In 1850, John C. Calhoun, Vice President for both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, wrote “Disquisition on Government,” an essay that explored minority rights within the context of majority rule and was a basis for southern secession. In his discussion of the economic roots of political events, he divided citizens into “tax-payers” and “tax-consumers,” foreshadowing the connection that would be made between taxation and citizenship rights in twentieth-century education policy and law.Footnote 1 Recent scholarship has explored that relationship and demonstrated that court cases reflect citizens’ perceptions of economic stakes and related education rights. In particular, white taxpayers often perceive that their higher total contribution to the tax base should redound relatively greater educational benefits, whereas Black taxpayers have argued that their relative tax burden means they are owed at least an equal education.Footnote 2 Foundations that promoted education reform in the Jim Crow South understood the distinctions Calhoun made in 1850 and recognized that taxpayer perceptions were important to education reform, not just a byproduct of tax policy but something that might be shaped by it.Footnote 3
Although recent scholarship has recognized the relationship between schooling and political development, scholars have neglected the central role of taxation.Footnote 4 Ongoing support for government and its policies depends upon citizens perceiving that taxation, which defines the social and cultural meaning of citizenship, is fair.Footnote 5 In debates about taxation, interest groups and actors across the political spectrum seek to institutionalize a social contract between the state and its citizens. Northern foundations influenced these debates in the Jim Crow South.
Scholars refer to a “classic period of American foundations” in the early twentieth century when a small group of philanthropic organizations made direct efforts to influence public opinion and played an outsized role in American life.Footnote 6 They played critical roles in the dramatic transformation of several key areas, underwriting policy work that was nonsectarian and science based. Charles Thwing, first secretary for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, articulated in 1925 that these foundations should demonstrate “that the usefulness of certain services are so great that the community shall finally assume and perform these services.”Footnote 7 Foundations involved with southern education demonstrated this new model, providing funding that was not intended to forestall initiative or substitute for local effort, but to demand both by building state capacity and creating a sentiment that would “answer the gifts of philanthropy with the larger gifts of taxation.”Footnote 8
This work focuses on three foundations. The General Education Board (GEB), funded by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in 1902, contributed to a range of education initiatives and coordinated foundation efforts in the South.Footnote 9 The Negro Rural School Fund (The Jeanes Fund), established with a bequest by Anna T. Jeanes in 1907, provided Black supervising teachers to rural communities.Footnote 10 The Rosenwald Fund, with initial funding by Julius Rosenwald in 1914, is best known for its contributions toward the construction of school buildings in Black communities.Footnote 11 Trustees often served simultaneously on more than one of these boards, creating an interlocking directorate that was a powerful force in education reform.Footnote 12
The foundations worked with white and Black northerners and southerners, representing business interests, higher education, the clergy, state interests, and local communities. They engaged in a process of interstitial collaboration, designed to fill policy-making voids in state and local governance, where a majority of white southerners were opposed to universal, centralized public schooling.Footnote 13 They designed public agencies and programs designed to limit where possible the strength of local white majorities and the influence of state and local politicians.
Reformers were concerned with a southern problem that related to and transcended issues of race and equality. They believed national strength depended upon regional unity, but the failures of Reconstruction had led to a reduction in labor force productivity, separatist political power, and a retardation of southern political and economic development.Footnote 14 An early report on southern education claimed it was “more than a Southern problem; … the education of the people of the South is today the supreme national question.”Footnote 15 It could transform southerners into citizens who might govern themselves in preferred ways, promote national unity, and rehabilitate the South by providing an institutional means to reach rural communities, and make government more efficient in the process.Footnote 16
Reformers had different conceptions of how racial difference affected national strength and translated into state and local education policy.Footnote 17 Most supported the racial state and believed Blacks only capable and deserving of an inferior education. However, some believed education might positively affect perceived racial differences and lead to greater equality over the longer term. Foundations prioritized goals that resonated with most reformers, including state centralized public schooling, universal and unequal for white and Black students, and organized to meet state defined minimum standards for curriculum, teacher training and remuneration, school terms, and consolidation.Footnote 18
Edwin Alderman, a prominent southern reformer, argued that the most pressing concern was to change the public’s conception of the state to a “collective will of the people expressing itself in laws and institutions [for which] taxation is the involuntary tribute which civilized men pay for their share of the common good.”Footnote 19 Foundations promoted tax policies to increase education revenues, place the burden of schooling on public rather than private sources, and legitimate education for rural Black citizens, goals that were not congruent with the southern social or political structure. Tax reform was not just a financial matter but also an important step in defining voter logics.
This paper explores these efforts and makes clear the need for scholarship on the relationship between school reform, political development, and taxation. The first section provides historical context. The next focuses on North Carolina, where a distinctive educational culture enabled foundations to be relatively more effective and provides a useful lens for reconsidering foundation work in southern education reform and, more generally, in civil society.
Southern Education and Taxation: Historical Context
Southern attitudes about public education and taxation were shaped by the institution of slavery. The region was relatively unaffected by the common school movement that began in the Northeast in the 1830s and led to schooling across the North and West. Most antebellum southern whites attended denominational or subscription schools, or they were part of the plantation elite and educated by private tutors. Politically powerful slave owners dominated state legislatures and had little interest in educating poorer whites.Footnote 20 Reconstruction created additional impediments.
Southern Blacks believed education to be the antithesis to slavery and were a catalyst for expanding opportunity after the Civil War.Footnote 21 They were joined by the Freedman’s Bureau, denominational organizations, and foundations like the Peabody and Slater Funds and achieved moderate educational gains in racially segregated schools across the South.Footnote 22 However, no public system of schooling developed in any state. A number of factors limited its development and led to significant inequality.
