South transitioned from a luxury reserved for the elite to more available to the masses. However, southern white elites largely excluded black children from this trend. In 1916, Georgia was home to 122 secondary schools in total, none of which were allowed to educate black students. While there was a closing of the gap in literacy rates in the early 20th century, educational attainment, such as receiving diplomas, of black students lagged behind that of their white counterparts. This was due to the lack of funding and availability of schooling for black children based on race (Margo, 1990).

Due to the lack of public funding from counties and the state, many schoolhouses in black areas were funded privately, either by the community or charity organizations (Anderson, 2005). This, however, did not mean that southern black communities were not independent from the public education system. Despite receiving disproportionately less funding, they were still forced to pay an equal tax as white southerners for public education. This led to a phenomenon of “double taxation,” in which African Americans had to pay for both the public education of white southerners and the private education of their own communities (Macleod, 1998). The implementation of private education in most communities were either facilitated by Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, which focused on an industrial education, or, in areas in which a more long-term education focused on academic advancement was desired, Rosenwald Schools (Macleod, 1998). Rosenwald Schools were widely implemented throughout the South, numbering 5,000 by 1936 (ibid).

Labor and School

The need for labor was a crucial hindrance to the education of all Southern children in the early 20th century. However, not all forms of labor played an equal role in their effects on school attendance. Notably, the agricultural labor seen in the rural South had much less of an impact on attendance than textile labor seen in urban areas around the region (Walters, 1992). This was because of the predictable growing seasons that only required labor during the planting and harvesting of crops. In contrast, the textile industry required constant labor and, therefore, demanded more labor from children who could otherwise be sent to schools (Walters, 1993). Generally, the textile industry used young white laborers and rarely employed black laborers (ibid). This could have contributed to narrowing the school attendance gap between white and black children. As the South continued with its efforts to industrialize, this trend difference could have continued until child labor laws were implemented. Many of these laws, pushed primarily by the federal budget, took longer to take hold in the South than in the rest of the country as the South saw child labor as necessary for its industrialization (Cope, 2023). Southern states would go on to pass numerous, widely applicable exceptions to compulsory education laws (Cope, 2023). These laws effectively shut out not only black populations from education but poor rural southern whites as well (Edwards, 2020).