Conceptions of federalism and general white indifference limited the national government's ability to address Southern educational inequality in the early twentieth century, and education reform had the potential to incite fears of concentrated government power at both the national and state levels. The federal government delegated oversight to elite actors, including foundations, who hoped to use their considerable power to influence education policy and shape national understanding of the Southern race problem.Footnote 5 Foundation reformers developed an array of organizational structures and networks to promote the evolution from policy development to sustained implementation in a policy domain fraught by race, political dissension, poorly developed administrative structures, and an education infrastructure that lacked schoolhouses, adequate teacher training programs, and minimum and consistent standards to define public education. Southern education reform is an important example of the way in which interest groups and institutions were central to the development of the American state. State power in the early twentieth century developed more on the periphery than at the center.Footnote 6
The challenge for reformers was not really a “weak” state, however, but the complexities of working through a “hidden” one. Progressive reformers often relied on an associational synthesis, in which national policymaking was promoted by using public and private resources, and through cooperative action by voluntary and private organizations at the state and local level.Footnote 7 However, this was difficult to achieve in early twentieth-century Southern education reform. First, there was no commonly held conception of universal education as a public good, which made it difficult for voluntary and private organizations to mediate effectively between the state and civil society. Second, while Progressive Era reformers often sought national establishments, including public schools, to serve as agents for reform, public schooling in the South was undeveloped and disconnected from most state-level offices, evidence of the generally weak administrative structures across Southern states.Footnote 8 Finally, local education reform required cooperation in local communities, but rural blacks were marginalized from the broader political structure. Public officials preferred not to have input from the black community, making it almost impossible for organizations to play the same mediating role.
The long-term goal was a state system of public education centrally administered and supported through taxation, which required a bureaucracy sufficient to providing oversight and implementing minimum standards. In moving toward that goal, the foundations were aware of the gaps that existed in every domain of policy implementation and used a variety of measures to fill them. Interstitial collaboration was necessary to the incremental development and institutionalization of foundation programs, filling gaps in the provision of universal education at the state and local level in order to develop education institutions and practices. It was a political mode of operation that engaged interest groups and institutions, as well as local citizens across the political spectrum, as a necessary precursor to both achieving and sustaining an associational synthesis in education reform. It began at the top, with the appointment of a state agent, extended to the local level wherever counties would allow a Jeanes teacher, and then into communities through an array of programs designed to promote data collection, teacher training, and public funding. The process led to new forms of taxation, schoolhouse construction, teaching standards, and a strengthening of administrative capacity at every level of government in some Southern states. It also promoted commonly accepted conceptions of education as a public good that was a necessary precursor to institutional legitimacy in black education reform.
The modern foundation emerged in the early twentieth century when a small group of philanthropic organizations, guided by professional expertise and research to inform goals, played an outsized role in American life.Footnote 9 These foundations were critical to the dramatic transformation of several key areas in American life, underwriting policy work that was nonsectarian, secular, and science based. In the process, they helped to create institutions and agencies devoted to the study of particular sets of public problems, often in tandem with state universities and government agencies.Footnote 10
The foundations active in Southern education wanted every Southern state to promote universal, segregated schooling. An early foundation report referred to Southern education as “a national problem. … We cannot afford to let a great section of the country, containing one-sixth of our entire population, remain longer in this condition.”Footnote 11 Their reports made clear the importance of schooling to broader state-building goals, claiming “education to be the foremost task of our statesmanship, and the most worthy object of philanthropy.”Footnote 12 A public system of education, managed by the state and funded through taxation, would help promote national ideals at the local level in the most public of spheres and would foster the role of government and local schools as instruments of reform.Footnote 13 As one foundation field agent noted, “The Principal of the School is the natural agent to bring the farm demonstrator, the extension worker, and the health official and the preacher into a harmonious co-working for the development of the center into a vital community institution.”Footnote 14 Because schools were an important intermediary between the state and society, education reform was an essential component of political development.Footnote 15
The early twentieth-century foundations had the power to influence policy development, given extensive resources, business methods, and connections to powerful actors at all levels of government. Many philanthropists were also involved in municipal reform, which shaped their vision for modernizing the South.Footnote 16 They sought efficient governance systems run by experts that would mitigate the power of local politics and bring a more scientific understanding to policy development and implementation.Footnote 17 A letter from prominent foundation executive Abraham Flexner to a Mississippi reformer about the failed reelection campaign of New York City Mayor John Mitchel in 1917 is telling.
The defeat of Mitchel is viewed with dismay by all lovers of good municipal government. … He gave New York not only the best administration it had ever had, but probably the most intelligent administration that any large American municipality had ever had. As the newspaper men say, however, ‘it did not get across.’ His merits were appreciated by the ‘highbrows,’ to follow the newspaper phraseology, but somehow or other the masses did not see it or feel it. … However, in government, as in education, we must keep pegging away in the confidence that ultimately reason and decency will prevail.Footnote 18
Foundation reformers disdained weak administrative systems and control by the “masses.” A centralized system of schooling in the South, managed by experts, would require and therefore strengthen the administration of state and local governance. However, effective education reform required programs that “could get across,” in a way that mayoral contender Mitchel could not.
Many Southern leaders embraced a “New South” perspective that supported expanded educational opportunity, but within the context of the racial state. Many believed opportunity should be provided only to whites, and those who supported universal education for both races assumed it would be in segregated and unequal schooling.Footnote 19 Black and white Southerners were also deeply distrustful of northern largesse and the state centralization that would follow from foundation programs that promoted publicly funded, standardized schooling, managed by experts, extended to members of both races, and inclusive of local black participation in policy initiatives. Further, foundations sought to reform rural black communities, which directed policies toward disfranchised and marginalized citizens who were not considered by elite reformers and public officials to be essential to political development. The associational synthesis was central to twentieth-century policy and political development, but the Southern context did not encourage it.Footnote 20
The foundations had power but insufficient authority in a region dominated by local control, the racial state, and politicians with varying conceptions of the relative merits of black education.Footnote 21 Foundation reformers distrusted civil society, yet recognized that policies could not be developed and implemented in the South without the participation of local communities.Footnote 22 They could not impose their vision for either education or governance, and research has demonstrated that their instincts were correct. Support for policy and political development is ultimately more fragile when private rather than public interests promote it.Footnote 23 The foundations funded state agencies that would be responsible for rural black education, but those agencies needed legitimacy to achieve goals. However, that legitimacy required an educational infrastructure with sufficient organizational capacity to deliver schooling efficiently and the support of interest groups with competing visions about the relationship between education and the state.Footnote 24 Reform required far-reaching collaboration tailored to time and place and inclusive of actors across the political spectrum who supported the work.