The South, devastated by the war and its related costs, had relatively less wealth and limited choices about how to conceptualize public schooling.Footnote 23 The region remained primarily agricultural into the twentieth century, with underdeveloped property tax structures and fewer businesses available to take on additional tax burdens. States could improve schools through substantial and burdensome tax increases, make schools more efficient with existing and insufficient sources of revenue, or accept an inadequate public system relative to other areas of the country.Footnote 24
Beginning in the 1830s, northerners contributed significantly more per capita to schooling on a significantly higher tax base.Footnote 25 The Civil War created tax burdens in the South and led to Reconstruction constitutions that legislated schooling but strictly limited the combined total of state and local taxes. For example, tax levies in Georgia required grand jury endorsement and approval from two-thirds of registered voters.Footnote 26 A report from South Carolina is illustrative. “Mixed schools were forced upon an angry people. Taxes were levied at the will of a majority of voters whether they owned property or not. School officials were ignorant, incompetent and openly defiant. The old opposition to public schools had greatly increased … negro schools were tolerated, but not encouraged.”Footnote 27
The racial state was the most significant impediment to universal public schooling. Southern whites were deeply committed to states’ rights and local control, which might protect them from policies that gave Black citizens a legal entitlement to attend school and required whites to pay for it.Footnote 28 National debates about taxation policy and education rights included efforts to pass the Blair Bill, proposed in Congress between 1883 and 1890 to provide federal aid for education, but the failure of that bill sustained state and local control over education and related tax policies.Footnote 29
Although each southern state had a unique tax system, there were important similarities. Every state in the Union taxed property by 1860, but southern states were not willing or able to tax all property at uniform rates. The primary constraint resulted from the political difficulty of placing a value on human chattel. The southern agricultural economy provided limited opportunity to transfer the burden to business, and tax assessments on individual property, real and personal, required strong local administrative and political structures that did not exist.Footnote 30 A reliance on ad valorem taxation was problematic because of unequal assessments that could potentially put an undue burden on farmers, the southern white politicians’ primary constituents. Property taxes were instead limited to individual assets reported by local taxpayers, creating opportunities for underreporting and a lack of uniformity.Footnote 31
Local communities in the North typically determined needs for municipal services and established property tax assessments accordingly, but southern states legislated constitutional limits on southern taxation after the war.Footnote 32 Instead, general property taxes were supplemented and supplanted by an extensive system of license taxes; a nearly complete excise system; and regressive taxes on sales, licenses, privileges, severance, tobacco, gasoline, gifts, liquor, and the poll.Footnote 33 These taxes were not conducive to significant revenue increases, but they were more palatable to white southerners.
Southern states typically appropriated to schools a portion of the property tax assessment, and designated additional sources including regressive taxes, poll taxes, and special tax levies. Alabama designated local poll taxes; Maryland designated income from the state school fund and revenues from dog taxes, fines, and licenses; South Carolina designated poll and liquor taxes.Footnote 34 Most southern states also allowed school tax levies at the discretion of county and municipalities on property or polls, typically capped, if approved by a majority of voters.Footnote 35
The use of property tax revenues, poll taxes, and special taxes led to profound inequalities. Most southern states did not have equalization plans; districts with higher property values could raise sufficient funds for schooling within the constitutional tax rate limit.Footnote 36 The poll tax was instrumental in denying the vote to southern Blacks, but disfranchisement meant that most Blacks and some poor whites ceased paying the tax and transferred the education burden to wealthier whites, affecting majority white and majority Black communities differently.Footnote 37 Southern whites argued that their higher total tax payments should not be redistributed to local Black schools, a policy debated in Virginia’s 1901 constitutional convention. “There is quite a sentiment in the State in favor of a division of the school fund, giving to the white schools the money collected from the white people and to the negro schools only the money collected from the negroes.”Footnote 38 The courts ruled that tax divisions according to the amount paid by each race were unconstitutional, leading whites to find other means to limit funding for Black schools.Footnote 39
Special tax levies approved by a majority of voters often supplemented school appropriations, though some states set maximum rates and many districts failed to approve them. They were often designed to benefit wealthier white districts and exclude Blacks, and their approval could not be assured in areas where majority Black populations or poor whites voted.Footnote 40 It seemed that Black disfranchisement would assure a successful special tax election, though regional demographics created unpredictable outcomes.Footnote 41
By the end of the nineteenth century, the southern wing of the Democratic Party, the “Redeemers,” regained power, decimated Reconstruction gains in education, and created new barriers for Black communities.Footnote 42 Some southerners recognized the need for a southern system of universal public education, particularly Black citizens who were the catalyst for education development in their own communities. There were also southern whites from across the political spectrum who believed universal and unequal education was important to southern progress. States in the North and West demonstrated relatively stronger local political structures and administrative capacity and transferred the tax burden to corporations and railroads, addressed rising income inequality through inheritance taxes, and equalized property assessments to increase revenues and promote equity.Footnote 43 However, the southern racial state led to one-party rule and made it difficult to address adequately local needs.Footnote 44
White education reformers from the North and the South collaborated at the annual Conference for Education in the South that began at Capon Springs, West Virginia, in 1898.Footnote 45 Conference leaders served as foundation trustees and insured a coordinated campaign. William Baldwin, head of the Long Island Railroad and first GEB chair, articulated participant attitudes in his 1899 conference address. “Social recognition of the negro by the white is a simple impossibility… . Properly directed he is the best possible laborer to meet the climatic conditions of the South.”Footnote 46 Foundation policies were conceived in grossly unequal terms that reflected racial prejudice and accommodated the southern racial state.
