The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle Over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870â?"1980

CHAPTER TWO: A LAST GASP TO MAINTAIN A SEGREGATED SYSTEM: Mississippi’s Failed Effort to Make Separate Education Truly Equal

33 A LAST GASP TO MAINTAIN A SEGREGATED SYSTEM Mississippi’s Failed Effort to Make Separate Education Truly Equal By the late 1930s, Mississippi had succeeded in significantly improving the state’s white public education system; even so, the state’s white schools, especially in rural areas, remained largely second rate and still in need of costly improvements. The dramatic transformations in white education, however incomplete, had only been possible because of the almost total neglect of black public education. While black Mississippians had objected to state plans to provide unequal school facilities for their children from the beginning of the white educational improvement campaign begun in the early twentieth century, it was not until the late 1930s that any segment of white Mississippi began to agree that the state’s minimal support for black public education would no longer suffice. White concern over the dismal state of black education sprang largely from fears that the entire edifice of racial segregation, and the separate but equal doctrine that justified American apartheid, was vulnerable. Indeed, by the end of World War II, changes in the region’s demographics and economy threatened to undermine the racial status quo, while the federal government seemed increasingly sympathetic to the cause of black civil rights.1 White political leaders and others in Mississippi, like those throughout the South, began to recognize that a little more emphasis on the equal part of CHAPTER TWO the separate but equal equation might be prudent if segregation was to be preserved. The gap between rhetoric and reality was perhaps greatest in the area of public education, where even the most charitable comparison of black and white public schools stood as a glaring refutation of the notion that separate could ever be equal in the state. White Mississippians began to explore two options for creating a separate but more truly equal education system: federal aid and a state-sponsored equalization campaign. While both brought modest yet needed improvements to black (and white) education, neither mechanism succeeded in creating an equalized dual school system. Beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, federal money was available to the states in increasing amounts. For a poor state like Mississippi, such funds represented a potential windfall to address the state’s inability to fund state services like public education adequately. The use of federal money, however, raised the specter of federal oversight and the possible destruction of the state’s Jim Crow arrangements. State-funded equalization was also fraught with problems. First, as one of the poorest states in the nation, Mississippi had limited resources to expend on closing the huge gap between black and white education created during the first half of the twentieth century. Second, Mississippi, like other southern states, developed its equalization program as a bulwark against perceived threats to segregation. Consequently, equalization proposals were designed to make only minimal adjustments in state spending on black education in the hope that such an effort would deflect a possible challenge to separate but clearly unequal arrangements. In 1950, the editor of the Grenada (Miss.) Grenada County Weekly expressed succinctly the rationale behind the state’s recent efforts to improve black education:“I claim that we had better do a little than to be MADE to do a heap.” Third, white Mississippians never wholly embraced an honest and fair equalization program because of concerns that growing numbers of blacks in the state favored abolishing school segregation, which equalization was designed to support. Although many black Mississippians actually endorsed equalization if carried out justly, white leaders ultimately hesitated to spend millions to upgrade black schools without an explicit pledge of support from black leaders to maintain Jim Crow education.In addition,the practical motivations that led Mississippi political leaders to consider federal aid to education or 34 A LAST GASP TO MAINTAIN A SEGREGATED SYSTEM to favor even inadequate equalization schemes did not necessarily alter local attitudes of racial discrimination committed to preserving white educational prerogatives. Consequently, when local school officials did seek to tap into federal funds, they often used most of the extra money to continue the effort to improve white schools in their area. And since local officials often implemented the state equalization mandates, an already insufficient effort became exceedingly lame in actual operation. The creation of Mississippi’s separate but unequal school system had been possible because whites had stripped black Mississippians of all political power, a...