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“Beyond the Buffalo Hunt”: Educating for Economic Development in the North Carolina Black Belt, 1965 – 2002 William D. Goldsmith Dissertation Prospectus, Duke History Department 8 April 2014 “Shadows in the Sunbelt,” was the phrase that a blue-ribbon panel of southern politicians and economic policy experts in 1986 invoked for the plantation South’s economic problems. The 1970s had been a hopeful era of “rural renaissance,” as dubbed by such policy elites, including for the black belt—those rural, heavily African American counties that span the rich soil from Virginia to Texas where Old South slave-based agriculture predominated prior to emancipation. A steady stream of firms shifted manufacturing operations there from the deindustrializing North, and blacks were successfully challenging employment discrimination while directly influencing local politics in ways they had not since Reconstruction. But with the recession of the early 1980s, this economic upswing faltered, forcing a search for new means of economic growth. In the estimation of this panel on rural economic development—which included the governors of Virginia and Mississippi as well as esteemed economists Charles E. Bishop and Juanita M. Kreps—globalization meant that southern states and localities had to move “beyond the buffalo hunt” for low-wage manufacturing jobs. They instead had to focus on education and entrepreneurship for economic development, a theme that emerged from a wide array of policy experts and embraced by many southern politicians. As the executive director of a southern economic policy nonprofit, MDC Inc, phrased the problem in 1988: “If we in North Carolina are going to compete with Japan, as we have to, in this global economy that we’re entering, then we’re going to have to compete with them on the basis of education—and the basis of education of our least equipped, not just our best and brightest.”1 1 MDC Panel on Rural Economic Development, “Shadows in the Sunbelt: Developing the Rural South in an Era of Economic Change,” (Chapel Hill, NC: MDC, Inc. 1986); “1988 North Carolina People Interview with George Autry,” MDC, Inc., 1988. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dnvPCOEYlY. “Beyond the Buffalo Hunt”: Dissertation Prospectus Goldsmith 2 This was a pitch for development of people rather than place, and improving education for economic development had broad buy in beyond the state level. At the local level, African Americans had long sought equitable education to improve economic security—and they had increasing local political power—while at the federal level, policy elites concerned about a “nation at risk” of economic malaise pitched educational improvement and worker retraining as a means of boosting American competitiveness. During an age of intellectual fracture in the U.S., disparate policy actors came together around education as an answer that solved both national economic needs and rural poverty in the black belt. Yet despite this investment in people through education, public schools would be hard pressed to deliver both economic growth and economic equality for the plantation South. As judged both by new testing-based accountability metrics as well as student graduation and college completion rates, public schools in the subregion did not provide an equitable education to the predominately African American children who attended them. Despite successful school finance lawsuits and federal law meant to leave no child behind, a state judge would accuse educators in the North Carolina black belt of committing “academic genocide.”2 One of the fundamental tasks for historians of the late 20th century is to understand how economic inequality increased so dramatically in the United States after the 1970s, reckoning with the political, economic, and cultural changes that facilitated this trend and the many 2 “Nation at risk” refers to the 1983 report issued by President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education. I borrow language regarding fracture from Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). Superior Court Judge Howard Manning, Jr. has used the expression “academic genocide” repeatedly, referring at times to selected Charlotte-Mecklenburg high schools as well as Halifax County Schools from 2005 to the present. “Report from the Court: The High School Problem,” Hoke County Board of Education v. State of North Carolina, 95 CVS 1158 (NC Superior Court, 24 May 2005); “Notice of Hearing,” Hoke County Board of Education v. State of North Carolina, 95 CVS 1158 (NC Superior Court, 16 March 2009). The case is also known as Leandro II. “Beyond the Buffalo Hunt”: Dissertation Prospectus Goldsmith 3 attempts to mitigate or reverse it.3 As one small part of that research agenda, this dissertation project traces the construction and implementation of economic development policy regarding one of the poorest subregions in the nation, the U.S. black belt, with a focus on the portion within North Carolina (see Figure 1 for a map highlighting the communities targeted for this dissertation). In the rural, black-majority counties of the plantation belt, major political and economic changes in the 1960s—notably the civil rights revolution and agricultural mechanization—created new opportunities for African Americans and impoverished residents of all races. As a state, North Carolina pursued many economic policies that favored the development of human capital, particularly in comparison to other southern states. And yet by many economic metrics, North Carolina’s plantation belt today looks remarkably similar to plantation belt communities in the rest of the South (see Figure 2).4 By looking at the place where education as economic development policy had one of its best chances to succeed, I hope to illuminate why geographic and racial inequality has persisted despite the many structural disruptions during the 1960s, despite the dedicated efforts of many people to even shares of U.S. prosperity. Focusing on the North Carolina black belt from 1965 to 2002 allows for a fresh view of the political and economic possibilities for greater equality in the late 20th century. First, it further illuminates what the civil rights movement did and did not change by focusing on 3 As depicted by the work of Judith Stein, Jefferson Cowie, Kim Phillips-Fein, Jacob Hacker, Paul Pierson and a growing list of scholars (historians as well as other social scientists), economic policy shifted direction in the 1970s as part of a renewed search for growth, a path influenced at least indirectly—if not directly—by organized business interests. Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Jefferson Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009); Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (New York: Simon & Schustser, 2010); Benjamin C. Waterhouse, Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001); Robert M. Collins, "The Economic Crisis of 1968 and the Waning of the 'American Century'," The American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (1996). 4 For interactive maps, visit http://sites.duke.edu/williamgoldsmith/dissertation/interactive-maps/ “Beyond the Buffalo Hunt”: Dissertation Prospectus Goldsmith 4 Figure 1: The North Carolina Black Belt The core counties for this project are within the thick black line: Warren, Halifax, Northampton, and Edgecombe. Halifax and Northampton comprise the Roanoke Rapids micropolitan area; Edgecome is part of the Rocky Mount metropolitan area; and Warren County is outside such statistical areas. The counties within the thin outer black line are of secondary focus. They include the cities of Wilson and Greenville. Source: U.S. Census Bureau via Social Explorer economic development, attempts to grow the pie, rather than economic redistribution, attempts to re-cut the existing pie. Scholars have now explored in some detail civil rights struggles for equal access to employment, housing, and education, but few have studied how the movement reshaped strategies for adding jobs and improving economic opportunity through growth.5 Second, this dissertation highlights a much more interventionist U.S. government than some scholars of this neoliberal period have appreciated by paying attention to how policy actors at the local, state, and federal levels sought to develop its poorest communities in a swiftly integrating 5 Scholarship on such civil rights endeavors grows ever more voluminous, but see especially Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). “Beyond the Buffalo Hunt”: Dissertation Prospectus Goldsmith 5 Figure 2: Poverty in the North Carolina Black Belt The percentage of people within census