The Conference appointed eight members to serve on the Southern Education Board (SEB), an executive committee with an operating budget but no endowment, that would coordinate foundation work in the early years. The SEB was a significant force for tax reform, with funds to expend “exclusively for the purpose of stimulating public sentiment in favor of more liberal provision for universal education in the public schools.”Footnote 47
Southern Blacks faced a formidable challenge in their quest for education. The Supreme Court legalized “separate but equal,” but segregated schools in the South were grossly unequal.Footnote 48 Black citizens were effectively disfranchised through legal and extra-legal means and communities lacked the political power to influence education reform. Black citizens nonetheless exercised agency, contributing time and money to building their own schools, developing Black teacher organizations and community groups, and working collaboratively with foundations and the state to build a stronger educational infrastructure.Footnote 49
The United States Commissioner of Education reported in 1910 that the “the percentage of illiteracy was greatest in the South, negro population largest … [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.”Footnote 50 Southern schools met on average 100 days fewer than northern schools with barely more than one-third of school-age children enrolled.Footnote 51 Expenditures for southern Black students averaged only half of that for southern whites, with shorter school terms, fewer schoolhouses, and lower teacher remuneration.Footnote 52
Carole Dickerson, South Carolina’s state supervisor for rural white teachers, visited the Ridgeville Schools in 1911: “no grounds, no outbuildings, no water … no paint … cracks in the door through which you can see the passers-by … a few rough benches and a stove in each instance constituted the entire equipment.”Footnote 53 She complained that schools ran from three to four months with half of the children absent and recommended consolidation, school improvement associations, educational standards, and special tax levies, reforms that required centralization and a stronger administrative infrastructure.Footnote 54 Unfortunately, taxation limits and local control in a dual system of segregated schools lowered the quality of education for both races. The problems that Dickerson described were endemic, yet southerners opposed reforms. The SEB needed to overcome voter logics that prevented tax reform.
States typically allocated funds to counties based on a fixed amount per student regardless of race, but districts funneled the majority to whites. GEB agents found white taxpayer claims to be specious. “By the strict property valuation the white man helps the negro with taxes, [but] there is another and fairer view … taxes on shows, beers, and liquors generally, receptions from the use of oil and fertilizers, the dog tax, etc., helped to make up the school fund … the negro drinks his share of the beer … uses a considerable per cent of the fertilizers sold, is largely interested in the circus … and certainly contributed as much as the white man from his dogs… . In equity then some portion of the proceeds mentioned from these sources should go to him.”Footnote 55 Southern whites sought to prevent Calhoun’s distinction between tax-payers and tax-consumers by strictly limiting the public funds available to Black communities.
Ironically, southern Blacks paid more than their fair share of state and local taxes. Foundations expected matching funds, often private contributions, for services that should have been supported by taxes paid, a form of grossly unfair “double taxation.” As one foundation agent explained, “For however poor a community may be, the people must go to some expense in order to prize their schools. People will not prize anything that costs nothing.”Footnote 56 The ratio of the Black to the white tax rate, defined as the proportion of assessed property and poll taxes, was 6.32 during 1880–84 and 2.56 during the period 1906–1910, a change resulting from increases in the assessed value of property and the loss of Black poll tax revenues. The ratio for Blacks was higher even after their poll taxes declined and without factoring in the added burden of private donations.Footnote 57 Whites paid a larger share of total revenues, but their tax rate was significantly lower.Footnote 58 The distinctions between “tax -payer” and “tax-consumer” were far more complex than southerners and education reformers realized.
Ultimately, northern foundations gave significantly less funding to southern Blacks than to whites and promoted an inferior industrial education curriculum in segregated Black schools to train students for agricultural and domestic labor.Footnote 59 However, every decision about schooling was inextricably linked to problems of taxation. As one prominent reformer explained in 1899, “there is danger that we will not long be able to obtain from southern white tax-payers help for the colored common schools, unless we are able to introduce into them some industrial features.”Footnote 60 Booker T. Washington was criticized for promoting industrial education as a path to Black economic independence.Footnote 61 Foundations supported him not only because industrial education was more palatable to whites but also because economic independence might lead to higher tax revenues.
The GEB understood that philanthropy was insufficient for building a southern education system. “The agency to which the South must look for the education of the masses … is the state system of schools supported by public taxation and administered as a public business. This is the agency upon which all modern states depend for training the masses in the arts of civilization.”Footnote 62 However, a 1904 letter to the SEB highlighted the racial complexities. “The burden of educating the negro is a civic responsibility; but … if schools supported by outside money are going to educate the negro, why should the white Southerner trouble his pocket about the matter?”Footnote 63
Foundations struggled to conceptualize tax policies that would promote their education vision and shape voter conceptions of the relationship between education and the state. “Taxation will become an easy matter when the schools are made vital and effective… . Shall the burden rest upon the local district, upon the county, or upon the state?”Footnote 64 They believed local citizens would see the correlation between taxation and improved educational opportunity, but Edgar Garner Murphy, vice president of the annual conference, expressed concerns about a backlash in 1907. “Men are already getting uneasy as to how their money is being spent. Unless the people gain an increasing confidence in the general policy under which their funds are collected and utilized, they will quit voting their funds with such generosity and a reaction will be inevitable.”Footnote 65 County superintendents had received a 30 percent salary increase to promote county oversight and professionalism, which Murphy argued did not result in a corresponding increase in efficiency.Footnote 66
Murphy also expressed concern that the unequal tax burdens and benefits would create significant inequality.
the county authorities used their funds for negro education in giving a higher education at … state institutions to the white children of the families on the county board … plain stealing from the negroes of the county … the white children in the Black belt have thus an unfair advantage over the white children elsewhere… . Our people share together the legacy of military disaster and the burdens of a bi-racial population, but under their rural conditions they are broken up into dozens of ineffective social units… . Whatever is of service to them in helping them to find one another and to find and follow the larger, unprovincial South, will aid them also in the finding of nationality.Footnote 67
Murphy’s example demonstrates the complicated problem of local control. Although centralization did not guarantee equality, a goal not shared by most reformers, the lack of it made inequality inevitable across every domain and prevented the development of the shared ideals central to nation building. The Jeanes Fund underscored these ideas in its 1914 annual report. “If America is to be a triumphant democracy, there must be a better apportionment of the money which we are spending for education. It is high time that we do more for the poor children in the rural backgrounds, whether white or colored.”Footnote 68 Local rule was considered detrimental to the role that education might play in bringing the South up to northern standards and strengthening the relationship between citizen and state.
