“beyond the buffalo hunt”: educating for economic ......economy that highlight neoliberalism,...

“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.


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/


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).

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


global economy.6 Finally, this research helps us understand why public scrutiny of schools

intensified in the ways that it has over the last several decades.7 Educational investment was a

counter to the loss of manufacturing jobs, yet policy faith in educational “upskilling” allowed for

cross-party alliances over free trade policy that furthered manufacturing job losses. As schools

became central sites for creating economic development through a high-skilled workforce, these

under-resourced communities struggled to provide an education that allowed graduates to

compete with children educated elsewhere. Ironically, even as more outside and community

6 Historical work on the 1980s and 1990s remains nascent, but for representations of the era’s culture and political economy that highlight neoliberalism, see for instance Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Cowie, Stayin' Alive. 7 On growing scrutiny of public schools, see the work of education historian Diane Ravitch. Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2010); Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).

Figure 2: Poverty in the North Carolina Black Belt

The percentage of people within census tracts living within 200 percent of the federal poverty line. Source: U.S. Census Bureau via Social Explorer


resources went to education in the black belt, public schools focused on general education

became less capable of conferring comparative advantage.

The first major research task of this dissertation involves understanding why so many

policy actors—including locally elected officials, local business interests, analysts for nonprofits

and advisory councils, firm relocation managers and consultants, and the state and federal

politicians who made policy decisions—came to see educational investment as a vital component

of economic development. The second involves a closer look at how local, state, and federal

actors implemented this policy, particularly as it pertained to northeastern North Carolina. The

third task involves evaluating outcomes of these policies: what they did and did not change for

the lives of people in the rural northeastern section of North Carolina, as judged both by

econometric measures of health and wealth (if possible, including those who left the subregion

for more prosperous communities) as well as qualitative assessments grounded in historical

memory.

In my preliminary view, public education became the policy vessel for disparate agendas

it could not simultaneously fulfill. As local government in the North Carolina black belt became

more representative, these new leaders equalized public sector employment along racial lines and

pursued greater investment in local education. While this agenda aroused opposition from white

property owners, often organized against local tax increases, it also had at least some measure of

support from local whites intent on economic development. After the economic tumult of the late

1970s and early 1980s, policy advisors pushed increased state investment in human capital as a

means of furthering a postindustrial knowledge economy. They gained purchase in North

Carolina, where business-oriented Democrats maintained political power far longer than in Deep

South states. At the federal level, even champions of the new neoliberal political orientation in


favor of free trade and privatized government allowed for a federal role in U.S. education to spur

economic productivity. Members of the Reagan administration justified education spending as a

sort of economic defense policy, despite the president’s campaign promises to abolish the newly

established Department of Education. With free trade agreements during the 1990s, worker

retraining became a primary means of compensating American losers in the global shift of

manufacturing from the U.S. to the “developing” world. Yet in the plantation South, after

industrial relocation to the area reversed course around the early 1980s, educational investment

did little to bolster rural communities beyond providing public sector employment. Those

students who thrived typically left for metropolitan job markets, repeating an old pattern of brain

drain that disincentivized rural educational spending. As state and federal pressure to improve

educational outcomes increased, these systems faced a vicious cycle: labeled bad schools

because of test scores and drop outs, they became even worse as parents with means fled for

other communities or educational options. This predicament became entrenched with

implementation of No Child Left Behind in 2002, bound at both state and federal levels. As the

wage premiums for educational achievement grew in the increasingly top heavy, “winner-take-

all” political economy of the late 20th century, educational and economic inequality rose in

North Carolina.

