1. Calhoun, John C., “A Disquisition on Government: And a Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States,” Cralle, Richard K., ed. (South Carolina: Walker and James, 1851), 21.Google Scholar

2. Walsh, Camille. Racial Taxation: Schools, Segregation, and Taxpayer Citizenship, 1869–1973 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. For example, voters incorrectly perceive that giveaways exist in the modern welfare state only for the poor because employers make payments on behalf of taxpayers and taxpayers receive benefits through tax deductions. See Howard, Christopher, The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).Google Scholar

4. Steffes, Tracy, School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Malczewski, Joan, Building a New Educational State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Ajay K. Mehrotra, “Fiscal Forearms: Taxation as the Lifeblood of the Modern Liberal State,” in The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control, eds. Kimberly J. Morgan and Ann Shola Orloff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 285; Einhorn, Robin, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 5.Google Scholar

6. Hammack, David and Anheier, Helmut K., A Versatile American Institution: The Changing Ideals and Realities of Philanthropic Foundation (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013).Google Scholar Zunz, Olivier, Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Keppel, Frederick, The Foundation: Its Place in American Life (New York: Macmillan Co., 1930; New York: Routledge, 1989).Google Scholar

7. “Thwing Gives Fourteen Points of Philanthropy,” The New York Times, February 15, 1925.

8. Edgar Garner Murphy, “The Task of the South: An Address before the Faculty and Students of Washington and Lee University, 1902,” accessed September 13, 2019, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101068033354&view=1up&seq=5.

Foundations acted similarly in their approach to southern public health initiatives. For example, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission 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. The Commission also recognized that the most glaring deficiency in the South’s public health system was the lack of county organization and sought to improve both that and networks of established state agencies. Ettling, John, The Germ of Laziness: Rockefeller Philanthropy and Public Health in the New South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 2, 118–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Fosdick, Raymond, Henry Pringle, and Katherine Douglas Pringle, Adventure in Giving: The Story of the General Education Board, a Foundation Established by John D. Rockefeller (New York: Harper and Row, 1962); James Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Malczewski, Building a New Educational State.

10. “Certificate of Incorporation of Negro Rural School Fund,” Series 1, Subseries 2, Folder 1924, Box 202, Papers of the General Education Board, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY; hereinafter referred to as RAC-GEB.

11. Rosenwald, who provided initial gifts in 1914 to Booker T. Washington for schoolhouse construction and a formal endowment in 1917, also provided funding for other southern education initiatives. Mary Hoffschwelle, The Rosenwald Schools of the American South (Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 9–48, 69.

12. Hammack and Anheier, A Versatile American Institution, 43–47. There were other philanthropists active in southern education, including Anson Phelps-Stokes and Andrew Carnegie in the North and the Duke family in the South.

13. Foundations promoted education reform through an array of institutional configurations that operated within a policy-making void. The term “associated action” typically includes elite actors and does not adequately capture policy development at the level of individual states or localities. Interstitial collaboration expands the definition of associated action that is currently in the scholarship. See Malczewski, Building a New Educational State, 22: Malczewski, “Interstitial Collaboration: Education Reform in the Jim Crow South,” Studies in American Political Development 31, no. 2 (October 2017), 238–258.

14. Natalie Ring argues that northerners worked to achieve national unity by “problematizing” southern progress in a process that was shaped by U.S. participation in global imperialization, framing the South as “backward” and in need of northern guidance in its evolution toward civilization, a context that shaped northern and southern perspective on national unity. Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 18. Richard Bensel details the long-term implications of Reconstruction policies in the South, particularly with respect to political development at the level of southern states and its implications for political and economic development. Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 236, 414–17. Malczewski provides greater detail of the implications of post-Reconstruction attitudes and policy for education reform in Malczewski, Building a New Educational State, 13–18, and on North Carolina in particular in chapter 3.

15. Report from the Bureau of Investigation and Information of the Southern Education Board, Proceedings of the Conference for Education in the South, the Sixth Session (New York: Issued by the Committee on Publication, 1903), 45.

16. Joseph Soss, Richard C. Fording, and Sanford F. Schram, Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3–4. The American welfare state is more robust than most people recognize when the private dimensions of social spending and tax benefits are taken into account, including schooling. Steffes, School, Society, and State. See also Jacob Hacker, The Divided Welfare State: the Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; Christopher Howard, The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths about U.S. Social Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Howard, The Hidden Welfare State.

17. Malczewski, Building a New Educational State, 14.

18. Malczewski, Building a New Educational State, 11–13.

19. Edwin Alderman, “The Child and the State,” in Proceedings of the Fifth Conference for Education in the South (Knoxville: Gaut-Ogden Company by the Southern Education Board, 1902), 58–59.

20. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery, 230.

21. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935; repr., New York: Atheneum, 1992); Bois, Du, “Negro Education,” and “Gifts and Education,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. Lewis, David Levering (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995)Google Scholar; Moss, Hilary, Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 94–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. Ron Butchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks and Reconstruction: Freedmen’s Education, 1862-1875 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980); Butchart, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861–1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980); Ullin Leavell, “Trends of Philanthropy in Negro Education: A Survey,” The Journal of Negro Education 2, no. 1 (1933): 38–52.

23. As late as 1930, the average per capita rate of wealth in the South was 53 percent of the average per capita rate in states outside of the South, based on averages of 14 southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia); the total yearly income per school child aged 5 to 17 was about two-fifths the national average (except in Maryland, which reached the national average). Fred McQuistion, Financing Schools in the South: Some Data Regarding Sources, Amounts, and Distribution of Public School Revenue in the Southern States, 1930 (Nashville: Julius Rosenwald Fund, 1930), 6; School Money in Black and White, Report by the Committee on Finance of the National Conference on Fundamental Problems in the Education of Negroes called by the U.S. Department of the Interior (Nashville: Julius Rosenwald Fund, 1934).

24. McQuistion, Financing Schools in the South, 4.

25. Northerners paid 9 cents per capita in 1830, 15 in 1840, and 36 in 1850; southerners paid 5 cents per capita (free) in 1830, 11 in 1840, and 26 in 1850. In 1850, northerners collected 31 cents per capita and southerners only 8 cents per capita (free) for school taxes. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery, 220–22. See also J. H. Hollander, Studies in State Taxation, with Particular Reference to the Southern States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1900).

26. Charles McIver, “Current Problems in North Carolina,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 22 (1903): 302.

27. C. J. Martin, History and Development of Negro Education in South Carolina, (Columbia, South Carolina: State Department of Education, Division of Instruction, 1949), 3.

28. White concerns about Black education began with Emancipation and reflected a lack of agreement about the relationship of education to the political economy of the South. For a discussion of Mississippi during Emancipation, see Christopher Span, From Cotton Fields to Schoolhouse: African American Education in Mississippi, 1862–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); for a more general discussion of the South, see Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South; Robert Margo, Race and Schooling in the South, 1880–1950: An Economic History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990; David Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); and Malczewski, Building a New Educational State.

29. Efforts to pass the bill provide a useful lens for understanding southern attitudes about education and the state. Many southerners believed the federal government should fund education because it had forced the South to end slavery but retain primary responsibility for educating Blacks. However, southern democrats who supported the idea of federal funding were concerned about federal control. One version placed almost complete control over funds by state officials. Some who opposed the bill thought federal support was unconstitutional and feared that spending a treasury surplus would lead to tariff increases. Others believed that it would destroy the self-reliance of the South and might be detrimental to local efforts to address important issues like taxation and ultimately lead to a nationalized and integrated school system that would recreate Reconstruction patterns of northern influence. Four different versions failed to pass congressional approval. Allen J. Going, “The South and the Blair Education Bill,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44, no. 2 (September 1957): 269; Daniel W. Crofts, “The Black Response to the Blair Education Bill,” The Journal of Southern History 37, no. 1 (February 1971), 43.

30. Einhorn argues that the institution of slavery defined an antigovernment rhetoric conceptualizing it as a danger to liberty. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery, 220–22.

31. For example, many southern states required taxpayers to furnish the assessor with a sworn list of items. Some states, like Kentucky, legislated that auditors could be called on to assess property omitted from the tax rolls, but this was both anomalous and rarely used. For a detailed description of state tax revenue systems for every state in the Union, see Plehn, Carl, Revenue Systems of State and Local Governments (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1907).Google Scholar

32. For example, Kentucky assessed a flat rate of 50 cents per $100 of assessed property values; in Mississippi the state tax was fixed at 6 mills on the dollar in 1907. These rates changed infrequently, and there was no annual evaluation that tied revenues to needs, the reverse of the practice of northern states or western states. Carl Plehn, Government Finance in the United States (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1915), 126; Plehn, Revenue Systems of State and Local Governments, 731.

33. Plehn, Revenue Systems of State and Local, 638. For example, Louisiana taxed insurance agents, slave traders, theaters, money brokers, pawn brokers, liquor retailers, circuses, menageries, racetracks, and peddlers operating from boats, billiard tables, factors, commission merchants, restaurants, coffeehouses and bars, furniture stores, lawyers, notaries, dentists, and hotel rooms. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery, 223–25.