The GEB recognized that nowhere in the South had an “entirely proper relationship between state, county, and district officials been worked out.”Footnote 69 Education reform, tax reform, and political development were not just linked but existed in a dynamic, and the SEB sought “a system of taxation to provide ample revenues along with such reform of the schools laws as is needed to provide effective administration.”Footnote 70 Murphy was clear that foundation work transcended particular funding programs. “Our campaign for the arousing of sentiment can be broadened into a campaign for the direction and the education [underlining in original] of sentiment in reference to the task of administration … the South is peculiarly in need of some form of sympathetic but external guidance.”Footnote 71 The task was “appealing to those powers of taxation, to those local forces of self-interest and self-development by which the State spends a little money for a larger life.”Footnote 72
Foundations tailored programs to individual states, but had national goals. In 1915, the Southern Conference for Education and Industry, a group developed from a merger of the SEB, Southern Education Association, and the Conference on Education in the South, announced a new permanent committee of representatives from each southern state. The group’s mission was to develop equitable and practicable southern taxation, adopt amendments to state constitutions, create effective and permanent state and local assessment officers, and introduce tax education programs in high school and higher education.Footnote 73
Schooling was fundamentally altering the relationship between individual states and local communities across the nation. The general trend was toward schooling in consolidated districts, administered by counties with stronger state oversight.Footnote 74 After WWI many states introduced equalization funding, and by 1928 the Federal Biennial Survey of Education demonstrated that states were assuming more responsibility for funding and equalization.Footnote 75 However, the Brookings Institution issued a series of state reports beginning in 1928 that demonstrated that in the South administrative oversight of county finances, taxation, health and human services, schooling, and roads was typically underdeveloped.Footnote 76 By 1934, southern states on average allocated a greater share of total income to public schooling than the national average, but contributions varied widely by state and reflected policies that exacerbated inequality, including school terms that were shaped by agricultural cycles well into the 1930s.Footnote 77 School expenditures for white southerners in 1930 were $44.31, less than half the national average, and for Black southerners only $12.57, a quarter that of southern whites and eighth that of the national average.Footnote 78
Unfortunately, the racial state led to policy decisions that exacerbated Calhoun’s distinctions between tax-payers and tax-consumers. In North Carolina, foundations reformers collaborated with state actors to promote a centralized system of universal public schooling and demonstrated that tax reform was important to the expansion of schooling and to shaping public conceptions of the state.
North Carolina: Education Reform and Taxation
North Carolina’s economy and political culture was distinctive. The Atlantic Ocean region, known for tobacco and cotton production, was home to a majority of the state’s plantations and Black population. The state’s center was moderately fertile, with smaller farms and fewer Black citizens. The far west was mountainous and dedicated to timber. The plantation ruling class was relatively smaller than in other southern states and more successful at diversifying business interests around the agricultural unit, with vertical integration that included textile mills and furniture production. By the early twentieth century, the state’s economic culture reflected decades of business development and proximity to northern markets.Footnote 79
The state’s educational culture was also distinctive. The majority of its antebellum residents, like other southerners, opposed common schooling. However, the state had legislated a fund for public education in 1825. Although most of the funds were initially diverted to other state needs, federal surplus funds of $2,000,000 from Andrew Jackson’s administration became an endowment with income for public education.Footnote 80 In 1836, Governor Edward Dudley allocated additional state funding and encouraged local taxation. The state imposed ad valorem taxes on real property and improvements, the capital invested in slave trading and other commerce, interest and dividend income, inheritances, and an extensive system of regressive flat taxes and poll taxes on white and Black men.Footnote 81 It had the most well-developed public education system in the antebellum South, but education gains and the related tax structure were wiped out after the war.
The state’s Reconstruction constitution placed strict limits on property taxes for all general purposes. It called for a uniform system of segregated public schools with a minimum four-month school term to be funded by local contributions and allocations from the State’s public school fund, which was almost depleted from the war.Footnote 82 Some counties could maintain the mandated four-month term with the maximum tax rate on higher valued property; most were unable to meet minimum standards given lower valuations and constitutional rate limitations.Footnote 83
Efforts to equalize Black and white schools during Reconstruction did not last. In 1880, the town of Goldsboro campaigned to establish graded schools by appropriating white property and poll taxes exclusively to whites and Black property and poll taxes to Blacks. Blacks and poor whites in Goldsboro had united to defeat the measure, but whites successfully campaigned for a second vote and a state general statute that allowed the division of taxes.Footnote 84 Local areas were emboldened, but they also recognized the potential power of the Black vote in towns with minority white populations, particularly in the eastern part of the state, and worked to stack county boards of education with Democrats who could dominate education policy.Footnote 85 In 1886, the State Supreme Court declared unconstitutional tax divisions based on race, but whites sought other methods.Footnote 86
The state funded schools with property and poll taxes distributed to counties on a per capita basis, augmented by local school taxes, minor appropriations, fines and forfeitures, and private donations for school improvement initiatives.Footnote 87 Many counties enacted local, supplemental special taxes, approved by popular vote or mandated to meet minimum state standards.Footnote 88 When the commissioners of Sampson County levied a special tax in 1885 to provide the funding necessary to meet the minimum four-month school term, taxpayer Barksdale resisted payment because it violated constitutional tax limits.Footnote 89 The court initially ruled in Barksdale’s favor, but a vigorous dissent that reflected the state’s distinctive education culture led to a state law that prioritized educational standards over maximum tax rates and allowed special taxes.Footnote 90
Special tax “districts” could be formed without regard to existing township or county lines but confine the vote and related improvements to gerrymandered areas.Footnote 91 The districts were popular with southerners who wanted to limit which neighborhoods were included in tax levies and with foundations because districts could be expanded to contiguous communities and might compel neighboring voters to seek similar improvements.Footnote 92 Special districts proliferated in the early twentieth century for initiatives including better facilities, consolidation, and public high schools.