The stalled quest for economic equality in the North Carolina plantation belt

This dissertation will start with a period of intense hope: the post-1965 era represented a

tremendous opportunity for greater economic equality in the black belt, a southern subregion

long marked as a bastion of economic and social inequality. That inequality was highly

racialized, perpetuated by Jim Crow disenfranchisement and the persistence of a regional labor


market. The black belt, which I also refer to interchangeably as the plantation belt and the

plantation South, became more geographically fixed after the Civil War as emancipation ended

slaveholder’s capital mobility (see Figures 3 and 4).8 Reconstruction offered significant

opportunities for black political and economic equality. In North Carolina, the congressional

district in the northeastern part of the state became known as “the Black Second,” and despite

Redemption in the 1870s, biracial governance continued in the area and surged again with the

Fusionists in the 1890s.9 But with the rise of Jim Crow, African Americans were cut out of direct

politics, and rural white landowners would wield outsized influence over the region’s political

economy into the 1960s. During that decade, the long African American freedom struggle bore

major fruit with civil rights legislation while the decline of the southern regional labor market

and postwar federal policy contributed to the rise of the suburban Sunbelt.10

Thus, the period after 1965 presented major opportunities for greater racial and economic

equality. The landmark federal legislation that emerged from the civil rights movement, the 1964

8 I borrow the term “plantation belt” from Gavin Wright, and I find it more appropriate than cotton belt, which might be confused for the wider range of counties where cotton production predominated after the Civil War and spread further southwest during the early 20th century. Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986). In the plantation belt, African Americans remained in significant numbers after the Civil War, often constituting a demographic majority in these counties. The term “black belt” arose in reference both to the quality of the soil as well as the significant presence of African Americans. 9 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935); Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 1872-1901: The Black Second (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981). 10 Local community studies have examined in detail the actions taken by “indigenous” African Americans in rural communities to secure their own rights. Outside organizers from CORE, the SCLC, and SNCC built on longstanding grassroots efforts to bolster black independence and challenge white supremacy. That persistent bravery, sometimes (but not always) captured and conveyed by the national media, dragged a reluctant federal government into playing a more direct role as conflict mediator. For civil rights history that center the rural plantation South see especially John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009).


Figure 3: Cotton Production, 1859

Source: Wright, Old South, New South (1986), 37

Figure 4: Racial Composition of Southern Counties, 2010

The southern black belt highly correlates with antebellum cotton production. Source: U.S. Census Bureau via Social Explorer


Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, gave greater political leverage to African

Americans in the plantation South. While flawed, these laws facilitated remarkable growth in

black voter registration and electoral participation. Even as segregationists sought to preserve

white supremacy by chiseling away at federal protections and privatizing public resources, they

faced growing challenges from new voters who blunted local attempts to restructure racism.11

The plantation belt today has more locally elected black officials relative to its share of voting-

age population than elsewhere in the country, and by and large elects black state and

congressional representatives. The recent Supreme Court voting rights decision in Shelby County

v. Holder (2013) casts some doubt on whether these trends will continue, but the trajectory from

1965 to 2002 was marked by black political ascendency in the plantation South.12

Yet despite the emergence of roughly equal political representation in black belt

communities, the southern subregion today lags behind both the nation and the rest of the South

in measures of average wages, educational attainment, lifespan, and population gain. As Peter

Applebome of the New York Times suggested in 1994, the black belt is where “everything and

nothing changed.” A generation that came of age during the 1980s in eastern North Carolina

seemed “throwed away,” in the words of native Linda Flowers, without a steady role in either

11 On modern conservatism and segregationists, see especially Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Kevin Michael Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Nancy MacLean, "Neo-Confederacy Versus the New Deal: The Regional Utopia of the Modern American Right," in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 12 Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. _____. On southern voting rights since 1965, see Steven F. Lawson, In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965-1982 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Charles S. Bullock and Ronald Keith Gaddie, The Triumph of Voting Rights in the South (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009); David Lublin, The Republican South: Democratization and Partisan Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). For more pessimistic account, see J. Morgan Kousser, Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999).


farm or factory.13 The black belt remains in the “shadows of the sunbelt,” despite the efforts of

liberal reformers captivated by human capital development and attuned to the problems of the

rural South. Why didn’t the civil rights revolution, combined with the War on Poverty and all the

federal spending of the Great Society, do more to change that?

