Leveraging the State: Private Money and the Development of Public Education for Blacks

Abstract

This study analyses African Americans’ success in getting the state to improve access to a basic social right—the right to a public education—in the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century South. During this period, Southern blacks were deprived of the right to vote and many of their civil rights. We find that the loss of political and civil rights influenced the means that blacks could use to affect policy, and it limited the policy objectives they could achieve; but it did not render them unable to affect policy. After disfranchisement, black communities, in an alliance with Northern philanthropists, modified and vastly extended a strategy we call “leveraging the state “—a strategy that had been used successfully by both black communities and white communities in the nineteenth century to increase access to public elementary education. This strategy involved using private funds in combination with partial public funding to directly establish new public schools and then negotiating a state commitment to ongoing support of the new public schools. Such a strategy cannot secure political or civil rights, but it can and did secure social rights—although at a high financial price for the challengers and their allies.