Governor Charles Aycock, elected in 1901 on a platform of white supremacy and economic expansion, promoted “New South” initiatives, prioritizing economic development, education reform, political development at the state and local level, and deep collaboration with foundations.Footnote 93 Aycock was close to prominent state reformers who participated in the annual Conference for Education in the South, influenced Conference goals, and situated the state to benefit from related funding.Footnote 94 Aycock addressed the 1901 Conference and accompanied participants on a railroad trip through the state. He advocated universal, segregated, and unequal education for Blacks, goals that mirrored Conference consensus. The SEB believed that the state might be pushed to do even more than what Aycock advocated but also recognized limitations, particularly Aycock’s virulent racism.Footnote 95 He argued for a modern education program in line with national trends and states’ rights. “Philanthropists in the North may think they can educate the negro without the help of southern whites, but they are mistaken. We favor universal education and intend to accomplish it … we need help, but we can do the work unaided and will rather than humiliate ourselves.”Footnote 96 Education reform could not be superimposed, but North Carolina was a willing partner.
Prior to 1901, 74 of 97 counties required state funds to maintain the mandated minimum term.Footnote 97 The poll tax was designated to benefit schools and contributed nearly one-half of funding in 1898, but half had been paid by Black men and disfranchisement substantially decreased poll tax revenues.Footnote 98 The state appropriated additional education funding in 1902, including compulsory and uniform property taxes, poll taxes, fines and ad valorem taxes; a $100,000 state appropriation apportioned on a per capita basis; and another $100,000 provided to counties to maintain the mandated minimum term.Footnote 99 However, early education reforms led to enrollment increases and required additional revenues to support the developing infrastructure.
James Yadkin Joyner, Aycock’s superintendent of public education, developed relationships with foundations that redounded decades of funding benefits.Footnote 100 He collaborated with them to promote local taxation increases because schooling was “the best means of developing any community morally, intellectually and financially” and taxation was “conducive to local pride, self-help, self-reliance and independence … every man that pays an additional cent of local tax, [feels] his individual responsibility … and his individual duty to get the worth of his money.”Footnote 101 He recognized that once taxes were levied, they were rarely abandoned permanently.
The SEB reports recognized the state’s distinctiveness, including the General Assembly’s right of control in all matters pertaining to public education, including taxation, state appropriations, and the appointment of county boards of education.Footnote 102 A case similar to the Barksdale case came out of Franklin County in 1907, but by that point more liberal attitudes prevailed and the state’s Supreme Court ruled that a system of free popular education was the constitutional priority.Footnote 103 However, these cases demonstrated that in a state dominated by rural areas, many rural citizens did not support education reform. Further, the power granted to the state was more in theory than fact because the state superintendent had no means of enforcement.
County school boards were supposed to promote consistent standards and opportunity across townships but were generally ineffective. Most whites, influenced by Plessy v. Ferguson and Aycock’s populist white supremacy, felt that education rights should not be extended to Blacks. Foundations recognized that many legislators assumed public education to be a state institution and recognized that collaboration with foundations could have significant results. Yet, the relationship between foundations and the state was a symbiotic one and influenced by voters.Footnote 104 Foundations designed programs to coax support from a reluctant public and legislators who supported the idea of universal education in theory, but legislators were far more loyal to white supremacy and their constituents in practice.
The SEB worked with the governor and state superintendent to encourage special tax districts. The 1903 campaign director described these collaborative efforts to “arouse public opinion” by disseminating information through newspaper reports, addresses, conferences, mass meetings, and schools.Footnote 105 The Peabody Fund lauded the SEB in 1907 for successful campaigns in eight southern states that led to a remarkable record of local revenue increases. The GEB also rewarded communities for local tax increases, matching funds and private donations, promising in 1904, “two dollars for every three dollars raised by private subscription … for enlarging, improving, or furnishing the public school-houses.”Footnote 106 Foundation programs promoted local taxation and created new conceptions of schooling.
The SEB did not extend campaigns and incentives to Black communities. “As a matter of absolute justice they ought to participate proportionately… . But we are confronted ‘with a condition and not a theory.’ An attempt on our part to compel such proportionate participation now would in all probability defeat all our efforts and work to the injury of negro school education.”Footnote 107 The SEB perceived that tax campaigns benefitting rural Blacks would put the entire tax program at risk and encouraged greater white support of Black schools. It would be “important to secure the help of the whites, for we must encourage and not hinder the sense of civic responsibility among the white people of the South.”Footnote 108 Unfortunately, many counties were against tax increases in general and support for Black schools in particular.