The partial answer is that these efforts did do much to change the economic fate of the

plantation belt. The civil rights revolution has reduced poverty, alleviated hunger, improved

access to health care, and made employment opportunities more equitable (see Figure 5). But the

economic development of the black belt since 1965 has been uneven. Many regional advances in

the 1970s were erased by the recessions of early 1980s. One task of this dissertation is sorting the

causes of the stalled economic development of the North Carolina black belt.

Part of any explanation for limited economic change certainly involves the conservative

opponents of civil rights, who took control of the Republican Party in the South and, indeed,

much of the nation. Segregationists hindered school desegregation and the extension of voting

rights after (as well as before) 1965, and they were vital participants in engineering the sort of

13 Peter Applebome, "In Selma, Everything and Nothing Changed," New York Times, 2 Aug 1994; Peter Applebome, Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture (New York: Times Books, 1996), 56-88; Linda Flowers, Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 143.

Figure 5: Poverty by Race and Region, 1959-1978

Source: Wright, Sharing the Prize (2013), 245


strategic accommodations that scholars of modern conservatism have pointed out. White political

leaders in North Carolina in many ways represented the vanguard of such adaptations of white

supremacy. Though Democrats held more comparable power in North Carolina, the party was

generally dominated by business-oriented conservatives and moderates, seeking “civilities” over

civil rights. Some North Carolina Republicans, moreover, were major players in the modern

conservative turn, exemplified by U.S. Senator Jesse Helms. Modern conservatives also laid

claim to the universal language of the civil rights movement, arguing not only that

colorblindness was enough but that racial preferences designed to correct for past discrimination

rivaled the evils of de jure Jim Crow. Historian Nancy MacLean has described this as a sort of

political jujitsu, conservatives redirecting the force of their opponents’ blow into their

counterassault.14 My research will remain attuned to modern conservatives’ assault on the civil

rights revolution, yet I do not believe that old opponents with new strategies were the

determining factor in the fading economic prospects of the black belt in the 1980s and 1990s.

Nor do I think the blame belongs at the door of locally elected black officials, sometimes

dismissed as inept if not as equally corrupt as the good ole boys they often replaced.15 In most of

these communities, African Americans did not start winning major offices until the 1980s and

14 Crespino, In Search of Another Country; William Henry Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Anders Walker, The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 49-84; MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough, 226. For a sociological examination of “colorblind racism,” see Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010). 15 While derision of black local leadership in the plantation South is in my experience more of a popular notion than a scholarly construct, some historical work has propped up this notion. See for instance Christopher Myers Asch, The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: The New Press, 2008), 282-286, 296-297. In Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene presents a lyrical and deeply nuanced portrait of the political ascendancy of African Americans in a rural Georgia County, but its focus on a convicted black county commissioner can easily be construed as blaming local people for the area’s economic shortcomings. Melissa Fay Greene, Praying for Sheetrock (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1991).


1990s, after the plantation South had already stalled economically.16 To the contrary of blaming

these local officials for rising economic inequality, I propose that as other economic

development options came up short, they helped direct local attention to the importance of strong

public schools and government-assisted worker re-training. The protection of black voting rights

also likely helped propel state and federal support: a political scientist studying economic

development suggests that “black legislative representation was the single strongest predictor of

industrial policy activism” for a U.S. region.17 The rise of locally elected black officials in the

black belt was a slow process, one that required incremental improvements to federal voting

rights legislation. But this dissertation helps underscore that the rise of locally elected black

politicians was deeply intertwined with Great Society programs, desegregation, and industrial

development.