Cooperative relationships affected political development at every level of governance, yet developed in an ad hoc and inconsistent manner.Footnote 25 Many scholars neglect a more dynamic process of policy implementation that recognizes local agency, including direct engagement with local citizens and marginalized groups. Elite actors hoped to control the process, but ended up part of a more comprehensive and diverse reform dynamic, made up of a range of actors, interest groups, and institutions that included rural black citizens through grassroots, bottom-up mobilization that was particularly significant for schooling.Footnote 26 Black education reform required the participation of local black teachers and reformers, often disregarded in the scholarship on policy and political development because of their extreme political marginalization.Footnote 27 Education reform provides another historical example of the way that exclusion and bias were inscribed into state–society relations, but scholars have failed to capture adequately the role of more inclusive coalitions that were central to foundation success and political development.Footnote 28
Conceptions of associated action that neglect the existence of a broader reform dynamic support a Southern education narrative that suggests that foundations engineered reform to promote their own power, including centralization and the development of a “single ‘system’ suited to their own corporate purposes.”Footnote 29 The scholarship has indicted philanthropists for providing significantly less funding for black compared to white education, and for promoting an agenda for blacks based on the Hampton model of industrial education, which sought to cultivate black citizens to dignify labor and contribute to the South's prosperity in segregated and unequal schools.Footnote 30 Some scholars have argued that foundations formed alliances with the state, but failed to cultivate support for their ideas.Footnote 31 The scholarship rightly acknowledges the oppressive environment in which rural blacks sought to expand educational opportunity for themselves, and the significant power of foundations. It is an easy case to make given that black education gains across the South remained grossly unequal to white education gains throughout the first half of the early twentieth century. However, the indictment is also somewhat facile, neglecting the nuance of progressivism and state building in the early twentieth century.
Interstitial collaboration describes a more dynamic process of reform and expands our conception of the associational synthesis. Interstitial denotes the gaps that existed between the goals of Northerners and Southerners, white and black citizens, and politicians at every level of governance and the disparities between white and black education, state policy and local practice, and national ideals and local norms. Foundations developed initiatives that operated within those spaces, through programs that added to the educational infrastructure and promoted a shared understanding about black education. Interstitial collaboration among social actors and institutions filled the gaps that prevented sustained reform and efficient governance.
The first section of this article provides historical context for the work of three northern foundations involved in Southern education reform and demonstrates the need for interstitial collaboration. The second section provides specific examples of interstitial collaboration as it operated in Southern education reform. The relative power of individual interest groups and actors was dependent upon the unique state and local context, creating an array of institutional arrangements that affected state and local political development, the organization of local black communities, and black agency. Interstitial collaboration was an important interim step in the evolution from policy development to implementation and institutionalization.
FOUNDATION OBJECTIVES AND THE NEED FOR INTERSTITIAL COLLABORATION
The annual Conference for Education in the South began in 1898 at Capon Springs, West Virginia. Reverend Hollis Frissell, principal of the Hampton Institute in Virginia, addressed the participants of the first meeting with a call to use the schools for the “uplift of the people.”Footnote 32 Conference participants, comprised of representatives from twelve states and the District of Columbia, heard a call for better schools, longer school terms, more qualified teachers, and intelligent appeals for outside aid.Footnote 33 Robert Ogden, head of the New York branch of Philadelphia's Wanamaker stores, who became vice president of the second conference, echoed Frissell's opening message and argued that the “highest institutions and the most cultivated persons should find the noblest exercise of their greatest power in such service as will most surely lift the mass.”Footnote 34 Participants recognized that their position in society and access to private funding gave them considerable power. The annual conference became an important venue for far-reaching collaboration that included elite white Northerners and Southerners, philanthropists, progressive reformers, members of the U.S. Bureau of Education, university scholars, businessmen, the clergy, and Southerners who represented state interests. The group met annually through 1914 and had a significant effect on Southern education reform between 1900 and 1940.Footnote 35
The context for education reform in the South was daunting even to this optimistic and privileged group. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Southern schools met on average 100 days fewer than schools in the North, with barely more than one-third of school-age children enrolled.Footnote 36 There was a lack of adequate schoolhouses for both blacks and whites across the South, but especially in rural black communities, where schools were often in makeshift spaces without adequate lighting, furniture, or other basic amenities that would be expected in any functioning school. The total budget for public schooling was significantly smaller in the South, and there was little incentive to generate greater revenues if it meant increasing local taxes.Footnote 37 The differences in per capita expenditures between the North and South were extreme, $5.53 and $2.49 respectively in 1910, but disparities were even more pronounced within the South, across states and between communities within states, providing evidence of the extent to which local politics determined educational conditions.Footnote 38
In spite of these difficult parameters, the importance and efficacy of elite-associated action is evident in some of the accomplishments of the annual conference. It resulted directly in the development of the Southern Education Board (SEB) in 1901, an organization that provided executive oversight for the evolving work, with sufficient funding for annual operating expenses but no endowment, and the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board (GEB) in 1902. The GEB contributed to a range of initiatives and helped to coordinate and oversee the work of all of the funds that were active in the South, especially after the SEB disbanded in 1914.Footnote 39 Anna T. Jeanes’ bequest created the Negro Rural School Fund, also called the Jeanes Fund, in 1907. The Rosenwald Fund, established by Sears’ magnate Julius Rosenwald with initial gifts in 1912 and a formal endowment in 1917, made contributions to rural black communities for schoolhouse construction, as well as a range of educational initiatives like school libraries.Footnote 40 There were important differences in operating procedures for each fund. However, board membership consisted of an interlocking directorate that included prominent members of the annual conference and trustees that served simultaneously on all three boards, leading to a set of shared objectives that defined Southern efforts and provided greater opportunities to develop and guide reform. References to “foundations” here refer specifically to the work of the GEB, Jeanes Fund, and Rosenwald Fund in the South between 1900 and 1940.Footnote 41
Elite reformers understood the context. Reform required stronger state and local governance systems and a shared ideology about the relationship of education to the state, but both goals would be extremely difficult to achieve. The GEB pointed out in 1914 that several states had serious obstacles to implementing education reforms, including state educational organizations that were considered defective, with inefficient methods for raising money and constitutions that prohibited local taxation for school purposes. Foundation reformers felt that perhaps nowhere in the South had an “entirely proper relationship between state, county, and district officials been worked out.”Footnote 42 Public schooling might mitigate the problem. It could potentially transform rural blacks into citizens who might govern themselves in preferred ways, aid in efforts to rehabilitate the South by providing an institutional means to reach rural communities, and make government more efficient in the process.Footnote 43 The foundations designed programs to address problems of administrative capacity, which included efforts to rationalize state education policy by creating minimum standards and appropriate forms of oversight that connected local schools to state-level governance structures.Footnote 44
The racial state presented even greater impediments to reform. Black disfranchisement in the South meant that where black schools even existed as part of a district, local whites were technically in charge, with formal responsibility for teacher hiring, compensation, schoolhouse construction, and even the curriculum. However, many white leaders did not support black schooling and typically paid little attention in practice to any of these domains, leaving rural black schools isolated from the political structure. Some Southern politicians collaborated to promote universal but segregated and grossly unequal schooling, while many others often impeded even those unjust efforts. Many white district school boards exercised oversight for the primary purpose of limiting black education.