The 1909 campaign focused on “general seed sowing work in prospective territory” with one hundred speaking engagements, local tax literature, and campaigns organized by township, rather than county.Footnote 109 Lautrec Brogden, state supervisor for rural education whose initial salary was funded by the GEB, dedicated the second quarter of 1911 to increasing local tax revenues. He worked with white communities to lengthen terms, increase the number of teachers, issue bonds for buildings and equipment, and consolidate small schools.Footnote 110 However, these campaigns could be difficult. In Johnston County, most of the twelve local tax elections failed, in part because the new county superintendent had not allowed sufficient time to educate voters. In Wayne County, voters defeated a measure to construct two high schools because the taxes would benefit voters living closer to the schools, inspiring a state law granting local boards the power to use tax money for rural transportation.Footnote 111 Campaigns created a dynamic between citizens and the state, redefining frames of support for schooling and demonstrating the powerful role that taxation could play in shaping expectations.
Sampson county, home to about 35,000 rural residents with 89 white and 46 Black schools, provides an example of local politics. The area was agricultural and affected by the panic of 1907 and several years of crop failures. Residents had voted for several local tax districts that provided for one-sixth of the permanent school fund, but voters were leery of additional levies that might lead to consolidation and abolish local schools.Footnote 112 These local debates demonstrated the limitations of funding a public-school system through special tax levies.
The Barksdale case was again reaffirmed in 1917.Footnote 113 The state legislated rural high schools and expanded minimum terms to six months, which required counties to raise local taxes to meet new standards. Granville County refused to impose a supplementary tax, claiming high schools were not technically part of the public school system and not covered by the Barksdale legislation. The courts, again reflecting the state’s distinctive culture, prioritized state standards and affirmed state powers of regulation and control.Footnote 114 The decision made the high school an integral part of the public-school system.Footnote 115 The court said the state’s “supervisory authority should be exercised over all—rural, city, and town.”Footnote 116
The State Educational Commission in 1917 produced a study of the state’s school laws and educational conditions, including a comparison with other state educational systems, and made recommendations for public school laws and teacher training. The GEB prepared the survey information, including an inventory of the state’s 7,738 rural schools, which explicitly addressed the relationship between taxation and voter logics.Footnote 117 In 1918, there were 4,643 one-room schools, 2,167 two-room schools, 541 three-room schools, and 387 with four or more rooms.Footnote 118 Early rural schoolhouses, described as “rambling one story buildings” that existed primarily for mill children or Black children, represented “not so much a lack of means, as indifference to the rights of children and a desire to escape school taxes.”Footnote 119 The two-story frame structures with about a half dozen classrooms represented an “awakened interest in public education … often erected at great financial sacrifice” in spite of lacking appropriate construction and amenities.Footnote 120 The large brick structures of the consolidated or special tax districts, mostly well planned, properly lighted, properly furnished, and inclusive of dormitories and teachers’ homes, represented “the high-water mark of rural education sentiment.”Footnote 121 The report demonstrated that tax reform could influence voter expectations and their sense of responsibility.
The commission argued that increased expenditures would “not only add to the attractiveness of the schools themselves, but also strongly influence the movement for better and more attractive homes.”Footnote 122 This language encouraged tax increases, even if it was unclear that taxation had these broader community outcomes. Campaigns often sought to “improve” the Black community in degrading ways that undermined a focus on education standards and equality, reflecting the paternalism endemic to populist and progressive reformers.Footnote 123
There were eighteen special tax districts in 1900, but coordination between the SEB, GEB, and the state led to an increase that contributed about one-fourth of the total school fund by 1907.Footnote 124 The 1909 campaign added 152 special tax districts, for a total of 1,077 in 95 of 98 counties, and an increase of $166,510 over the previous year.Footnote 125 By 1919, there were more than 2,000 special districts, increasing local tax contributions from 12 percent of total public school expenditures in 1900 to 34 percent in 1918.Footnote 126 However, 6,000 districts failed to approve a special tax, leading to the claim that “the greatest institution of democracy—the public school—continues in three-fourths of the districts of the state on a semi-charitable basis.”Footnote 127 The state believed tax districts had been “the chief means of arousing renewed interest in rural education” but recognized the limitations.Footnote 128
Special tax districts increased revenues and shaped voter expectations but created stronger adherence to local control and significant inequalities. Wealthier communities with higher property valuations were more likely to approve these districts, and poorer communities, unless compelled by law, were less likely and at lower rates. By 1921, the average school term in urban areas was 8.5 months, in the 2,000 special tax districts between seven and eight months, and in the 6,000 districts without special tax levies not yet a consistent six-month term.Footnote 129 Poorer counties without special taxes drew on the equalization fund, which increased from $250,000 in 1913 to $2,209,290 by 1927, which was provided by wealthier taxpayers and distributed in inverse value to the ratio of taxable property.Footnote 130 Taxpayers argued against equalization on the basis that it promoted income redistribution and school centralization that threatened local control.
Tax districts also politicized rural areas. Local politicians gerrymandered neighborhoods to exclude Blacks, include railroads, include or exclude farms depending on whether the owner was favorable, and extend across county borders.Footnote 131 The Aberdeen Schools superintendent reported that “not one cent of the local tax was expended on Black education because the district excluded every single negro house and property.”Footnote 132 The bulk of taxable property in the state was captured by special tax districts, which left remaining areas without the same opportunity to secure available wealth.
The school fund and special tax districts in 1921 were insufficient for new initiatives like teacher training and equalization.Footnote 133 Foundations believed it would be more efficient for the state to lift constitutional tax limits than promote piecemeal tax districts. The problem was not merely financial but conceptual, representing voter logics in opposition to state-centralized schooling and Black educational opportunity. Foundations needed voters to reconceptualize schooling as a universal, high-quality state institution before they could develop the tax base required for centralized schools with minimum standards.