Great Society programs, from the new organizations that sprang from the War on Poverty

to the new federal investments in health and education, provided a substantive springboard for

those seeking to increase economic security for the black belt’s poorest citizens. In North

Carolina, the War on Poverty foundations proved particularly strong, as the state under Terry

Sanford (1961-1965) partnered with private foundations to create the North Carolina Fund, a

16 Few historians have looked systematically at the rise of these rural local black elected officials, but the many community studies suggest that the late 1970s and 1980s were turning points of African American political success. For examples in Lowndes County, Alabama; McIntosh County, Georgia; Halifax County, North Carolina; Noxubee County, Mississippi; and Sunflower County, Mississippi, see: Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes; Greene, Praying for Sheetrock; William D. Goldsmith, “The Halifax County Black Caucus, ‘A Group to Be Reckoned With’: The Struggle for Black Political Control through the School Board in Halifax County, NC, 1976 – 1987,” unpublished paper; Charles C. Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870-1980 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005); J. Todd Moye, Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 17 Susan B. Hansen, "Targeting in Economic Development: Comparative State Perspectives," Publius 19, no. 2 (1989): 59. As an additional sign of the difference that locally elected black officials made for economic equality, a longitudinal study of six Florida towns—including three in the panhandle black belt—found that where blacks elected to meaningful local offices, public sector employment became much more evenly distributed. James W. Button, Sheila L. Croucher, and Barbara Ann Rienzo, Blacks and the Quest for Economic Equality: The Political Economy of Employment in Southern Communities in the United States (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009).


model for federal programs that operated from 1963 to 1968.18 Community action agencies, Head

Start programs, worker training programs, and healthcare clinics chipped away at health and

wealth disparities. Though elites (both white and black) coopted many of these programs and

limited their impact as antipoverty measures, particularly in the early years, these new

institutions often provided crucial bases over the longer term for employing African Americans

and addressing economic inequality. Even the inadequacies of these measures went hand-in-hand

with black political organizing, bolstering the call for African American elected officials or more

radical solutions to fight for economic equality.19 The end of Jim Crow made it more possible for

relocated African Americans to answer the “call to home,” in order to care for aging parents or

seek greater autonomy in rural life, and many of these returnees from the urban North helped roll

out new public infrastructure in these rural counties, demanding equality of access to welfare and

working in public service institutions. With a focus on northeastern North Carolina, this

dissertation will continue the recent trend in scholarship on the long War on Poverty that

explores qualified successes rather than overemphasizing the limited quality of change wrought

by the Great Society programs.20

New federal funding for schools and human services came tied to desegregation

18 The history of the North Carolina Fund has been carefully documented by Robert Rodgers Korstad and James L. Leloudis, To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 19 In North Carolina, for instance, the African American-led People’s Program on Poverty emerged in the black belt to challenge elite-dominated community action agencies. It provided a training ground for future area congressman Frank Ballance. Ibid., 215-225. 20 See especially the work of Annelise Orleck. Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, eds., The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). Scholarship on the war on poverty in the South that highlights qualified successes includes Susan Youngblood Ashmore, Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964-1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008); Korstad and Leloudis, To Right These Wrongs; Karen Medlin Hawkins, “Coastal Progress: Eastern North Carolina's War on Poverty, 1963-1972” (Ph.D. diss, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2012); Crystal R. Sanders, “To Be Free of Fear: Black Women’s Fight for Freedom through the Child Development Group of Mississippi” (Ph.D. diss, Northwestern University, 2011). On southern black migration back to the South, see Carol B. Stack, Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South (New York: Basic Books, 1996), xiii-xvi.


provisions that further broke Jim Crow. This dissertation will provide a new window in

particular on public school desegregation, often dismissed by historians of the right and left for

its failures to improve education either for whites or blacks. It also proved significant in the

construction of new political coalitions in the black belt. The carrot of Elementary and

Secondary Education Act (ESEA) Title I funding worked in concert with new sticks from the

Department of Justice and federal courts to ratchet recalcitrant school districts toward

meaningful desegregation. Once this occurred (usually not before 1969), many white parents

traded public schools for hastily organized private ones, even though substantive numbers of

white children remained in integrated schools. But white flight had its upsides, in that African

