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A Thread About School Segregation: During Reconstruction, local black communities did not push integrated public schools as the South moved to the first public schools on a large scale. They wanted equal funding for their schools. There was a brief moment of relative parity.
Whites were openly hostile to the idea of ANY education for African Americans. They considered it wasted money. One of the top complaints during Redemption was that school funds for black students were a waste.
As highlighted by @KeriLeighMerrit, the South was against education for the masses generally, but they were absolutely terrified about what schooling for blacks would do. An educated population with the right to vote could undue their policies designed to reinforce inequality.
Education for citizenship is an important pillar of democracy. So fights to defund schools are fundamentally threats to our Republic. In the South, they first intimidated black voters and literally drove them from the polls. Sound familiar? The goal was to have voting control.
Voting control gives you control over resources and policy. After restricting blacks from voting with violence, they cut taxes aggressively. And these were progressive taxes that landowners were paying. Then you can cry broke to cut school funding.
In the South, black and white school funding declined precipitously after Reconstruction ended. This was racial policy, to be sure, but it was public policy on a grander scale. They wanted to cut all school funding equally but found that poor whites liked public schooling
There were other changes. States magically decided that local governments could NOT fund schools. It’s not hard to see why— a majority black community was still a threat, so federalizing funding was another way to rob blacks of their rights to education.
Important: racists do not like local control if that local control is not to their liking. They hate it and will fight it. You see the same strategies at work today—barring local government authority to pursue global conservative goals. There is nothing new under the sun.
The policy has never been about schools only or segregation only. It is about citizenship. Please understand that. These debates are about who is and isn’t a full citizen.