34. Plehn, Revenue Systems of State and Local Governments (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1907), 652, 710, 787.

35. At the end of the nineteenth century, all southern states did not legislate special taxes, but as public schools expanded in white communities, more states added this option. In 1915, Alabama passed a constitutional amendment that enabled the “several counties in the several districts of any county” to collect a special property tax for school purposes, and in 1917, Florida legislature proposed an amendment that would require all counties to levy a school tax on taxable property. “Biennial Survey of Education 1916-1918,” U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education Bulletin 1919, no. 88 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921), 440, 508–09.

36. Plehn, Revenue Systems of State and Local; Lewis H. Machem, Tax Systems, Boards and Methods of Equalization of the Several States (Richmond: D. Bottom Superintendent of Public Printing, 1915).

37. For example, in majority white communities, the Black vote mattered less and the loss of Black poll tax revenues had less of an effect. In majority Black communities, a decrease in poll tax revenues could have a significant effect. It was also more important in majority Black communities to use legal and extralegal means to limit Black voting in order to ensure that policies continued to benefit local whites. Political rights, segregation, and racial attitudes varied by region and between urban and rural areas, but increasingly and primarily favored white students during Jim Crow. J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974). In his work on discrimination and schooling in Birmingham, Alabama, Carl Harris demonstrates that political and educational rights are shaped not only by time and space but also by political, organizational, economic, financial, and ideological factors. Carl Harris, “Stability and Change in Discrimination against Black Public Schools: Birmingham, Alabama, 1871–1931,” The Journal of Southern History 51, no. 3 (August 1985): 375–416.

38. A. C. Braxton to Hollis Burke Frissell, May 21, 1901, Folder 3, Box 1, Papers of the Southern Education Board, University of North Carolina Special Collections, Chapel Hill; hereinafter referred to as UNC-SEB.

39. Frenise A. Logan, “The Legal Status of Public School Education for Negroes in North Carolina, 1877–1894, in The Struggle for Equal Education, ed. Paul Finkelman (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), 435.

40. For an interesting discussion of the politics of special tax votes and ways in which Black and white voting power led to complicated local tax assessment elections in North Carolina, see Frenise A. Logan, “The Legal Status of Public School Education for Negroes in North Carolina, 1877–1894, in The Struggle for Equal Education, ed. Paul Finkelman.

41. For a detailed discussion of southern disfranchisement and one-party rule, see Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910.

42. The push for “redemption” by white southerners affected the development of new state constitutions across the South in the late nineteenth century and had a significant influence on all aspects of the southern racial state including education, the economy, public policies, and taxation. For more information, see Adward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (1995; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Ultimately, both major parties had to pander for greater power at the national level, especially following the populist revolt in the late nineteenth century, by appealing to the agrarian vote, which had implications subsequently for both federal and state politics. There were party realignments in the 1890s, and a more factionalized and entrepreneurial party system resulted. For example, stronger ties developed between representatives from the South and the West, which may have limited the willingness and ability of northern reformers to push for sweeping change. See Ann Marie Szymanski, “Beyond Parochialism: Southern Progressivism, Prohibition, and State-Building,” Journal of Southern History 69, no. 1 (February 2003): 107–37; Helen G. Edmonds, The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, 1894–1901 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951); Scott James, “Prelude to Progressivism: Party Decay, Populism, and the Doctrine of ‘Free and Unrestricted Competition’ in American Antitrust Policy, 1890–1897,” Studies in American Political Development 13, (Fall 1999): 288–336; Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). For further information about southern education, see Anderson, who argues that education reform was proscribed because education reformers and southern constituencies did not have a shared understanding of the relationship of education to the political economy of the South, particularly for southern Black citizens. Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South. Malczewski, in Building a New Educational State, builds on Anderson’s work, describing in greater detail the limitations of foundation work in the South and the Faustian bargain that many southern Black teachers had to make in order to promote education in their communities.

43. Carl Plehn, “The Nature and Causes of the Tax Reform Movement in the United States,” The Economic Journal 20, no. 77 (1910); Seligman, Edwin “The Separation of State and Local Revenues,” State and Local Taxation: National Conference under the Auspices of the National Tax Association: Addresses and Proceedings Volume 1, (1907): 485–88.Google Scholar

44. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery.

45. For information about the influence of the conference, see “The Conference and Community Organization,” Folder 149, Box 6, Series 2.2, UNC-SEB.

46. Baldwin, William, “The Present Problem of Negro Education, Industrial Education,” address by William H. Baldwin in Proceedings of the Second Capon Springs Conference for Christian Education in the South, 1899 (Raleigh, NC: Edwards and Broughton, printers, 1899), 70–75.

