Citizenship and Public Schools: Accounting for Racial Inequality in Education in the Pre- and Post-Disfranchisement South

Abstract

Building on the arguments that public education is a state-provided good and that citizenship rights affect groups' access to state-provided goods, the authors ask whether an abrupt transformation of U. S. citizenship rights-the disfranchisement of Blacks and many poor Whites in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South-affected the distribution of public educational opportunities and enrollments. Using county-level data for six southern states in 1890 and 1910, they find that disfranchisement changed the way local governments distributed educational opportunities to Black children and White children and produced greater racial inequalities in school enrollments. After disfranchisement, racial inequalities in educational opportunities were greatest in counties with relatively large Black populations, with relatively strong tax bases, and where the Democratic Party was least challenged. School enrollments of Blacks and Whites were limited by insufficient educational opportunities, suggesting that school expansion in the South was hindered by shortages of educational opportunities; but the limitation for Black children was significantly greater than the limitation experienced by White children