“The Schools Lost Their Isolation”: Interest Groups and Institutions in Educational Policy Development in the Jim Crow South

In early 1929, Mag Hanna, a teacher in Conway, Mississippi, wrote to John Easom, the state agent for Negro education, to complain about local government policies for rural black schools. The complaint was that the new county superintendent was “cutting the colored schools short this term” and it included a plea for help from the state agent to extend the school term because “we as a race of people can not advance in education without a chance to do so.”¹ The state agent responded that it would not be possible to remedy the situation for the whole county without the support of the white superintendent and the “good white friends of Leake County,” but he did provide an application to get money from the Rosenwald Fund to extend the school term if money could be raised in the community toward the effort and teachers could be guaranteed a minimum salary.² While it would seem impossible that anyone outside of the local governing structure could be consulted on matters of educational policy in rural communities in the Jim Crow South, this teacher not only protested but also bypassed the local government to get an application for funding that could potentially have a significant impact on the county’s public schools. In spite of their relative marginalization from state and local political structures, rural black communities were able to participate in the development of educational policy in the South. Public-private collaboration between northern philanthropists and southern states promoted the development of an educational infrastructure that provided institutional sites for that participation and the means to mitigate against the strength of local politics.

In this article, I make two distinct contributions to the literature. The first is to the social science literature on organizational change, providing a more theoretical understanding of the ways in which rural blacks in the South, in spite of being isolated both geographically and through segregation, were able to establish links to political networks beyond their communities through schooling. The centralization of schools created the networks that rural communities needed to affect the public sphere. The second is that the use of a social science lens helps to reframe the historical literature on southern education and race by expanding definitions of black agency and the contributions of northern philanthropists. The more that schooling created links between rural communities and the political structure outside of them, the more rural blacks were able to participate in the development of policy. The dynamic effects of organizational change in the South are important to developing the historical narrative.

W. E. B. Du Bois documented the central role that southern blacks played in promoting their own education, and historians have expanded on his work by providing considerable evidence of the quantity and quality of their contributions to reform.³ These narratives show that teachers and community leaders were essential to educational development, and provide ample empirical evidence that members of the black community served as both a catalyst and a force for reform. However, there has not been a social and historical account that transcends individual cases, documenting more fully the institutional means by which the success of individual leaders and by extension, the community, was promoted and sustained. Christine Woyshner, in her study of the development of the national PTA, makes a similar case for the need to move beyond “local case histories that overlook translocal networks.”⁴

In recent years, there has been a renewed focus on the relative strengths of policy history as a distinct disciplinary lens. Julian Zelizer described some of the advantages, including the ability to incorporate a broader range of actors into the historical narrative by exploring the dynamic relationship that exists between interest groups and institutions, and the possibility of exploring the temporal dimensions of social processes.⁵ While policy and organizational frameworks can provide a fresh perspective on any number of established historical narratives, one area where this seems to be particularly true is in southern education, where educational policy was developed during Jim Crow in a dynamic process...