47. Letter to Frederick T. Gates, June 17, 1903, Folder 7414, Box 720, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY; hereinafter referred to as RAC-RFA, 6.

48. See Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which provided the legal framework for the racial state and Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education (1899), which legalized school segregation.

49. For more information on Black political rights, see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); Edmonds, The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina. For scholarship on education policy, see Christopher Span, From Cotton Fields to Schoolhouse; J. Morgan Kousser, “The Onward March of Right Principles”: State Legislative Actions on Racial Discrimination in Schools in Nineteenth Century America,” Historical Methods 35, no. 4 (Fall 2002), 177–204; and Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics; Ann Short Chirhart, Torches of Light: Georgia Teachers and the Coming of the Modern South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); Adam Fairclough, Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002); Michael Fultz, “African American Teachers in the South, 1890–1940: Powerlessness and the Ironies of Expectations and Protest,” History of Education Quarterly 35, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 401–22; Vanessa Siddle-Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); James LeLoudis, Schooling the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Sarah Thuessen, Greater than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919-1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 2–3; and Malczewski, Building a New Educational State.

50. William T. Harris, “Report of the Commissioner of Education,” in Reports of the Department of the Interior for Fiscal Year ended June 30, 1911, Volume II, Table 20 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912), xxxiii.

51. “Report of the Commissioner of Education.” See also the “Digest of State Laws Relating to Public Education in Force January 1, 1915,” U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education Bulletin 1915, no. 47 (Washington, DC, 1916), 628; and Louis Harlan, Separate and Unequal (New York: Atheneum, 1958).

52. Harlan, Separate and Unequal, 10–11. For a discussion of inequalities between Black and white schools in five urban areas in the South, see Howard N. Rabinowitz, “Half a Loaf: The Shift from White to Black Teachers in the Negro Schools of the Urban South, 1865–1890,” The Journal of Southern History 40, no. 4 (November 1974): 565–94.

53. “Leaves from a Supervisor’s Notebook,” 1911–1912, Folder 1198, Box 131, Series 1.1, RAC-GEB, 6.

54. Caroline Dickinson to Mr. Tate, December 6, 1912, in “Leaves from a Supervisor’s Notebook,” Folder 1198, Box 131, Series 1.1, RAC-GEB, 7.

55. Brittain to Buttrick, June 25, 1913, Folder 585, Box 67, Series 1.1, RAC-GEB.

56. George Dickerman, “Agent’s Report: The South Compared with the North in Educational Requirements,” in Proceedings of the Fourth Conference for Education in the South: Athens Meeting, 1901 (Washington, DC: Southern Education Board, 1901), 20.

57. Black tax rates depended largely on county. Blacks who resided in predominantly white counties typically had lower tax rates; whites in those regions did not materially benefit from small increases in the Black tax rate and hesitated to institute a poll tax that would create potential Black voters. For Blacks in minority white counties, small increases to the tax rate yielded larger total returns and whites had less fear about Black political power, believing votes could be limited through legal efforts, like literacy laws and poll taxes, and extralegal efforts. Morgan Kousser, “Progressivism for Middle Class Whites Only: North Carolina Education, 1880–1910,” The Journal of Southern History 46, no. 2 (1980): 178; Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics.

58. Kousser, “Progressivism for Middle Class Whites Only,” 174.

59. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South; Adam Fairclough, Teaching Equality; Michael Fultz, “African American Teachers in the South, 1890–1940: Powerlessness and the Ironies of Expectations and Protest,” History of Education Quarterly 35, (Winter 1995), 401–22; Siddle-Walker, Their Highest Potential; Malczewski, Building a New Educational State.

60. Hollis Frissell to Morris K. Jesup, January 16, 1899, Folder 1, Box 1, UNC-SEB.

61. Robert Norrell, Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (New York: Belknap Press, 2011).

62. Minutes of a Meeting of the General Education Board, January 24, 1911, Folder 3651, Box 353, Series 1.1, RAC-GEB, 10.

63. W. H. Heck to Wallace Buttrick, January 7, 1904, Folder 1, Box 6, UNC-SEB.

64. Wickliffe Rose to Dr. Green, May 6, 1911, Folder 19, Box 1, Series 1.2, UNC-SEB, 4.

65. Edgar Garner Murphy to Wallace Buttrick, November 14, 1907, Folder 7414, Box 720, Series 1.5, RAC-RFA.

66. Edgar Garner Murphy to Wallace Buttrick, November 14, 1907.

67. Edgar Garner Murphy to Wallace Buttrick, November 14, 1907.

68. Annual Meeting, “Jeanes Fund Report of President,” 1914, Folder 2125, Box 222, Series 1.2, RAC-GEB, 6.

69. The General Education Board: An Account of its Activities, 1902–1914 (New York: General Education Board Publication, 1915), 183.