The ability to sustain education change over the longer term depended on policies that embedded change in the political system, through new legislation, stronger centralization and oversight, a reconsideration of tax law or reallocation of the budget, and the support of civil society. Institutionalized reform, particularly in local areas, could only be achieved with the help of state and local actors who were perceived to have a certain level of political legitimacy to achieve foundation goals. Foundations hoped for sufficient autonomy to enact change, granted to them by state politicians or earned through the perceived legitimacy of the work. Scholarship has demonstrated that such legitimacy redounds to agencies with a reputation for expertise and efficiency, and relationships to organized interests that might compel politicians to defer to foundation policies, even when they might prefer otherwise.Footnote 45
The early twentieth-century foundations excelled at initiating programs that promoted success in these domains by engaging in interstitial collaboration, a mode of political action in which foundations worked with state education departments, university professors, county supervisors, local school boards, local teachers and reformers, and rural black communities toward the goal of filling in the gaps that existed in the provision of universal education throughout the South. Foundation reformers developed a process for education reform that addressed in targeted and ad hoc ways the problems of state and local governance, the lack of infrastructure, and a range of accepted beliefs about race and education. Their program varied across regions and included a diverse set of actors, connecting civil society to the transformation of the institutions responsible for schooling. The system had to be built from the ground up, which required the inclusion of local black citizens, whose participation would potentially undermine foundation work generally, as well as the work of state-level agents who sought legitimacy in the eyes of white Southerners. Interstitial collaboration required the participation of actors across the political spectrum who promoted goals determined by time, place, and the gaps that existed in education policy and practice.
Legal scholarship describes a similar concept. While Congress is responsible for enacting laws, there are situations in which it leaves gaps and calls upon the federal judiciary to use a common-law method known as interstitial lawmaking to fill those legal gaps. The process acknowledges that silence in an area of law is no reason for limiting the reach of the law. The need for interstitial law can be unintentional, when legislators fail to anticipate gaps, or purposeful, such as when Congress leaves matters to the courts to address. These are omissions that might be produced by the inadequacy of the legislative process or the inevitability of legislating in a complex society, but must be filled if statutory schemes are to provide citizens with the rights and services envisioned.Footnote 46 Details, both minor and major, are often missing from federal statutes, which inevitably give rise to lawsuits when the statutory scheme is implemented. The judiciary relies and builds upon existing state law when possible, but sometimes, there is no such law to guide it, or the existing state law is inadequate and a diversity of results might result.
Some states enacted new education legislation and then allowed or even asked foundations to fill gaps in the law with regard to rural black education. Other states purposely excluded rural blacks from education reform initiatives and were unenthusiastic about foundation interference. Tax law is a useful example. In the 1890s when the Democratic Party regained power in the South, many states developed new constitutions that placed strict legislated caps on state and local taxes.Footnote 47 To expand schooling in the early twentieth century, states could remove caps or allow special tax districts in which counties or school districts could collect tax revenues to extend school terms in local areas. However, many Southerners were adamantly against lifting the caps and unwilling to allow revenues to flow to black communities. Some counties created the special tax districts and then purposely drew the district lines to exclude every black household. Indeed, whites had considerable power to allocate funds disproportionately from the state to local communities, so that the majority of money went to white schools.Footnote 48 The difficulty of raising sufficient revenues to support a public system of education was a significant issue that varied by state and cut across multiple domains in policy development. It was relatively easier in some states, including North Carolina, to lift legislated caps and create special tax districts, and relatively harder in other states, including Mississippi.Footnote 49 Even where tax legislation allowed for education reform, new laws were impossible to implement because of gaps in local policy and practice. The law limited taxation and the racial state prevented the law from changing.
Foundations sought to reform tax policy, enlisting the support of a variety of actors across the political spectrum and through foundation initiatives that were tailored to the context in each state and locale. When legislators in Mississippi proposed a bill to establish white schools, it was declared by the district court to be unconstitutional because the word “white” appeared in it. The case, brought on behalf of black residents in Jasper County, was ostensibly filed to protect the state from violating Plessy v. Ferguson's rules about separate and equal. However, in reality, concerned white citizens who opposed the school tax and wanted the bill repealed were behind the case.Footnote 50 Mississippi reformers would not have succeeded with a bill to raise taxes for schools for both races, and by focusing the bill on the white community, legislators created a constitutional problem and an opening for those who sought to limit taxation and schooling. A 1903 report from Charles Dabney, who was directing the SEB Bureau of Investigation and Information, was clear about the difficulty of providing public and universal schooling across the rural South. “The cause for this very disadvantageous situation has been attributed to various reasons, but the principle one is that the available funds for school purposes are too limited to maintain the dual system of schools up to the standard the whites desire for themselves and neither the legal injunctions nor the common justice involved is sufficient to protect the interests of the politically powerless group of Negroes.”Footnote 51
Both legislated caps on taxation, and exclusionary tactics to prevent tax flows to black communities inhibited an increase in tax revenues and limited education progress. Sufficient tax revenues were required, for example, to build new high schools and provide additional remuneration to black teachers who might meet standards for minimum certification at the secondary level. Many Southern states also enacted laws in the early twentieth century to centralize and expand schooling through local consolidation and longer school terms, yet also failed to acknowledge that, for rural blacks, formal schoolhouses often did not exist, and school terms were based upon agricultural cycles because compulsory-school laws were not enforced.
The formal systems and political will necessary to address these issues were often nonexistent. Foundations recognized gaps in both the law and in existing practice and developed programs to address school-funding issues, including tax campaigns and a funding method that required matching funds from county budgets and private donations that would institutionalize reform in the local budget. Essentially, foundations designed programs to fill voids, in the hopes that over time, their work would lead to institutionalized and sustained reform. They encouraged broad coalitions that promoted schoolhouse construction, additional local taxation, and minimum school terms in rural black communities.
The strategies to address unique local needs were diverse because reformers recognized that education policy voids were no reason to limit the reach of education reform. Interstitial collaboration promoted collective action across diverse groups and helped foundations be effective at influencing policymaking in areas that state and local political systems had simply ignored. It also created opportunities for the participation of marginalized black citizens, even if severely circumscribed, incorporating them into the state through the developing public school system. This occurred formally, through organizational structures that developed within and outside of existing governance systems, and informally, through the political and professional networks that existed as part of these structures and cut across discrete organizations in the field.
The scholarship on foundations and Southern education typically indicts foundations for not using the power of their largesse to overturn the racial structure of the South and, indeed, the racial ideologies of foundation reformers and their willingness to accommodate the racial state provide evidence for that indictment.Footnote 52 However, foundations attempted to affect policy development in a context where the racial state created real social and legal constraints, some that were arguably unconstitutional, including the creation of special tax districts that excluded black households. Without carrying the analogy to interstitial lawmaking too far, foundations had to walk the line between having power to guide expert thinking about education reform and the risk that their work would be perceived as usurping the state and local rights of Southern legislators and citizens.
Because of the array of programs and relationships, it is easiest to understand interstitial collaboration as a formative process or interim step, moving from policymaking through elite-associated action to local implementation, recognizing that national efforts could not be imposed on state and local settings because of the agency that exists at every level of civil society. In a utopian reform environment, one in which the associational synthesis could more easily operate, foundations would have collaborated with Southern white reformers, business interests, university representatives, and governance systems to create a publicly funded and centralized education system. Yet, such cooperative ties were stronger in some states and regions and nonexistent in others, the result of racial attitudes that existed across a spectrum of beliefs and influenced the willingness of whites to participate in education reform. Fortunately, collaboration existed in some form in most Southern regions and, while elite reformers preferred to work with organizations that connected them to white educational experts, politicians, and reformers, rural blacks had to be part of the process, even if bound by the strict parameters of the racial state.
