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13 The Negro people seem to be pathetically desirous of sending their children to school. —Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of North Carolina, 1924–25/1925–26 It is essential that our children should be given the best training and education possible to qualify them for the responsible duties of citizenship. —Petition from African American parents in Smithfield to local school officials, 1925 White people in our state are not asked to sweat blood [so] that their children may be helped through the schools to become good citizens. —George E. Davis, Rosenwald school supervisor, 1927 c h A p t e r o n e The Price of Equality Black Loyalty, Self-Help, and the “Right Kind of Citizenship” “Ho’ Stop! Look! Listen!” In the summer of 1919, flyers bearing that headline circulated around the small town of Ahoskie in North Carolina’s northeastern corner. The black community’s Educational League was advertising its “Two in One” celebration, an event billed as both a “Homecoming of our boys, and an Educational Rally.” Returning veterans of World War I and the “elder soldiers” of the Civil War were to gather at the Colored Masonic Hall and march down Main Street, followed by a brass band and a procession of schoolchildren waving American flags. After reaching the First Baptist Church, the crowd would listen to remarks from local leaders and enjoy a free dinner. Anticipating a “High Day in Israel,” event planners urged, “Come One,Come All!” While the celebration’s publicists promised parades and pageantry, they held educational promotion as their “main object.” In exchange for food and festivities, the league would collect contributions for school improvement projects. Among the invited guests were white officials, including the county superintendent of schools and the state supervisor of Negro rural schools. The celebration of black military service cloaked a much larger project. Having performed the highest of patriotic duties by sending men to war, African Americans saw new opportunities to stake claims to education as a fundamental right of loyal citizens. Nearly one thousand people attended the rally. Records do not indicate whether those officials in attendance pledged increased educa- 14 / the price of equAlity tional appropriations, but the state supervisor of Negro rural schools later noted that the people of Ahoskie were “anxious” to build a new school. At the very least, Ahoskie’s black citizens had rallied their way onto the state’s radar.1 Across the state and nation, the war had freighted questions of racial loyalty with especially heavy import. Many whites had bristled at the sight of black men in uniform and feared the potential for black militancy at home. The war also had opened up northern labor markets to black workers, prompting a new wave of black migration from the South. As the wartime rhetoric of democracy bolstered black calls for racial justice , white concerns regarding black loyalty chafed against a rising spirit of black self-determination. Interracial tensions reached a crescendo in 1919, a year that, according to historians John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr., “ushered in the greatest period of interracial strife the nation had ever witnessed.”2 Within that context, black leaders employed pledges of loyalty as leverage in postwar campaigns for expanded access to state services, particularly education.3 They insisted on a reciprocal bond of interracial loyalty that conceded white political privilege but afforded white patronage of black public education. When the state failed to reward black loyalty and demanded a heavy dose of “self-help” in building schools, black leaders demonstrated increased interest in political organization and alliances with “outside agitators.” In 1921, betraying its nagging concerns about containing black protest, North Carolina created the Division of Negro Education , which promised to discourage agitation and cultivate among African Americans “the right kind of citizenship.” Born out of white fears of black insurgency, this new agency nonetheless opened up space in which blacks could make claims on the state. African Americans ultimately used that space to press for educational equality and to renegotiate the kinds of citizenship that black public education would facilitate. World War I and the Specter of Black Disloyalty “No truer American can be found anywhere than among the Negroes of the South,” declared Durham educator James E. Shepard in April 1917 to an African American assembly at Raleigh’s Odd Fellows Hall. The black man, he insisted, could not be “incited to rebellion” and would not use the war to advance his own...

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