70. “The Work of the Southern Education Board,” Folder 105, Box 4, Series 2.1, UNC-SEB, 6–7.

71. Edgar Gardner Murphy to Wallace Buttrick, November 14, 1907, Folder 7414, Box 720, RAC-RFA; Edgar Garner Murphy, “The Task of the South: An Address before the Faculty and Students of Washington and Lee University, December 10, 1902,” Hathitrust, accessed September 13, 2019, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101068033354&view=1up&seq=5.

72. Murphy, “The Task of the South.”

73. The Bulletin of the National Tax Association 1, no. 5 (June 1915).

74. Steffes, School, Society and State.

75. The report indicates national trends toward local consolidation to create larger units of local school control and more efficient and cost-effective administration. Philander Priestly Claxton, “Biennial Survey of Education 1916-1918,” U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education Bulletin 1919, no. 88 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921), 785. A number of states addressed equalization during this period including Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Utah, Wisconsin, and Missouri (Claxton, “Biennial Survey,” 509–10). The increased focus on finance and administration is evident in the later bulletins, particularly 1928–31. Emeline Whitcomb, “Biennial Survey of Education 1928–30,” U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education Bulletin 1931, no. 20 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1931), chap. 1.

76. See, for example, Report on a Survey of the Organization and Administration of State and County Government in Mississippi,” (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1932); A. T. Allen, Paul V. Betters, Charles M. Johnson, Fred W. Morrison, and Charles Ross, State Centralization in North Carolina, ed., Paul V. Betters (Washington D.C., Brookings Institution, 1932); Report on a Survey of the Organization and Administration of State and County Government of Alabama, ed. Henry P. Seidemann (Montgomery: Wilson Printing Company for the Brookings Institution, 1932).

77. The median percentage of the total annual income provided to public schools was 4.4 percent in the South and 3.8 percent in the North. School Money in Black and White.

78. School Money in Black and White.

79. For a more detailed discussion of the factors that make North Carolina distinctive economically, politically, and educationally in the South, see Malczewski, Building a New Educational State, chap. 3.

80. Allen et al., State Centralization in North Carolina, 15.

81. Although some southern states instituted poll taxes on all enslaved people, North Carolina had uniform and relatively lower poll taxes on whites and Blacks, limited to men over 12 and under 50. This decision was primarily a compromise given debates about how to tax enslaved people. North Carolina wanted to tax slave owners but recognized that a progressive tax on property would be untenable and might promote debate about taxation and representation. The uniform and limited poll tax on enslaved people in the state was criticized because it appeared that the state was putting “white and Black people on equal footing.” Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery, 229.

82. Allen et al., State Centralization in North Carolina, 19; North Carolina Constitution of 1868, art. V and art. IX, § 17, https://www.ncleg.net/library/Documents/Constitution_1868.pdf.

83. George Ernest Barnett, “Taxation in North Carolina,” in Studies in State Taxation, with Particular Reference to the Southern States, ed. Jacob Harry Hollander (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1900), 78–79.

84. Frenise A. Logan, “The Legal Status of Public School Education for Negroes in North Carolina, 1877–1894, in The Struggle for Equal Education, ed. Paul Finkelman (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), 429–33.

85. Frenise A. Logan, “The Legal Status of Public School Education for Negroes in North Carolina, 1877–1894, in The Struggle for Equal Education, 434.

86. Frenise A. Logan, “The Legal Status of Public School Education for Negroes in North Carolina, 1877–1894, in The Struggle for Equal Education, 436.

87. The state also drew on its public school fund for school building loans. Public Education in North Carolina: A Report to the Public School Commission of North Carolina, with an Introduction by the State Superintendent of Education (New York: General Education Board Publication, 1921), 129.

88. Public Education in North Carolina, 46, chap. 4. The legislature was clear that school districts without sufficient funds to maintain four-month terms would have a special tax levied by the Board of Commissioners in that county to supply the deficiency.

89. Barksdale v. Sampson County Commissioners, 1885; State Centralization in North Carolina, 22–23.

90. Robert C. Strong, North Carolina Reports, Vol, 148., Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of North Carolina, Spring and Fall terms, 1908 (in part) (Raleigh, NC: Edwards and Broughton Printing Company, 1921), 177.

91. Public School Law of North Carolina being Consolidated Statutes of North Carolina Together with Decisions of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction (Raleigh: Office of State Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1919), 43.