EXAMPLES OF INTERSTITIAL COLLABORATION IN SOUTHERN BLACK EDUCATION REFORM
Philanthropic donations could never be adequate to building and maintaining a public system of universal education in the South. The longer-term goal was to transfer the burden of schooling to the public, administered by educational experts located in state departments of education, and inclusive of rural black schools. It would be a school system based on scientific data, developed by educational experts, and administered through stronger state and local governance systems.Footnote 53 Those goals required public support for schooling, demonstrated through taxation, schoolhouse construction, and a shared ideology about public education. To achieve those goals, foundation initiatives promoted formalized rules, rationalization on an increased scale, and an expansion in levels of authority in order to create bureaucratic autonomy for public education based on educational expertise rather than partisan and local rule.Footnote 54 It would be the opposite of localism and had the potential to lead to new forms of governance that would replace the vested interests of local communities.Footnote 55 These goals would be difficult to achieve, especially if it meant that black schools would be included.
Reform required an interim process in which administrative systems that operated within, parallel to, and discretely from formal governance systems could be implemented to establish new policy, enact reform, and manage social policy.Footnote 56 This made reform relatively less coercive than direct governmental intervention, and potentially helped it to become part of the state and local political system. The foundations recognized the difficulty of implementing reform and institutionalized policies and programs by layering tracks onto existing institutions and developing arrangements that varied by state in order to create environments that were more conducive to education reform.Footnote 57 Because the work had to take place locally, education reform programs varied across the South and were open to decentralization and policy experimentation, strategies that were instructive as race-based social policy developed with greater breadth in the New Deal.Footnote 58 Their programs recognized and limited where possible the strength of local white majorities and created public agencies to deliver education that state and local politicians could not easily influence, at the same time that the agencies delivering these programs sought the legitimacy required for efficacy.
Interstitial collaboration began at the level of the state, where foundations wanted a comprehensive system of reform that would be public and centralized. Most Southern states had state-level departments of education overseen by elected superintendents who had little educational expertise and typically no commitment to rural black education. The foundations recognized that it would be impossible to promote goals for universal education and change the administrative structure of schooling without a state-level agent committed to foundation goals. The white state agent for Negro schools in those states that could accommodate such a position was an important method for achieving foundation objectives.
The state agents provided foundations with access to every level of governance. By 1914, the GEB selectively appointed agents in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia.Footnote 59 The agents and the organizations that they directed at the state level, located in state departments of education, added a layer onto existing state institutions.Footnote 60 In states where these agents were most successful in garnering state and local resources to institutionalize reform, the agent became responsible for a budget and staff. Foundation reports were clear that the location of the position would give “‘entre’ to all the counties, communities, and schools of the state; [the agent] could transact the state's business with county superintendents, county school boards, local trustees and teachers … and then get the two races to cooperate in its improvement.” The state agent coordinated efforts among political actors, a strategy that foundations believed would strengthen governance capacity at the state and local level.
Foundation reports typically focused on greater coordination of services as a first order of business, a strategy that defined their programs and had the potential to strengthen governance capacity at the state and local level. In 1911, the trustees of the GEB recommended “cooperation with state and local authorities to develop rural public schools.”Footnote 61 They also recommended that foundation agents “get the cooperation of county superintendents,” and black teachers bring about a “spirit of cooperation” in rural areas.Footnote 62 In their discussion of county training schools, which were the precursor to high schools for Southern black students, they recommended that the schools be maintained by public funds, and built and equipped with the “cooperation of the two races.”Footnote 63 Cooperation was essential for both rural black education reform and Southern political development. It required local participation on an unprecedented scale for purposes of national policymaking. This was impossible to do without state and local actors who had achieved sufficient bureaucratic autonomy to implement policies that might be at odds with the beliefs of both local white politicians and their constituents, and even local black community members.Footnote 64
The system for appointing state agents was especially significant given the politics of civil administration in the decentralized national government at the turn of the century, where governmental functions at all levels were staffed through the appointment of the governing political party.Footnote 65 The state agent program was administered through a state-level agency that had the potential to overcome local politics.Footnote 66 The positions were part of the formal governance structure, but agents reported to both their foundation benefactors and white politicians. Education fieldworkers who were located within state and local political systems with at least partial funding from northern philanthropists helped to strengthen administrative oversight of both schools and local communities, promoting both standardization and centralization over the longer term. The agent would be a “state official, an officer of the state department of education, and would have in all his work the powers and responsibilities of such position … [which would] combine the advantages of official authority with freedom from arbitrary political interference.”Footnote 67 Hence, it was a noteworthy innovation to create a position to work in tandem with, rather than as an appointee of, a more partisan government.
Each agent was expected to promote broader goals that included tax reform, school consolidation, term extensions, minimum teacher salaries and standards for certification, and a philanthropic mode of funding that both coexisted with state and local budgets and operated discretely.Footnote 68 Foundations wanted the agents to get both races to contribute through private donations to supplement the school building fund and secure an increase in the appropriation of public funds. In short, “he can stimulate and direct state, county and local effort in developing an effective system of public schools for the training of the negro children of the state.”Footnote 69 However, in a context defined by the racial state, this was a very tall order. It required that the state agent achieve a sufficient level of autonomy to experiment with new programs, collaborate with local black teachers and reformers, and convince white and black Southerners to support foundation- based reform. They had to start with bureaucratic discretion and work toward sufficient autonomy to develop policy initiatives that were at odds with many Southerners. Foundations placed state agents for Negro education in fourteen Southern states, but recognized that these agents could not assume state oversight of rural black schools without a process that would redound legitimacy to their work.
The appointment of the state agent would have been sufficient to the cause if white politicians in every state and local area generally supported the agents’ efforts on behalf of foundations, and local black citizens supported industrial education as the mode of schooling. The appointment in such a context would have led to state-supported reforms and a more centralized public system of schools that included black communities. This was not the case in any Southern region. The GEB secretary reported in 1914 on progress in making these appointments. “Under the present State administration in South Carolina it does not seem practicable to appoint a man in that state now. The same condition is found in Louisiana and to less extent in Mississippi. I should deem it unwise to appoint men at this time to any one of the three states named. I have had a request from Florida but, to speak plainly to you and in confidence, I do not fully trust the State Superintendent in this particular matter.”Footnote 70 The GEB produced reports that predicted whether state support for Negro education was “strong, medium, or weak.” The reports also detailed the reason behind each classification and a plan for overcoming it, where possible, often providing similar data by county.Footnote 71
The appointment of a state agent provided opportunities for foundations to manage reform in a more top-down manner and increased collaboration with state-level departments of education, but foundation reformers were aware that this would be insufficient to implementing education programs in local areas, particularly those defined as weak with regard to support for rural black education. Further, the legitimacy of state oversight depended on local success. When both whites and blacks perceived local reform as beneficial, appropriate, and efficient, it brought legitimacy to the work of the state agents.Footnote 72 The agent was essential to developing state administrative structures, but progress was ultimately dependent on their implementation and success in rural areas.