One strategy was to provide small gifts that required matching funds, which forced the creation of a tax-based revenue stream and public responsibility for schools. The GEB argued that “very small sums properly administered may be made to stimulate local effort, to release large sums from the public treasury, and to direct all expenditures toward significant results.”Footnote 134 Abraham Flexner, Secretary of the GEB, was clear “that a dollar accomplishes more if it can be used to stimulate the raising of funds by taxation than in any other way” and encouraged foundations to use private funds “to secure larger public support … public action in these matters does not go backward.”Footnote 135 In 1919, the Rosenwald, Jeanes, and Slater Funds coordinated efforts to extend school terms and create additional county training schools, but gifts were used to encourage local support.Footnote 136 The GEB funded teacher salaries to lengthen school terms in Black communities when districts committed to paying a designated minimum salary with district matching funds, which institutionalized extended school terms and consistent remuneration. The Rosenwald Fund contributed a fraction of the total cost of more than 5,000 buildings it is credited with across the South, ensuring that construction and operation costs became institutionalized in the county. It provided more appropriations to the state than the GEB or the Jeanes Fund and brought correspondingly the greatest amount of contributions from local tax dollars and private donations.Footnote 137 Rosenwald’s construction contracts stipulated that building sites had to be the property of public school authorities, school terms were at least five months, and the community provided from public funds and private donations, inclusive of land and labor, an amount equal to or greater than the award from public funds and private donations.Footnote 138
Foundations also promoted consolidation, which required robust and streamlined administrative structures to implement minimum standards and data collection systems. These changes would affect voter conceptions of schooling and related taxation. By 1925, consolidation was gaining favor in Black communities, with “wretched one-room schools being abandoned, a steady increase in the provision of transporting the children by bus … [and] increased enthusiasm for high schools for Negroes.”Footnote 139
The GEB also enhanced administrative capacity by funding state and local agents to promote foundations goals. This included initial funding for Brogden’s position as state supervisor of white rural schools and white “State Agents for Negro Education,” who were located in state departments of education. They had “‘entre’ to all the counties, communities, and schools of the state; [to] transact the state’s business with county superintendents, county school boards, local trustees and teachers … and then get the two races to cooperate.”Footnote 140 The state agents promoted consolidation, influenced school construction, and secured Black and white private donations and public appropriations. Nathan Newbold was appointed in the State in 1913 with GEB funding. He created the Division of Negro Education, located within the state department of education, and served for more than 40 years. He promoted legislative changes in line with foundation goals, garnered additional budget allocations at the state and local level, and promoted local fundraising. The role created powerful opportunities to interact with communities, which likely influenced citizen conceptions of public schooling as a state institution that included Blacks.Footnote 141
The Black supervising Jeanes Teacher became the de facto superintendent of Black schools in counties where appointed and central to local reform through community organization and fundraising.Footnote 142 Home-Making Clubs, promoted by the GEB and the Smith-Lever Act, and supervised by local Jeanes teachers, created farm stands that sold harvested and canned vegetables and fruits, the proceeds of which were often put into the local schools.Footnote 143 The Jeanes Teachers facilitated the unjust tactic of double taxation because the money contributed in significant ways to building and sustaining the infrastructure. As the infrastructure grew and public sentiment toward education evolved, Black education might be institutionalized and more difficult to rescind. As one GEB report stated, “It has been the policy of the Board gradually to withdraw support of activities in public education after having demonstrated the value of these activities, and to let the public-school funds assume the support.”Footnote 144
Jeanes Teachers often highlighted fundraising in their reports. In 1915, state teachers organized 355 Home-Maker Clubs with a total membership of 3,854 women and girls, who raised $6,639 from poultry and the sale of canned produce.Footnote 145 The Iredell County teacher reported that a “patron gave four acres of land to the school,” and the “proceeds from the gardens will go towards extending the school term. He has promised to give four more acres if they are needed.”Footnote 146 Once this money was donated and spent for school improvements, it was more likely that subsequent expenditures would come from public coffers.
Despite these efforts, gross inequities were the norm, particularly between Black and white schools. Foundations encouraged equalization policies that raised property assessments in order to increase revenues and allocations. However, further legislation required acceptance of equality of opportunity, which did not exist between white communities and was unlikely between Black and white ones. However, state policies that promoted minimum standards for both races could improve schooling and shape conceptions of civic responsibility.
Newbold reorganized the Division of Negro Education and made it distinct from the state department of education in 1921. The state gave him greater authority, additional staff, and funding for approximately fifty percent of the personnel costs.Footnote 147 Legislators likely believed these changes would foster centralization and hoped Newbold would use the reorganized division to promote limited reform and better race relations while sustaining segregation.Footnote 148 However, the office employed Black professionals, including G. H. Ferguson, assistant director responsible for teacher training; George E. Davis, supervisor of Rosenwald Buildings; Annie W. Holland, supervisor of elementary schools; and, W.A. Robinson, supervisor of high schools. The inclusion of Black professional staff supported in part by foundations promoted higher academic standards for the state’s Black citizens and contributed to Newbold’s willingness over time to consider that separate education could be more equal. These staff members were active in local communities and instrumental in shaping voter conceptions about universal, public education and the state.
As schools improved and enrollments increased, voters became increasingly dissatisfied with disparities between white counties. Prior to 1931 North Carolina had two school terms, the six-month term mandated by the state and the extended term that rested upon a vote of the people in any district and operated under its own set of laws and provisions. Foundations had demonstrated that local tax programs could shape voter expectations. However, the state could not impose a centralized, universal school system without significant policy changes and voter support.