92. The Public School Law of North Carolina, 39–45; Public Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina Passed by the General Assembly Passed by the General Assembly at its Session of 1901 (Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton and E. M. Uzzell, State Printers and Binders, 1901), 65.

93. The idea of a “New South” was championed in speeches and editorials by Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, who called for the South in 1866 to exist “not through protest against the Old, but because of new conditions, new adjustments and, if you please, new ideas and aspirations.” The Complete Orations and Speeches of Henry W. Grady, ed. Edwin DuBois Shurter (New York: Hinds, Noble and Eldredge, 1910), 7. For more information about Aycock and educational reformers in the state, see Gregory Downs, “University Men, Social Science, and White Supremacy in North Carolina,” Journal of Southern History 75, no. 2 (2009): 267–304; James LeLoudis, Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 37–72; Charles Brantley Aycock “How the South May Regain its Prestige: An Address Before the Southern Education Association, 1903,” in The Life and Speeches of Charles Brantley Aycock, eds. Robert Diggs, Wimberly Connor, and Clarence Poe (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1912), 279–86.

94. State participants in 1901 included Charles McIver, president of the State Normal and Industrial College in Greensboro; James Joyner, state superintendent of education; Edwin Alderman, president of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill; George Winston, president of the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts; Reverend Edward Rondthaler of Raleigh, appointed vice-president of the 1901 conference; Reverend A. B. Hunter of Raleigh, appointed secretary and treasurer; Walter Hines Page (originally from North Carolina but residing in New York), appointed vice president of the 1901 conference; and Charles Meserve, who led education campaigns in the state. See Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Education in the South held at Winston-Salem, North Carolina, April 18, 19, 20, 1901 (Harrisburg: The Committee, 1901).

95. “The Educational Equipment and Needs of North Carolina,” January 27, 1904, Folder 104, Box 2, UNC-SEB, 27–28.

96. “Notes on Negro Education,” April 28, 1901, Folder Miscellaneous Correspondence, 1902–1959, Box materials relating to life and to speeches, Papers of Charles Brantley Aycock, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh.

97. Public Education in North Carolina: A Report to the Public School Commission of North Carolina, 9.

98. Public Education in North Carolina, 102–03.

99. Of the total appropriation to schooling, Blacks received a third of the allocation that whites received. “The Educational Equipment and Needs of North Carolina,” January 27, 1904, Folder 104, Box 2, UNC-SEB, 3.

100. Malczewski, Building a New Educational State.

101. “Educational Expansion in North Carolina,” by James T. Joyner, 1910, Folder 104, Box 4, SEB-UNC.

102. “The Educational Equipment and Needs of North Carolina,” January 27, 1904, Folder 104, Box 2, UNC-SEB, 1.

103. Collie v. Franklin County Commissioners, 145 N.C. 170, 59 S.E. 44.

104. Elisabeth Clemens, “Associations in the Symbiotic State,” in The Many Hands of the State, 35–57.

105. Charles Dabney, “Report from the Bureau of Investigation and Information of the Southern Education Board,” Proceedings of the Conference for Education in the South, the Sixth Session (New York: Issued by the Committee on Publication, 1903). See also the “Working Plan of the State Supervisors of Rural Schools,” attachment from A. P. Bourland to Wallace Buttrick, November 28, 1913, Folder 7415, Box 720, Series 1.5, RAC-RFA (Dabney 1903, 45).

106. “The Educational Equipment and Needs of North Carolina,” January 27, 1904, Folder 104, Box 2, UNC-SEB, 26. The GEB became less involved in tax campaigns in later years, particularly after debates about federal incorporation of the Rockefeller Foundation, fearing that such participation would lead to criticisms about inappropriate efforts to use funding to shape southern politics. For information about general funding initiatives, see “Outline Report of the General Agent to the Trustees of the Peabody Education Fund, Part III,” 1907, Folder 7410, Box 720, 5–6.

107. “Outline Report of the General Agent to the Trustees of the Peabody Education Fund, Part III,” 1907, Folder 7410, Box 720, 5–6, 27–28.

108. “Outline Report of the General Agent to the Trustees of the Peabody Education Fund, Part III,” 1907, Folder 7410, Box 720, 5–6, 27–28.

109. C. H. Mebane, “North Carolina,” 1910, Folder 104, Box 4, UNC-SEB.

110. L. C. Brogden, “A Plan for the Development of the Rural Schools in North Carolina,” circa 1912, Box 4, Folder 105, Series 2.1, UNC-SEB.

111. Public Laws and Resolutions of the State of North Carolina Passed by its General Assembly at the Session of 1911 (Raleigh, NC: E. M. Uzzell & Co., State Printers and Binders. 1911), chap. 135.