Interstitial collaboration was required at every level of governance. State agents had to cooperate with white politicians to promote policy, but the most important part of the work was in local areas where there was a dire need to strengthen administrative systems, overcome local control, create an educational infrastructure where none existed, and gain legitimacy through the support of local actors. An important means of gaining local support was through the appointment of a supervising teacher in counties where a significant portion of the population was black, or more than ten black teachers were employed.Footnote 73 Foundations originally conceived of the Jeanes teachers as local supervisors who would be effective at “showing the teachers how to connect the school with the child's everyday life through simple forms of industrial work, and by planning a course of study and work that will fit them for a useful and happy life in their own community.”Footnote 74 The teachers could also demonstrate to local whites the benefits of black education by using their position to promote community clean up, sales of agricultural products to raise funds for schooling, and the general usefulness of industrial education to achieving “better” black communities. The SEB recommended that rural schools be selected for development, school clubs be organized to connect schools to homes, and small schools be consolidated.Footnote 75
The Jeanes teachers reported simultaneously to the foundation, the state agent for Negro education, and to local school boards, similar to the system of state agents who reported simultaneously to both the foundations and the state. These appointments created organizational systems and a bureaucracy to connect rural schools to the state, which helped local teachers to provide greater oversight of local schools. The county supervisors had formal responsibility for recommending and hiring these teachers, with a promise of at least partial funding, but the appointment required formal approval by the state agent and the Jeanes Fund. GEB field agent Jackson Davis was clear in 1910 about the need for effective teachers to reach rural black communities and collaborate in meaningful ways with local citizens.
The school is the most important, and almost the only point at which the community (and by this term I mean the state—the sentiment and leadership of the white race) touches the life of the negro with any conscious effort to shape his life and his condition … bring about a cooperation of all the public schools with the secondary schools, … connect the schools with the farm and garden demonstration work, and in short to unify as nearly as possible all the forces that are working for the education and help of the negro … the work took shape in my mind along the lines of selection, supervision and cooperation. We must select a qualified well-trained negro teacher … [who will] put new life into the negro schools by directing the efforts of the teachers along definite and practical lines, and by arousing the negro citizens to do more for their own education than they have heretofore done … showing the teachers how to connect the school with the child's every day life … the supervisors and the demonstrator and County Superintendent may cooperate to this end.Footnote 76
Davis used his work in Halifax County, Virginia, as an example of the possibilities inherent in these appointments. Whites in Halifax had been hostile to black education and a school board member had proclaimed, “The negro is doomed; nothing can be done for him.”Footnote 77 However, Jackson pointed out that after the county appointed a Jeanes teacher, politicians there expanded the size of the black school, included a room for industrial training, and made plans to buy three acres of land to promote agricultural work.Footnote 78 The appointment of a Jeanes teacher in the county demonstrated the benefits of industrial education, expanded schoolhouse construction, gave legitimacy to state and foundation programs, and increased support by both races for universal education.
The Jeanes teachers often had to navigate difficult local politics in order to be successful. Some black educators believed that industrial education had its advantages and that it might lead to more schooling in rural black communities, while others adamantly opposed this curriculum on the grounds that it limited black opportunity and might lead to a system overseen by white reformers committed to the racial state.Footnote 79 Many black reformers and parents considered the classical curriculum, not the industrial one, to be the path to political equality. Rural black teachers stood to gain significant support if they promoted foundation policies, even when it contradicted their political ideals, and could only be successful at the local level when rural blacks supported their work.
J. R. Faison, Jeanes teacher in Anson County, North Carolina, was clear that members of his community were wary of foundation support. He reported in 1913 to the North Carolina state agent that in forty-three rural black schools in Anson County, with a total average attendance of 1,431 pupils, most “patrons, pupils and teachers alike knew nothing of the industrial work in the rural schools, nor did they seem to see their possibilities along this line.”Footnote 80 It was clear that he worked in a community whose views differed from foundation benefactors and that he would be mediating between the two alternate conceptions of schooling. Other teachers shared these concerns. Helen Whiting, in her role as Georgia's black state supervisor, explained that some Jeanes teachers had to convince local blacks to cooperate. “There was a subtle movement against her program seemingly, which was due to lack of enlightenment. … The people expected Mrs. Gregory to emphasize industrial work. It seems to be taking her some time to convince them that her program is for improvement of instruction.”Footnote 81 Both recognized that local parents and teachers believed industrial education would provide fewer benefits than an academic curriculum, and Whiting was explicit that cooperation was essential for success. The Jeanes teachers also required foundation and local support in order to achieve bureaucratic autonomy.
Technically, the teachers worked under the direction of the county superintendent and reported to the state agent, but Southern whites generally and the state agents themselves often provided only cursory oversight. In most areas, the Jeanes teacher served as the “de facto superintendent” of black schools in the county and their work was central to a range of community initiatives. The state agent in Mississippi discussed the twenty-three Jeanes teachers appointed in that state in 1925, acknowledging that they were given “only a minimum amount of time which, of course, is a regret to us.”Footnote 82 These teachers often had the latitude to supervise all rural schools in a county, and their relationship to both county and state political systems embedded them in a bureaucracy that was nonexistent prior to their appointment. This latitude was significant because it provided the space to construct the education infrastructure essential to schooling and led to stronger administrative oversight. It also provided opportunities for the teachers to participate in networks with other Jeanes teachers across the South, foundation agents at the state and national level, and Southern white reformers and politicians. Interstitial collaboration created and sustained networks that would benefit foundation goals in the state.
While some of the Jeanes teachers were men, most Southern whites preferred to work with black women. They were perceived to be nonthreatening, especially when organizing schools that promoted an industrial rather than academic education.Footnote 83 The Mississippi state agent was clear about the preference. “I concur heartily in the opinion that women, as a rule, are capable of doing more effective work than men. My experience in Lauderdale County and my observation during the past few weeks thoroughly convinces me of this fact, and I am wondering if it would be advisable to go any further than recommend the employment of women in preference to men for this work.”Footnote 84 This adds an interesting gender component to the important role that teachers played in organizing rural communities during Jim Crow and underscores the essential place of these black women in developing forms of interstitial collaboration.Footnote 85
The first foundation letter to teachers appointed throughout the South advised teachers that the most effective appointees would keep in regular contact with school officials, be willing to help fellow teachers, assist in organizing the people of the community into associations for self-help, cooperate with the minister or ministers of the community, and introduce industrial work.Footnote 86 From the foundation perspective, those teachers who were successful at gaining the support of all of these groups could exercise significant leadership and create consensus for foundation-supported reforms.
James Dillard, the president of the Jeanes Fund, articulated the need for teacher flexibility. “In some places there is, I think, too much disposition to standardize their efforts. To my mind the four primary commandments given them are enough: (1) to promote industrial work of some kind, whether it be making dresses or mending harness, so as to emphasize the connection of the school with the home; (2) to keep in touch with the county superintendent; (3) to keep in touch with the ministers of the county; (4) to help the rural teachers in a friendly spirit, not in a bossy way. As to the rest, a Jeanes Teacher knows best what she can best do. Her freedom has been her strength.”Footnote 87 Dillard's letter underscores the extent to which community needs varied and teachers would need to fill gaps in policy and practice before foundation programs could be consistently implemented across the South. They helped to build the local infrastructure by developing local coalitions to promote education reform and ensuring that the schools had a positive and strong relationship to the community.
