Property Ownership and Educational Discrimination in the South

Abstract

In the postbellum southern U.S., African Americans were steadily disenfranchised, a modern publicly financed universal school system with racially segregated schools was created, and public school monies were allocated so that white pupils received substantially more than black pupils. An earlier paper (Ng and Halcoussis 2003) established a statistical relationship between black voter participation, the prevalence of black children and the degree of fund diversion. This article extends the analysis by examining the effect of land distribution, political participation, and tax incidence on black and white student expenditures. A positive statistical relationship is found between black per student expenditures and counties with higher political participation. A negative statistical relationship is found between black per student expenditures and counties where large tenant plantations are more prevalent. This establishes that both voting power and the source of school funding also played important roles in the existence and extent of racially based school fund diversion.