It is not unusual for different sociological theories to give different explanations for observed patterns in data. The relative merits of different theories can be adjudicated on basis of data analyses only if theories make opposing claims. It appears to us that Professor Ramirez's major quarrel with our study is with our theoretical perspective; he finds no serious problem with basic analyses nor with empirical relationships that we can identify. The difficulty with this theoretical disagreement, however, is that results of our study are consistent with both theoretical claims that we proposed and with those that Professor Ramirez prefers. Thus, our defense in following response for theory that we prefer is based upon theory's logical consistency and a look, once again, at history of early twentieth-century South. The basic difference between our perspective and Professor Ramirez's is that we propose a theory that links social structure and human agency. Professor Ramirez appears to prefer a more structural account with less consideration of role of individual actors that shape and are shaped by key institutions. More specifically, Professor Ramirez takes issue with our work because in attempting to link agency and structure, we argue that class matters. He is bothered by fact that we take class interests seriously as determinants of decisions conceming public school policies and that we believe that class position constrained choices of individuals to send their children to school or not. Moreover, he is upset, it appears, because we assert that it is difficult to disentangle effects of race and class in early twentieth-century South and he suggests that we are silent on effects of race. To argue that class relations of plantation agriculture were most important determinant of restriction of educational opportunities in South is not to claim that race did not matter or had no theoretical importance. Racial slavery was a class relation although racial criteria were used to impose and defend it. (Thompson [1975] called plantation a race-making situation.) Abolishing slavery made it impossible for equation between race and class to be drawn as clearly and efficiently as it was in antebellum South, but abolition of slavery did not completely destroy close connection between two. Racial criteria were used to disfranchise blacks and to ensure their economic, political, and social subordination. The institutionalization of racial bias within state institutions, which we term the racial state, made it state business to enforce racial privilege for whites and racial disadvantage for blacks. It is no longer controversial to claim that whites did not benefit equally from racial discrimination. We argue that plantation owners had a greater stake in black disfranchisement and racial segregation than did other whites. Labor-intensive agriculture based upon coercive labor control mechanisms is more stable if state protects authority of planters to exercise that control (James 1988; Paige 1975). The racial state of early twentieth-century South did just that. It created a politically impotent and docile class of black workers who had little choice but to adapt to work routines imposed on them by planters. White sharecroppers had greater capacities to defend their interests, but great supply of black sharecroppers diminished power of white sharecroppers to bargain with'planters. To claim, as we do, that racial discrimination had an economic basis in elite southerners' need for a captive pool of low-wage labor and that elites found racism to be one useful strategy to ensure that that pool of labor was available and reproduced over time is not to deny importance of race. It is, in fact, to emphasize Address all correspondence to Dr. Pamela Bamhouse Walters, Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Ballantine Hall, Bloomington, IN 474040.