Successful local programs could potentially change local attitudes about education and race, enhancing the reputation of both the local teacher and the state agent. Foundation reports were clear about the potential power of these teachers. “The teachers of colored public schools occupy a peculiarly important position. They are not only the chief agents in stimulating the interest of the colored people in the public schools, but they are also in a position to present the needs of the colored schools effectively to the school officials.”Footnote 88 Foundations encouraged regular conferences of Jeanes teachers within states and across regions to promote black education and contribute to conversations about foundation efficacy. “In these conferences they bring to each other and to the officers of the Jeanes Fund, to the State Agents, superintendents and representatives of Normal Schools a glimpse into the struggling life of the back country, the efforts of the people, their desires, their difficulties and their needs, that forms the basis of more intelligent efforts on the part of all.”Footnote 89
The agenda for a ten-day conference in 1931 included a session each morning in which representative Jeanes teachers from each of the Southern states made a series of 15-minute presentations to an audience that included representatives from the U.S. Bureau of Education, Columbia University faculty, the director and assistant director of the Rosenwald Fund, state superintendents of education, state agents for Negro education, the chairman of the board and president of the Jeanes Fund board of trustees, and the secretary of the GEB. The conference also included small-group discussions in which the teachers joined at least one foundation leader to discuss a topic in depth.
Such events had multiple purposes. In general, the teachers played an important public relations role. The Jeanes teachers could help to mitigate the isolation of rural schools because they were required in their positions to participate in the broader reform dynamic.Footnote 90 They were community organizers, fundraisers, and supervisors of rural black schools. Foundation efficacy required data that the teachers could provide in a context where most states had no systems for collecting it in the early twentieth century and little interest in developing systems that included isolated, rural black communities. With the assistance of these local teachers, foundations promoted networks that extended across local and state boundaries and fostered dynamic relationships between white and black reformers. The teachers operated within strict parameters, but foundation representatives gave them a voice at the table and an opportunity to connect their schools to educational leaders outside of the community. The optimism about their work recognized the potential rather than the reality, however, because success depended not just on the teacher's skills, but also the state and local political context and the attitudes of local blacks and whites. Interstitial collaboration describes what actually happened across the South as foundation reformers and black teachers painstakingly sought to expand public education, filling one gap at a time, in a context where an infinite number of them existed.
Booker T. Washington was clear that the teachers could be central to foundation efficacy, but recognized that any misstep on their part might also create greater prejudice in local communities. “This is especially true of Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, in which States there has been the worst divorce between the public school system and Northern efforts to help. I believe more strongly than ever that our work of the Jeanes Board is destined to be one of splendid reconciliation, but we must not expect a revolution overnight.”Footnote 91 Yet, everyone involved recognized that networks that involved diverse groups might lead to the kind of shared consensus that would provide greater legitimacy to foundation programs. The GEB believed that schools and rural citizens were central to their work. Leo Favrot, field agent for the GEB, restated in 1925 the arguments that Jackson Davis had made in 1910. “As an educator I want to make the schools better. I am honestly of the opinion that we can't make schools better without getting back of the schoolroom and teaching force and learning more about the community.”Footnote 92
The teachers played an important public relations role but, beyond that, filled important administrative roles that did not previously exist at the local level and extended interstitial collaboration beyond mere networking. Early foundation meetings made clear to participants that the lack of developed administrative systems in the South required that the teachers fulfill essential administrative functions in isolated rural black regions. The point is not to enumerate the range of teacher accomplishments, but to demonstrate that their efforts in rural areas were essential to the long-term success of policy development and implementation. They filled an important gap in local education policy and practice, both figuratively and administratively. The local success of education reform redounded important benefits to the state agency responsible for the work of these teachers. Teacher success promoted acceptance of black education, provided reputational benefits to both state departments of Negro education and the state agents who ran them, and made the work generally more efficient and consistent across regions in the South.
The developing bureaucracy gave foundations access to local schools and greater opportunities to promote their vision of educational policy in local areas. County superintendents submitted job descriptions to the Jeanes Fund that provide evidence of formal connections between black schools and governance structures created through foundation programming. “The class-room teacher looks upon the supervisor as their means of making contact with the school board, and our local school boards permit the colored supervisor to sit-in at our meetings and represent his people.”Footnote 93 A description in Tennessee acknowledged a direct line to the state, claiming the black teacher would supervise schools under the direction of the state department of education.Footnote 94
Teacher reports indicated that these job descriptions accurately conveyed what happened in practice. Jennie Robinson, the teacher in Virginia's Westmoreland County, reported that she met monthly with the white supervisor regarding suggestions for classroom teachers, attended supervisors’ conferences, state teacher and district teacher conferences, and meetings organized by white citizens to address health and welfare issues.Footnote 95 Mayme Coleman reported from Caroline County that she had met with the superintendent to develop a program to improve instruction, which included four district teacher meetings that promoted better reading, spelling bees, arithmetic demonstration, and a plan to continue sessions monthly.Footnote 96 These reports are not isolated and indicate formal connections between rural teachers and governance systems at both the state and local level. While these examples indicate formal connections to the local superintendent, each teacher also had power to make reports on behalf of teachers and provide extensive oversight in their respective counties.
By 1916, state agents reported on the increasing value of Jeanes teacher contributions, and gave as evidence the willingness of counties to pay a larger portion of the salaries. For example, in 1913–1914, only 15.5 percent of the total salaries were provided through state and local revenue sources, but this amount increased to 57.7 percent of the total by 1924–1925.Footnote 97 The Alabama state agent provided detailed information about these accomplishments as early as 1916. “In the course of last year, they assisted in raising $47,451 among the colored people and $1,368 among the white. … to improve school buildings, to erect new ones and to supplement the salaries of teachers.”Footnote 98 By 1921, the state agents reported the work of the supervisors “has materially increased the interest of the County Superintendents in Negro education and the County Superintendents are relying more and more upon the advice of the supervisors as to the selection of teachers, et cetera. … The testimony was that the Jeanes Teachers are doing most valuable work in stimulating projects for new buildings, raising money from the colored people for this purpose and also in some cases supervising the construction.”Footnote 99 The Texas agent reported in 1924 on the state's progress in constructing new schoolhouses in rural black communities with help from the Rosenwald Fund, and gave credit to the Jeanes teachers appointed in that state. He explained that each county in Texas presented a new problem that could require several visits from the state agent, a problem that was compounded by local superintendent turnover. However, he felt that “a successful approach was often made to school officials through tactful Negroes and Jeanes workers. Forty-one new Rosenwald schools were built in Texas this year [1929] and three in new counties.”Footnote 100 The teachers were clearly instrumental to policy implementation in the short term and foundation efficacy in education reform over the longer term.