The state’s 1931 Education Commission called for “equal tax rates and equal school advantages,” and the state completely centralized the public schools with the 1931 McLean Law.Footnote 149 It provided for a “general and uniform system of public schools,” with a term of at least six months maintained with state funding from sources other than property taxes.Footnote 150 The law was clear that the state should provide sufficiently for instructional services, the plant, auxiliary agencies, and minimum terms in accordance with state standards. The state also centralized taxation, road construction, and local government finance. It was a complete reorganization of state government, the result of agitation for changes in the organization and the administration of the state that began early in the century.Footnote 151
By the end of the Jim Crow era, North Carolina was a pioneer in state centralization. The Brookings Institution 1932 report on North Carolina presented the state as a national model, lauding it for centralization policies that eliminated inefficiencies, delivered services necessary in a modern economy, and modernized public education and tax laws.Footnote 152 However, notably missing from the report were foundations, which were a central and ongoing feature of the long evolution from a state system based in local control to a more fully developed centralized bureaucracy with modern systems of taxation. Foundations collaborated with the state and were central to education reform beginning in 1901, fostering a state-run system of schooling that promoted political development more broadly conceived.Footnote 153 The Brookings Institution report is also silent on gross inequalities that foundation policies ultimately exacerbated. Those inequalities, particularly between Black and white communities, might be easier to confront as schooling became institutionalized in the state and ceased being an entirely local matter.Footnote 154 Foundation reformers were likely pleased that they had expanded education for both races, in spite of persistent inequalities. As national and state ideals changed over time, centralized schools would be in better position to evolve.
Conclusion
Early historiographical debates about North Carolina’s administrative and tax reforms have focused on whether it was progressive or regressive over time. The “progressive” framework posits that the state experienced an educational awakening in the early twentieth century that led to increased tax support for schooling and produced an “expanded and democratized educational system that offered increasingly equal opportunity to all whites and … even to Blacks.”Footnote 155 The progressive framework provides a space for arguing that foundation support was central to this transformation and that it led to greater equality. The problem is that following disfranchisement, the total amount of education increased for both races but became increasingly unequal. Most scholars rightfully focus on the growing inequality. Yet, in a context shaped by the racial state and a desire to deny education to rural Blacks, foundations fostered the expansion of education and a reconceptualization of its relationship to the development of the modern state. This happened explicitly through taxation.
I have previously argued that the primary goal of the foundations active in southern education was to promote a stronger national state, which required efficient state and local governments that were connected through the bonds of the administrative state, particularly schooling.Footnote 156 Tax policies were the vehicle for institutionalizing these reforms, and tax reform required a set of shared beliefs about the purposes of education. The ideal was a public that was willing to assume responsibility for the cost of schooling, inclusive of both Blacks and whites and embedded in state and local political systems. Foundations used the power of their largesse to increase public contributions and influence voter conceptions of education and the state.Footnote 157 They sought to lessen over time the distinctions across communities between taxpayers and tax-consumers.
Southern education reform is a complicated terrain. Democratic equality requires that the state simultaneously apply consistent treatment to citizens and recognize the individuality of each.Footnote 158 To the extent that an administrative state existed in southern states, it was designed to do the opposite and sort citizens into racial groups in support of white supremacy. The racial state was the most salient characteristic of every hand of the southern state—government, institutions, civil society, and logics—and defined southern political development.Footnote 159 Foundations designed programs to disrupt the general status quo before such an explicit model of foundation giving was prevalent.Footnote 160 That recognition is not meant to let foundations off the hook for failing to address the profound inequalities of the South but rather to provide some context for understanding how they used taxation as an instrument of both education reform and political development. In general, early twentieth-century foundations encouraged innovation and risked social experiments that might be “scaled up” and lead to more effective social policy.Footnote 161 The critique of foundation work in the South is that the innovative experiments in education reform not only failed to be innovative enough to address social inequality but also exacerbated existing inequalities. These critiques do not appropriately recognize foundation outcomes that were possible.
This underscores the problem of philanthropy in a democracy, which provides a wealthy elite who are part of the establishment with greater opportunity than should be possible to influence and shape social policy. Scholars have highlighted the pernicious ways that this might undermine democratic equality and the legitimacy of governance, particularly in the case of the gigantic twenty-first-century foundations.Footnote 162 Contemporary foundations fund high-risk and longer-term experiments and innovations that are less likely to be addressed by government or supported by its citizens, but in doing so they also change the conversation, exercise influence, or force state action on a reluctant state polity.Footnote 163 However, although scholars have rightfully recognized the danger of such elite power, many have also argued that the early twentieth-century foundations failed to disrupt adequately the exercise of public power in the racial state.
Foundations involved in southern education reform operated like other foundations of the period and used funding to demonstrate the importance of schooling, compel the community to assume the costs for it, promote taxation, and affect voter logics. Research has suggested that the manner of taxation can affect state development.Footnote 164 In the South, regressive taxes were effective for raising revenues but did not require southern taxpayers to think carefully about their conception of education and the state. Foundation efforts to promote explicitly both private donations and public contributions for universal education were an important means of using taxation as a way to shape explicitly the relationship of public education to the state.
The American state is a symbiotic one, dependent on the organized efforts of private persons and groups to advance projects and implement public policy.Footnote 165 Foundation reformers existed in that symbiotic system, along with state institutions and actors and rural white and Black citizens. Efforts to influence tax reform required that citizen perceptions of education rights and responsibilities be reshaped through a system of taxation that citizens would support and would redound greater power to the state. Calhoun’s distinctions between taxpayers and tax-consumers have remained salient, particularly to the extent that voters over the twentieth century have increasingly perceived education to be a private good. But in the early decades of the century, foundations helped taxpayers in North Carolina to reshape conceptions of the state to include public schooling and taxation for members of both races, even if they could not conceive of it as an equal system.
