Where might the rich scholarship on Progressive Era southern education reform, particularly on African American schooling, be headed? Joan Malczewski suggests we should reframe southern black school reforms as a series of private-public experiments in state-building. She situates her study within the scholarship on the emergence of the modern state, represented most notably in Tracy Steffes's School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890–1940 (2012).
Malczewski directs our attention to “rural black school reform, the nature of foundation power, and the relationship of both to political development in the early twentieth century” (p. 2) across the South and in case studies of North Carolina and Mississippi. Foundations “established and implemented administrative systems that operated within, parallel to, and discretely from formal governance systems” (p. 21). Foundation reformers were more successful in states where they found allies among southern political and school leaders engaged in their own campaigns to centralize authority and create modern administrative machinery. Adapting the legal concept of interstitial lawmaking, Malczewski argues that foundations also engaged in “interstitial collaboration” to enforce conditions for aid and to build alliances with white and black southerners that functioned as “alternate systems of governance” (p. 29) where federal and state governments declined to act on behalf of black schools.
Malczewski makes clear that foundation state-building did not mean replacing the existing white supremacist racial state but giving it a wider and, ironically, more inclusive reach as well as a more centralized structure. Foundation officials believed that centralized authority and standardized administration would require school systems to bring black schools into the structure of public education, and by so doing tie the school to its local system and the local system to the state. In practice, their efforts allowed black southerners to take public action for their own educational goals. She admits, “It is not clear that black residents were concerned about administrative capacity” (p. 192), but black southerners realized that foundation and state reform agendas offered improvements and built pressure for federal intervention later in the twentieth century.
Malczewski necessarily covers familiar terrain early in her book, beginning with the Peabody Education Fund, the Conference on Education in the South, and the formation of the Southern Education Board and then the General Education Board (GEB). Public-private partnerships between the GEB, the Negro Rural School Fund (Jeanes Fund), and the federal government, such as hiring Jeanes teachers to organize agricultural clubs, tied black education reformers to the emerging administrative state at the national level. Such projects also taught foundations to adapt their strategies to the particular conditions of the southern states they sought to reshape.
Jeanes teachers were key actors in the reform dynamic because of the multiple responsibilities assigned to them by foundation reformers, state administrators, and their own professional identities. Charged with implementing an industrial education curriculum, organizing school and community improvement clubs, coordinating school construction campaigns, and supervising instruction, Jeanes teachers were effectively superintendents of their counties’ black public schools. What interests Malczewski, however, is the interstitial collaboration that created a parallel administrative structure linking Jeanes teachers, state agents, and foundations. Jeanes teachers reported directly to the GEB-funded Negro school agent at the state department of education, who in turn reported on their activities to the Jeanes Fund's director, and Jeanes teachers worked with both the state Negro school agent and the state's Rosenwald-funded building agent on new school construction projects.
The case study states “represent obvious extremes” (p. 116). North Carolina's white political and educational leaders had been actively involved in reform since the early years of the century. Governor Charles Aycock and state superintendent James Joyner built support for tax reform and universal education in rural communities, successfully arguing that separate and unequal education for whites and blacks would preserve white supremacy in a modernizing economy. They used GEB and Rosenwald money to hire state officials to administer their reform vision. Nathan Newbold, the GEB-funded state agent for Negro schools, created a division of Negro education within the state education department that included white and black agents for school buildings supported by the Rosenwald Fund, a state Jeanes supervisor, and a black high school supervisor also funded by the GEB.
By working directly with white school superintendents and black teachers, and skillfully deploying foundation aid at the local level, Newbold and his staff helped to build an inclusive administrative apparatus as well as a parallel structure that facilitated reform in black public education. Their success allowed Newbold to press on for increased standardization of facilities, term length, and teacher certification, as well as the expansion of secondary education through county training schools. “Ultimately,” Malczewski states, “education reform in North Carolina illustrates the importance of associated action to early twentieth-century reform and the power of schooling as a site to enhance governance capacity at the state and local level and expand political participation in local communities” (p. 157).
Conversely, few whites took interest in black education reform or responded to the foundations in Mississippi. Divisions between planters and poor whites, political demagogues like James K. Vardaman and Theodore Bilbo, and a preference for diffused governance by disconnected elected officials intensified white fears that education reform supported by foundation money, no matter how unequally applied, would benefit blacks, and in so doing bring down both localism and white supremacy. The result was a vast “educational policy void” (p. 194) that state leaders would not or could not fill. A sympathetic state superintendent like Willard Bond faced intense criticism for reform advocacy during election campaigns, and the state's GEB-funded Negro school agents were not only less involved in black schooling but more dismissive of black teachers and communities.
Foundation officials urged Mississippi state agents to exert greater authority over black public education. Despite the construction of a relatively large number of Rosenwald schools and the work of Jeanes teachers, Mississippi's state-level educational apparatus remained underdeveloped and weak by comparison with many other southern states. The reform dynamic was located instead at the University of Mississippi, represented by professor of secondary education (a GEB-funded position) Thomas Bailey and his successor, John Fant. They reported extensively on conditions in the state's high schools, both black and white, and advocated for black secondary education to county superintendents. But their influence was limited by the presence of ineffective, even corrupt, state agents and the state's refusal to entertain tax reform, or any other measure, to improve public education that would potentially benefit black schools.
In contrast with another recent study of North Carolina, Sarah Thuesen's Greater Than Equal (2013), Malczewski maintains a resolute focus on black schools as sites of political development. Yet she frequently shares the voices of black teachers, especially Jeanes teachers, whose reports provide strong evidence that interstitial collaboration did indeed leverage black agency to shape the reform dynamic. The black men and women who held the few state-level, foundation-funded positions do not speak so often or clearly, however. For example, Malczewski suggests that expanded administrative structures marginalized black teachers and community members who had actively participated in their creation. What remains unclear is the role that black professionals in North Carolina's Negro education division played in that part of the reform dynamic. In the case of Mississippi, Rosenwald building agents might have provided a black professional perspective on that state's refusal to build a modern educational state. Malczewski is to be congratulated for showing us how to bring current interest in connections between the state and schooling to bear on southern school history, and the lessons that southern school history holds for contemporary foundations and policymakers.
