Leveraging the state: Private money and the development of public education for blacks

This study analyses African Americans' success in getting the state to impr ove access to a basic social right-the right to a public education-in the l ate nineteenth- and early twentieth- century South. During this period Sout hern blacks were deprived of the right to vote and many of their civil righ ts. We find that the loss of political and civil rights influenced the mean s that blacks could use to affect policy, and it limited the policy objecti ves they could achieve; but it did not render them unable to affect policy. After disfranchisement, black communities, in an alliance with Northern ph ilanthropists. modified and vastly extended a strategy we call "leveraging the state"-a strategy that had been used successfully by both black communi ties and white communities in the nineteenth century to increase access to public elementary education. This strategy involved using private funds in combination with partial public funding to directly establish new public sc hools and them negotiating a state commitment to ongoing support of the new public schools. Such a strategy cannot secure political or civil rights, b ut it can and did secure social rights-although at a high financial price f or the challengers and their allies.