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SEGREGATED SCHOOLS IN SOUTH

During the early and middle 20th century, the quality of schooling improved dramatically for African-American children attending segregated schools in the South. The source of these improvements has been a point of contention. Donohue, Heckman, and Todd (2002) contend that private philanthropy performed an important role in initiating the improvements in black schooling in the South. This paper presents an alternative explanation for these improvements, based on previously unanalyzed annual county-level data from South Carolina from 1895-1960. The quality of black schools in South Carolina remained stagnant during the first twenty years of the 20th century. Beginning around 1920, school quality measures of black schools began to improve and continued to improve through 1959. These improvements were not achieved merely in absolute terms. Relative black-white school quality, measured by average school session length and class size, also began to increase around 1920. By 1940 the gap in school quality between white and black schools had narrowed substantially, although white children still on average attended better schools.

Its hypothesis is that the perseverance of African-Americans in the South to seek a better life for themselves and their children, in tandem with a political transition from a regime governed by white planters to one governed by other whites, motivated and funded the improvements. These improvements occurred despite the antagonism, or at least indifference, of both regimes toward the black population. The paper develops a simple model of the public -sector process in which the funding of black schools depends on the economic interests of the particular group of whites in electoral control of the school district. The ability of blacks to migrate, as illustrated by Margo (1991), provides the primary limit to the fiscal discrimination. The implications of the model are fully consistent with 65 years of school funding data from South Carolina.

Black schools in South Carolina began to improve around 1920, after more than twenty years of stagnation. These improvements began decades before the civil rights movement. I argue that black schools began to improve, and continued improving, throughout the era of segregation, as a result of a regime change from one controlled by white planters to one controlled by other whites. This argument does not presume that the whites who seized political power from the planters were more compassionate towards the cause of African- American education. Acknowledge the Importance of court battles and other external influences in improving black schools from the late 1930s and after. Progress is still going on. To get education is right of every human being, either black or white. So, that we can completely finished up the wrong mentality of person who think, black peoples have no right to raise or educate themselves.