The work continued to evolve, indicating the important role of this form of interstitial collaboration to foundation efforts. Mrs. S. S. Jones, a Jeanes teacher in Bolivar, Mississippi, reported in 1929 that her county was “now raising money to build several schools and have in the bank several hundred dollars for the above purpose.”Footnote 101 Nercelia Watts in Lamar, Mississippi, presented a comprehensive set of accomplishments: “We were successful in consolidating two schools, after four years of persuading … we hope to have the school term extended also we have great things planned for the next term [sic], purchasing a free library for as many rural schools as possible.”Footnote 102 Geneva Perryman in Leflore, Mississippi, provided more detail, enumerating nine areas of work that included building and repairs, school equipment, organization and classroom management, industrial education, longer terms, and regular attendance.Footnote 103 The state agents and local black teachers were clearly essential to building a public system of schooling that included rural blacks. These state and local appointments provided an organizational structure for promoting and implementing education reform, addressing a range of gaps in education policy and practice that excluded rural blacks.
Unfortunately, both white state agents and local black teachers in some regions of the South were sometimes not as successful as the foundations hoped. Education gaps persisted across the South and in many, they widened. There were state agents who seemed to have a marginal commitment at best to black education and sought foundation largesse without plans to extend public education to local black communities. Others supported foundation goals, but were unable to get sufficient support from white politicians in state or local governance structures. Some states had such weak state agents that they could not serve as intermediaries between foundation initiatives and local implementation. For example, the foundations provided funding to support a state agent for Negro education and an assistant state agent in Mississippi, but did not consider these agents relatively successful in their work.Footnote 104 White politicians in the state were not in favor of black education and the agents did little to support its expansion. They failed to collect data, develop relationships with local communities, promote tax reform, or take other meaningful steps to expand the infrastructure to include black schools. The GEB had little opportunity in that state to create parallel structures within state and local governance to develop and implement programs in the state. Similarly, there was variation across the South in teacher success. Their work was negatively affected by state agents who were not fully supportive or competent, local whites who opposed black education, black community concerns about white influence and the industrial education curriculum, and personal and professional limitations.
Foundations developed alternative relationships and structures to address these gaps, extending the scope of interstitial collaboration. For example, the GEB provided money for professors of secondary education to be appointed in state universities throughout the South. The first appointee in Mississippi was Thomas Bailey in 1908, who the GEB hoped might positively affect the lack of progress in that state. His main purpose was to establish public high schools, which served only white students at the time, but the GEB asked that he visit communities and create “a public sentiment that shall permanently sustain such high schools, and shall endeavor to place the high schools under such local leadership as shall give them intelligent and wise direction.” Bailey provided a monthly statement of his rural visits to the state department of education, to the university, and to the GEB.Footnote 105 The university professors conducted research and promoted coordination of secondary school reform, but appointees like Bailey and his successor Thomas Fant, supported broader GEB goals.Footnote 106 Both Bailey and Fant acknowledged in their reports a need to address the “Negro Question” in the state and expand educational opportunity for both races.
In 1917, Fant reported on efforts to join other Southern states in promoting the establishment of county training schools for rural blacks, and he invited a GEB field agent to Mississippi to discuss a proposition for promoting these schools. He was the GEB agent most active in efforts in Bolivar County to provide a public black high school in order to encourage blacks to stay in the county. In 1919, he requested funding from the GEB to promote his Better Schools Campaign in Mississippi, and in developing a plan for that work, he also consulted the state's black teacher associations, which had also raised $250 for the campaign. As Fant said about the donation, “They, of course, will profit indirectly in the results.”Footnote 107 While he focused first on white secondary education, he included black education where possible and often provided important information about racial politics in local areas.
The university professors in Mississippi became an important source of local attitudes and rural data that the state was unable to generate, even with the appointment of a state agent for Negro education and Jeanes teachers in a number of counties. For example, Bailey produced an extensive report in 1909 in which he was clear that he intended to get “complete and authentic data concerning every school in the state where any high school work is being done or ought to be done.” He explained that the state had no high school board, and that high school supervision was entirely in the hands of the university as a matter of custom, but advised the GEB not to impose a system externally.Footnote 108 He affirmed the extent to which extensive cooperation at every level of government would be instrumental to reform and discussed the need for comprehensive collaboration that would promote greater understanding of local needs. “My survey of the field, which is now nearing completion, convinces me afresh of the extremely close connection between educational conditions, on the one hand, and industrial, social, religious, political, not to say, climatic and physical, on the other. Whoever wishes to work out educational plans in the South must study the people, their industries, their history, their institutions, and so on. …”Footnote 109 His reports highlighted for foundations the need for interstitial collaboration as a means to promote black education reform. He was clear that cooperation must include local citizens. “The cooperation of the masses of the people would have to be obtained, especially of the farmers and the preachers and politicians, and, if I mistake not, these classes have little concern with the [annual Conference for Education in the South] and are often inclined to mistrust it. … In Mississippi, it often happens that our school men who understand country conditions and farm life are uncultured and uninfluential with educators, whereas our influential and cultured leaders know little about the country conditions and often care less.”Footnote 110
The professors of secondary education could be instrumental to local policy implementation. Bailey provided the GEB with a list of suggestions for additional steps in the process of implementing comprehensive education reform in the state. “Educational agencies should co-operate with and influence such movements as the Farmers’ Union, the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, the Bureau of Forestry, and so on. The Corn Clubs among the boys assume a really important aspect to ‘ordinary’ education. … make a deliberate effort to combine the industrial and educational forces of the state into a harmonious whole that shall re-make the state at once industrially and educationally.”Footnote 111 E. C. Sage, an assistant secretary of the GEB, wrote to Bailey in March of 1909, inviting him to Atlanta to meet with members of the GEB, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the Peabody Education Fund for an “informal, practical and quite private conference with the professors of secondary education regarding the entire high school situation and propaganda in the Southern States.”Footnote 112
Through public relations campaigns in the media, regular and ongoing conferences of state agents and Jeanes teachers, and substantial community initiatives, the foundations elicited the help of interest groups and local reformers. When the Jeanes Fund trustees met in 1911, the president suggested a university commission on race relations, comprised of representative faculty from each of the South's state universities. A “provision [to] be made for supplying the various Negro educational, religious and business meetings with competent speakers chosen from representative white people” was also suggested. In addition, the idea that graduates of Southern colleges study and report on local communities was offered.Footnote 113
Beyond the appointment of field agents, including state agents, Jeanes teachers, and professors of secondary education, foundations designed a range of programs that might also lead to institutionalized reform. They developed temporary measures to fill gaps in the educational infrastructure, in spite of efforts by many Southerners to limit such growth. Funding practices were an interesting example. Foundations provided funding that both coexisted with state and local budgets and operated discretely, but their gifts were used to promote private fundraising and local taxation. The provision of small philanthropic donations rather than full funding, with a requirement for matching funds, would force the creation of a tax-based revenue stream and public responsibility for the schools. Funding was awarded strategically for initiatives that would help to create an infrastructure but, more importantly, stimulate government spending. The GEB, the Jeanes Fund, and the Rosenwald Fund all operated in this manner, with one report stating 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 114 The secretary of the GEB was explicit about this in extensive correspondence with Rosenwald. In an early letter, he encouraged the use of private funds “to secure larger public support. Our experience shows that public action in these matters does not go backward.”Footnote 115 By working in tandem with local teachers and reformers, who raised private donations through a grossly unjust version of “double taxation” in the black community, the public might assume responsibility for the cost of schooling, which would ultimately embed schooling in state and local political systems.
