Southern Education Board

The southern education reform movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a multifaceted effort that included a number of philanthropic funds and a lobbying arm, the Southern Education Board (SEB). The SEB's advocacy led to an increase in appropriations for education in all of the southern states between 1900 and 1930. Even as educational opportunities widened for White children, however, a system of separate and unequal schools for Black children became firmly established in southern U.S. culture, enthusiastically supported by the philanthropists who governed the SEB.

The policies and programs of the SEB grew out of northern reformers' support for Hampton and Tuskegee institutes. New Yorker Robert C. Ogden was one of the founders of Hampton Institute and served on its board from 1874 until his death in 1913. Ogden believed that industrial education for Blacks would promote economic recovery and political stability in the postwar South by creating a skilled labor force. As Ogden solicited support for Hampton and its offshoot, Tuskegee Institute, among his wealthy acquaintances, he spread the idea of industrial education in northern philanthropic circles and was regarded as an authority on the topic. At the same time, he gained the respect of progressive White southerners for his understanding of southern society and White supremacist values. Ogden found an ally in Wall Street banker George Foster Peabody, who joined him on the Hampton board in 1884. Peabody's investment expertise helped place Hampton and Tuskegee on a solid financial footing and bankrolled both the SEB and the General Education Board. The third member of the triumvirate was William H. Baldwin, Jr. As general manager of the Southern Railway Company, Baldwin employed thousands of Black laborers and thus had a vested interest in a stable, skilled Black workforce.

The southern education movement began in 1901 when Ogden took a group of northern industrialists on a train journey to North Carolina where they met with members of the Conference for Education in the South. Their alliance was founded on a combination of disfranchisement and Jim Crow laws with a two-tiered educational system. The northerners would furnish technical assistance and limited funding while the southerners provided local leadership and political will. The arrangement was formalized in 1901 as the Southern Education Board at the annual meeting of the Conference for Education in the South. Its mission was to promote free education for all southerners by providing information to newspapers and magazines, speaking at educational meetings, supporting lobbying efforts, and maintaining networks of correspondence. The Board was funded first by individual contributions, then by grants from the General Education Board.

The 11 northern and 15 southern members of the SEB worked for 13 years to advance their reform agenda, with mixed results. In some states the SEB was able to build on existing efforts to create school systems; in others its success was limited by special interests that feared widespread public education as destabilizing and intrusive. The Virginia Constitution of 1902 contained provisions for a modernized and professionalized school system and the legislature subsequently organized a Cooperative Education Association specifically to coordinate with the SEB. In North Carolina, Governor Aycock worked with the SEB to stimulate local efforts to improve public education. Kentucky and Tennessee both enacted pro-education legislation for primary, secondary, and postsecondary levels of schooling. In South Carolina, however, opposition by mill owners and railroads led to the defeat of progressive education legislation. In Georgia, a constitutional amendment permitting county levies to fund schools was adopted, but localities were reluctant to actually impose the taxes.

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