Entangled by White Supremacy: Reform in World War I-era South Carolina

Chapter 11. Financing Educational Reform

At the conclusion of World War I, South Carolina’s population, with a 20 percent illiteracy rate, ranked as the second most illiterate in the nation. Moreover, three in four South Carolina adults lacked even an elementary school education. “South Carolina has been widely advertised as the most backward of all the states in public education,” state superintendent of education John E. Swearingen lamented in 1921.1 All reformers, black and white, agreed that South Carolina’s proportionately large illiterate and undereducated population, coupled with its inadequate public school system, compounded the state’s poverty, its excessive dependence on labor-intensive cotton agriculture, and its inadequate state services. Consequently, education reform remained central to the reformers’ vision. Black reformers believed education could diminish poverty among African Americans and reduce their vulnerability to white exploitation. As educated black leaders, they believed that education would promote greater opportunity for African Americans’ economic independence. White reformers believed that all other essential reforms such as attracting capital investment, implementing scientific agriculture, diversifying economic opportunities, raising the standard of living, expanding humanitarian institutions, and reforming the political system depended on dramatically reducing illiteracy and raising the education level of the general population. All reformers articulated a broadly shared vision of the transforming power and desirability of a significantly improved educational system. Black reformers frequently asserted that they wanted a decent education system for black South Carolinians. At every public commencement , conference, and community celebration, black churches, Financing Educational Reform 261 Chapter 11 Entangled by White Supremacy 262 colleges, businesses, fraternities, educators, professionals, and ministers called for improved educational opportunities. Benjamin F. Hubert, a prominent black educator at South Carolina State College, said in 1920 that black farmers, although they lacked formal education , understood the value of educating their children. Black farmers, Hubert explained, had discovered “that disease, crime, and poverty go hand in hand with illiteracy.” Consequently, they wanted decent school buildings, longer school terms, and competent, well-paid teachers. Black reformers, however, stood outside the system, seemingly reliant on moral suasion alone because disfranchisement excluded them from formal power. African Americans in South Carolina were left at the mercy of whites, who perpetuated the racial disparities in public education; whites controlled district school boards, which hired the teachers, set the length of the school term, established policies, supervised the schools, and distributed public funds. James Asa Brown, a black minister in Orangeburg, concluded that the most important change needed to expand education for African Americans was that “white people speedily change their attitude toward the education of the Negro race. Continuous discrimination” Brown warned, “will result in great danger to the country.” Marginal improvements in black public education had come only when black reformers petitioned and publicly pressured whites, as they had in 1919 to provide black teachers for Charleston’s black public schools, or when black reformers negotiated privately with whites, as I. S. Leevy had a few years earlier, to obtain a new black public school, Booker T. Washington, in Columbia. With the fading of the warmobilization demands that had briefly enhanced their influence with white leaders, black reformers’ leverage had diminished, making even these incremental improvements difficult.2 By contrast, white reformers were much better poised to navigate the education-reform maze. It is tempting to see white reformers as omnipotent, but in the political context of white South Carolinians, they lacked sufficient influence to act alone. Having successfully weathered two political storms in 1922—one legislative, one electoral —white reformers felt emboldened to tackle education reform beginning in 1923. Although it was an incomplete victory, in 1922 white reformers had channeled the frustrations of a brewing tax revolt into a significant piece of tax-reform legislation that generated Financing Educational Reform 263 new revenue and facilitated some shift in the tax burden away from property owners. That same year reformers scored another win by once again defeating Cole Blease in his bid for the governorship. Even though some reformers thought Thomas G. McLeod would make a mediocre governor, they rejoiced at his victory over Blease, gladly celebrating mediocrity instead of obstinacy. A banking lawyer from Bishopville with ties to the utility industry, McLeod began his governorship in January 1923 with a commitment to continue the property-tax relief that had begun the previous year. Building upon the initial, limited, tax-reform successes, reformers tackled, during McLeod’s first administration, the...