Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy by Stephen Kantrowitz

Author:Stephen Kantrowitz [Kantrowitz, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs, Historical, United States, Leaders & Notable People, Political, Regional U.S., South, History, Americas, State & Local, Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government, Legislative Branch, Sociology, Race Relations, Discrimination & Racism, 19th Century, Science & Medicine, Anthropology, Social Sciences
ISBN: 9781469625553
Amazon: B00XI80EXO
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2015-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Education and Citizenship

When the delegates to the constitutional convention assembled in Columbia in late September 1895, all eyes focused on the committee on the suffrage, chaired by U.S. Senator Benjamin Ryan Tillman. The first question on delegates’ minds was how to guarantee an electorate that would be “intelligent.” Nearly every proposal for suffrage restriction included some form of literacy test, for nearly all agreed that “ignorant” men should not vote. As early as 1888, F. W. Dawson’s Charleston News and Courier had suggested replacing the eight-box law with a formal, constitutional educational qualification. In the late 1880s, Hampton had described an educational qualification for the suffrage as uniquely fair and objective.33

Had Hampton been speaking in the late 1870s, a charitable listener might have been inclined to hear him out, for he had done more than most white men to support education for both black and white children. South Carolina’s first true public schools had emerged during Reconstruction, following the 1868 constitution’s mandate for nondiscriminatory public education for children six to sixteen years old. Schools were funded by a dedicated tax of $1 on each citizen. Unlike the poll taxes of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this was not intended as a means of restricting the suffrage; the 1868 constitution specifically forbade using nonpayment of this tax as cause for disfranchisement. School segregation was a fact of life in Hampton’s South Carolina, but into the late 1870s, his government had provided roughly equal support for black and white schools and amended the constitution to levy an additional two-mill ($.002 on each dollar) property tax for education. But after the initial flush of Hamptonite paternalism, the allocation of school funds became intensely racially discriminatory. The same 1878 amendment that increased school funding also apportioned the new funds according to school attendance, not school-age population. Since poverty limited many black children’s attendance, this sleight of hand channeled disproportionate funds to the white minority. By the mid-1890s, even the veneer of fairness had worn thin. Per-pupil expenditures for white students were hardly generous, but they exceeded annual expenditures for each black student (roughly $1) by a factor of four. Public education was separate, unequal, and inadequate.34

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