112. L. C. Brogden, “Report of Supervisors of Rural Elementary Schools for Quarter Ended March 31, 1910,” Folder 119, Box 5, Series 2.1, UNC-SEB, 4–5.

113. Board of Education v. Board of Commissioners of Granville County, 174 N.C. 469, 93 S.E. 1001 (N.C., 1917).

114. N. W. Walker, Tenth Annual Report: State Inspector of Public High Schools of North Carolina for the Scholastic Year Ending June 30, 1917 (Raleigh: Office of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Edwards and Broughton Printing Co., 1918), 137. For specific information about the public school laws mandating taxation for state standards, see Public School Laws of North Carolina (Raleigh: Issued from the Office of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1919) 33–36.

115. Public Education in North Carolina: A Report to the Public School Commission of North Carolina, 39–40.

116. Public Education in North Carolina.

117. The Commission was authorized for two years in 1917 and then reauthorized for an additional two years in 1919. Public Education in North Carolina, vii.

118. Public Education in North Carolina, 13.

119. Public Education in North Carolina, 16.

120. Public Education in North Carolina, 16.

121. Public Education in North Carolina, 18.

122. Public Education in North Carolina, 20.

123. On populism, see Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 197–200; and, on progressive reforms, see Gilmore, Glenda, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1996).Google Scholar

124. James T. Joyner, “Educational Expansion in North Carolina,” 1907, Folder 104, Box 4, SEB-UNC; C. H. Mebane,” “North Carolina, 1910, Folder 104, Box 4, UNC-SEB.

125. C. H. Mebane, “North Carolina,” 2.

126. Public Education in North Carolina, 9.

127. Public Education in North Carolina, 94.

128. Public Education in North Carolina, 98.

129. Public Education in North Carolina, 95.

130. D. J. Whitener, “Education for the People,” The North Carolina Historical Review 36, no. 2 (1959): 190–94.

131. Public Education in North Carolina, 99.

132. Superintendent McLeod to Nathan Newbold, February 5, 1916, Folder Ma-Mc, Box 2, Division of Negro Education, Department of Public Instruction, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh. Jonathan Pritchett analyzes tax policy in the state at the beginning of the twentieth century and demonstrates that the relationship between the poll tax and schooling following disfranchisement weakens the argument that local whites redistributed significant sums received from the state. He points out that the loss of the Black vote both limited the amount of taxes paid for schooling by the state’s Blacks and prevented them from voting for local tax levies in their communities but argues that county and state tax revenues were more equitably distributed than scholars have recognized. His argument, however, has the potential to undermine Black agency by trivializing their exclusion from local school improvement campaigns and their ability to institutionalize education reform in Black communities at the level of both the county and state. See Pritchett, “North Carolina’s Public Schools: Growth and Local Taxation,” Social Science History 9, no. 3 (Summer 1985): 279.

133. Public Education in North Carolina, 130.

134. Minutes of the General Education Board, January 24, 1911, Folder 3651, Box 353, Series 1.2, RAC-GEB.

135. Abraham Flexner to Julius Rosenwald, November 28, 1925, Folder 2, Box 15 and Abraham Flexner to Julius Rosenwald, June 20, 1919, Folder 6, Box 53, Julius Rosenwald Papers University of Chicago Special Collections; hereinafter UC-JRF.

136. “Jeanes Fund for Extension School Terms,” Slater Fund for County Training Schools, June 24, 1919, Folder 6, Box 53, Series 2.5, UC-JRF.

137. Between 1915 and 1927, the Rosenwald Fund provided $529,436 to North Carolina, with $569,261 contributed by Blacks, $68,615 by whites, and $2,226,738 from local tax dollars, and a total of 813 schools. “Philanthropic Funds and Negro Education,” November 1, 1927, Folder 1070, Box 119, Series 1, RAC-GEB. In total, 5,357 buildings were constructed in 883 southern counties and 15 southern states including schools, vocational buildings, and teacher homes. The total cost was $28,408,520 of which 15 percent came from the Fund, 17 percent from Blacks, 4 percent from white contributions, and 64 percent from state and county tax funds. See “Negro School Buildings in the Southern States, 1917–1947,” Folder 10, Box 76, Series 2.5, Papers of the Rosenwald Fund, Franklin Library, Fisk University, Nashville, TN.

138. Restatement of a leaflet, “Plan for Distribution of Aid from the Julius Rosenwald Fund for Building Rural Schoolhouses in the South,” July 1920, Folder 7, Box 53, Series 2.5, UC-JRF.

139. “The Julius Rosenwald Fund Annual Report, 1924-1925,” Folder 1, Box 81, RFA-Fisk, 7.