Many Southerners preferred that the administrative oversight of county finances, taxation, health and human services, schooling, and roads remain underdeveloped.Footnote 116 However, foundation reformers understood that an effective public system required an infrastructure supported by local citizens, and their programs encouraged both the infrastructure and the participation of civil society. Interstitial collaboration encompasses a diverse array of networks and programs that cut across policy domains, efforts that are essential to the expansion of schooling, and to restructuring governance. It is a political mode that addresses gaps in policy and practice and allows new policy to develop incrementally. The foundations looked forward to the next phase of their work, a new era when the schools could be turned over to experts, standards, and the state, without the need for programs that engaged local citizens.
CONCLUSION
In 1929, after nearly thirty years of education reform efforts in the South, GEB general field agent Favrot addressed the Department of Rural Education of the National Education Association in Atlanta, Georgia. Favrot described the accomplishments and failures of three decades of work and acknowledged that the most honest description of foundation efforts would need to include the many elements involved. He described it as a mosaic that lacked uniformity and varied in design and hue, reflecting simultaneously the successes and failures of education reform efforts across the South. Favrot recognized that the one positive constant in three decades of effort was the heroism of black teachers. “It is people like these, ‘inching along,’ as it were, who are responsible for much of the growth, slow but steady, in Negro education in the South.”Footnote 117 In fact, there were limited gains in black education in many areas of the South, but measurable progress typically happened in those regions, like North Carolina, in which interstitial collaboration was most effective.Footnote 118
Foundation agents in the South both sought collaboration and tried to manage it, which led to an institutional dynamic that promoted top-down initiatives at both the state and local level and lends some support to class hegemony critiques of philanthropy. Philanthropists had considerable influence, and it is important not to trivialize the impact of their particular objectives for rural black education; indeed, foundations developed the programs and appointed the people in charge of them. Further, the reform dynamic did not provide rural blacks with a fair opportunity to engage in the policy decisions that affected their communities. Rather, it provided greater space for interest groups in reform, particularly the opening of political opportunity structures for the black community, and the potential for incorporating communities into policy and political development.
The links formed by foundations included a broad range of reformers, and organizational structures were widely dispersed. Ultimately, foundation programs created a more dynamic relationship between governance structures and local communities, which had important implications for interest-group agency and its relative power in policy development. The policies associated with education reform in the South resulted from interactions between various interest groups and organizations. Black Southerners were marginalized from the political structure of the South in every domain, but foundation programs provided an opening. Black reformers, particularly teachers, were essential at the local level, and foundation reform programs could not have happened without them. There were strict parameters around the participation of the black community in policy settings, but schools brought black teachers into those settings and often in meaningful ways.
The organizational revolution created structures that mitigated the isolation of rural black communities and enhanced the strength and professionalism of rural black teachers. It also created formal avenues to promote the collaboration necessary to political development in the South. Local control was a powerful source of education development and innovation in rural black communities, just as it was in white ones. However, the developing bureaucracy could be a source of strength for rural black teachers, potentially leading to a more public system of education that provided avenues for teachers to shape school policies and practices and provide legitimacy to the state departments of Negro education responsible for black education reform and to local schools that required community support.Footnote 119 At the least, the teachers had opportunities to engage both within and beyond their communities in matters of education.Footnote 120 The new organizational networks in local communities existed without considerable oversight, and led to a more dynamic relationship between interests groups and institutions, providing opportunities for professional black teachers and engaging them deeply in the reform dynamic. It enhanced the governing capacity in local communities and provided formal openings for teachers, most of them women, to participate in policy and development, leading to state-level appointments for some.Footnote 121 In this sense, school administration and bureaucracy did more than just create networks.
While programs that supported industrial education were limiting to black education, those programs also expanded the scope of public schooling and promoted the inclusion of rural black schools. Shifts to bureaucratic systems connected schools to the political structure outside of local communities. Instead of schools being isolated from the governance structure, the developing bureaucracy could help to isolate schools from the electoral politics that dominated at the local level. It formalized and institutionalized collaboration among political actors, making permanent the array of ad hoc programs and relationships that developed to fill policymaking voids in Southern education. Expanded integration and coherence empowered organizational subunits and connected rural black communities both to networks and governance structures outside of the local political system.
There was a clear relationship between the implementation and sustainability of foundation initiatives and state and local political development. By 1931, the Rosenwald Fund trustees recognized progress in the South, but also realized that it would be beneficial to continue to focus efforts explicitly on county-level governance. Their report recommended that the fund “cooperate in experiments in a unified county organization which would include schools, health, library service, and general welfare, for white and colored in both rural and urban sections of the county. Such experiments, although they may be difficult to carry out, may throw a great deal of light on what can be accomplished under the best organization for all the people of the county.”Footnote 122 Schools were the most important institutional venue in which the community could organize for educational and social reform.
While the black community promoted their own education beginning with emancipation, as Jim Crow became institutionalized in both custom and law, members of this community also perceived that it would be easier both to promote and sustain reform when it occurred within established organizational structures. Many of these teachers worked closely with foundations at the local level. They were eager to promote a publicly funded and universal system of education, which would ensure expanded educational opportunity and be perceived as central to the development of their communities. Their willingness to work within foundation-based programs represented a difficult compromise. While programs had the potential to expand schooling for rural blacks, the risk was that ultimately control of those schools would end up in the hands of the state. At a certain point, it would result in greater power to state actors, to the detriment of local control. Interstitial collaboration was necessary to the development and implementation of foundation programs; bureaucracy formalized that collaboration and promoted foundation efficacy over the longer term, preferably in state systems of education centrally managed by experts who promoted minimum standards across each state's schools.
Many white Southerners narrowly promoted foundation goals because interstitial collaboration as promoted by foundations promised a system of segregated and unequal education. Foundation reformers introduced their programs as an answer to the Southern race problem and used their expansive networks and media relations to develop a public relations campaign that encouraged shared beliefs about the relationship between education and the state for both races. Many Southern states and locales developed new sources of revenue to support schooling generally and included some limited sums for agricultural and industrial schools for rural blacks, enhanced administrative capacity, and an infrastructure that connected local schools to the state. Yet, once reform happened in all of these domains and the state took over, local control of the racial state would be harder to maintain. The creation of more centralized schooling produced venues in which desegregation could be implemented, and the means by which incentives to comply and costs for not complying could be imposed. This was not necessarily the intent of foundations in the early twentieth century, when reformers hoped to promote national ideals in local areas and racial equality was not one of them. However, a more developed and centralized school system would create a more likely environment for new conceptions of both education and race.
Many Southern states joined the early twentieth-century organizational revolution, transferring local and partisan government to state administrative systems. Some states, including North Carolina, promoted stronger and more bureaucratic structures that altered the relationship of the state to local communities, particularly with regard to schooling. These achievements strengthened the state agencies responsible for public education in some regions. Through interstitial collaboration, the standards movement and centralization provided power to local communities and might have led to quantifiable gains in the general infrastructure. However, once greater bureaucratic autonomy was achieved, the dynamic relationships with civil society were diminished at the local level.