140. Minutes of the General Education Board, January 24, 1911, Folder 3651, Box 353, Series 1.2, RAC-GEB.

141. Damon Mayrl and Sarah Quinn, “Beyond the Hidden American State,” in The Many Hands of the State, 63.

142. Chirhart refers to the teachers as “double agents,” who simultaneously sought to achieve both foundation and community goals. Chirhart, Torches of Light, 123.

143. Malczewski, “Philanthropy and Progressive Era State Building through Agricultural Extension Work in the Jim Crow South,” History of Education Quarterly 53, no. 4 (November 2013).

144. “Supplement to ‘Negro Public Education in the South,” 1927, Folder 3297, Box 315, Series 1.2, RAC-GEB, 10.

145. “Summary of Reports of Home-Makers Club Agents North Carolina, 1915,” Folder 1048, Box 116, Series 1.1, RAC-GEB.

146. “Monthly Progress Letter, December 1915,” January 10, 1916, Folder 1043, Box 115, Series 1.1, RAC-GEB.

147. Nathan Newbold to Arch T. Allen, June 27, 1923. Folder Correspondence, Box 7, Division of Negro Education, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh.

148. This method of sustaining white supremacy by providing for limited Black gains and paternalistic oversight was also evident in the 1896 Populist-Republican fusion ticket. Helen G. Edmonds, The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina. For more information see, Charles Postel, The Populist Vision, 197–200; Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow.

149. State Centralization in North Carolina.

150. Allen et al., State Centralization in North Carolina, 48; See also the McLean Law, chap. 10, Public Laws of 1931. For the development of public school legislation more generally in North Carolina, see S. H. Thompson, “The Legislative Development of Public School Support in North Carolina” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1936). Allen et al. point out that the state authorized the Equalizing Act of 1923, a 1925 Education Committee that advocated joint county and state support and the teacher salary equalization, a 1927 Act to authorize additional state appropriations and establish a State Board of Equalization, and a 1929 Act to authorize additional state appropriations and an Education Commission.

151. State Centralization in North Carolina, 147.

152. State Centralization in North Carolina, 26–41.

153. The State had originally agreed to a budget of $5,000 for the study but then cut the funding to only $1,000. At Joyner’s request, the GEB agreed to provide another $5,000, convinced that the study would form a basis for advanced legislation in 1921 and continued progress on the reform agenda. James Joyner to the GEB, January 30, 1918, Folder 1066, Box 118, Series 1.1, RAC-GEB.

154. Scholarship has shown that strong political institutions are essential to the relationship between civil society and democracy and that localism did much to promote and sustain discrimination and inequality in education. Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civil Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003); Jennifer Hoschschild and Nathan Scovronick, The American Dream and the Public Schools (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 28–36. In addition, Quadagno demonstrates that the implementation of Medicare in the South led to greater integration in medical care and centralized services that took precedent over local culture and attitudes. Jill Quadagno, “Promoting Civil Rights through the Welfare State: How Medicare Integrated Southern Hospitals,” Social Problems 47, no. 1 (2000): 69, 71.

155. Kousser, J. Morgan, “Progressivism for Middle Class Whites Only: North Carolina Education, 1880–1910,” The Journal of Southern History 46, no. 2 (1980): 170.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

156. Malczewski, Building a New Educational State.

157. By 1934, on average, 40.2 percent of all state and local tax collections went to public education. North Carolina was the only southern state that put more than half of the state tax collections into schools. School Money in Black and White.

158. Elisabeth Clemens, “Associations in the Symbiotic State,” in The Many Hands of the State, 39.

159. Kimberly J. Morgan and Ann Shola Orloff, “Introduction,” in The Many Hands of the State, 3.

160. Hammack and Anheier, A Versatile American Institution; Rob Reich, “On the Role of Foundations in Democracies,” in Philanthropy in Democratic Societies, eds. Rob Reich, Chiara Cordelli, and Lucy Bernholz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 64–86.

161. Rob Reich, “On the Role of Foundations in Democracies,” in Philanthropy in Democratic Societies, 79.

162. Rob Reich, “On the Role of Foundations in Democracies,” in Philanthropy in Democratic Societies, 72; Lucy Bernholz and Chiara Cordelli, “Introduction,” in Philanthropy in Democratic Societies, 10.

163. Aaron Horvath and Walter W. Powell, “Contributory or Disruptive: Do New Forms of Philanthropy Erode Democracy?” in Philanthropy in Democratic Societies, 90.

164. Prasad, Monica, The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

165. Elisabeth Clemens, “Associations in the Symbiotic State,” in The Many Hands of the State, 37.