Americans in these local communities lost fewer historic black institutions and more black

educators and administrators kept their jobs. Elected school board offices provided crucial

political toeholds for building cross-class black voting coalitions, key to the rise of locally

elected officials to more prominent roles. They fought to modernize many systems that had long

been controlled by white crony networks. With agricultural mechanization, many fewer local

children faced pressure to leave school early for field work, and the wage premiums of

educational credentials increased the economic value of school. Federal funding bridged the gap

between paltry local tax bases and state provisions, proving especially important if property

owners successfully balked at tax increases to pay for public schools that were majority black.21

21 For scholarship that emphasizes the failures of desegregation, see for instance David S. Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Raymond Wolters, Race and Education, 1954-2007 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008); Derrick A. Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); R. Scott Baker, Paradoxes of Desegregation: African American Struggles for Educational Equity in Charleston, South Carolina, 1926-1972 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006). New scholarship has provided a more rounded appraisal of desegregation in the South. Tracy Elaine K'Meyer, From Brown to Meredith: The Long Struggle for School Desegregation in Louisville, Kentucky, 1954-2007 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2013); Jill Ogline Titus, Brown's Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). See also the sections on education in the community studies cited in Footnote 16.


While much of the black community building rooted in Great Society programs caused

interracial conflict, this dissertation will also expose how the search for new employment

possibilities created room for interracial common ground. Local activists and business leaders

alike sought new jobs after changes in agricultural production sapped demand for farm labor.

During the 1970s, they were often successful, though not strictly because of local efforts.

Manufacturing employment rose as rural communities benefited from state industrial recruitment

policies and northern deindustrialization. Firms took advantage of the many amenities of these

black belt counties—abundant water, cheap land, and un-unionized labor. While some

companies no doubt chose not to come because of concerns that black workers would be more

likely to unionize, the fact that many branch plants did relocate—particularly to the South

Atlantic plantation belt—shows that such concerns were hardly universal. African Americans

gained a larger share of these jobs than during the Jim Crow era and broke through various

barriers to supervisory positions thanks to civil rights litigation for equal employment.22

Though local actions were likely not decisive in attracting new industry, some

scholarship suggests that communities with biracial governance proved more successful in

economic development than those where segregationist whites tried to keep an iron grip on local

political bodies. Some new black leaders found common cause with some white former

segregationists, who sought growth-oriented development in part to maintain power given black

re-enfranchisement. Particularly this was the case in urban communities, including major

metropolitan areas like Charlotte, Atlanta, and Birmingham, as well as smaller cities like

22 Thomas E. Till, "The Share of Southeastern Black Counties in the Southern Rural Renaissance," Growth and Change 17, no. 2 (1986); MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough; Timothy J. Minchin, From Rights to Economics: The Ongoing Struggle for Black Equality in the U.S. South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007); Robert Samuel Smith, Race, Labor & Civil Rights: Griggs versus Duke Power and the Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008).


Jackson, Mississippi.23 Scholars have done less work on rural communities, but some clues

indicate that growth policy provided an important area for compromise even in the black belt.

Political scientist Frederick M. Wirt spent 30 years studying Panola County, in the Mississippi

Delta; observing the economic disparities between two towns from the 1960s to the 1990s, he

attributed the difference to a biracial political coalition that worked to attract industry in the more

successful community.24 His account does not make clear whether the rise of locally elected

blacks in these counties helped reshape representation on important commissions, public

authorities, and private business groups that played crucial roles in economic development and

industrial recruitment. As I look at the local economic development authorities and chambers of

commerce in northeastern North Carolina, my research will consider how these organizations

responded to emerging black governance at the mayoral and county commission levels, and

whether, as such changes occurred, they correlated with a change in strategy in the kinds of

businesses that these local leaders sought to recruit.

But my research will focus on the degree to which this search for new industry affected

educational investment, and whether this was also a point of common ground between African

American political leaders and business-oriented whites. A recent community study of Selma,

Alabama suggests that white leaders there embraced the pursuit of high-wage employers in the

late 1970s as a means of replacing jobs lost from the closure of an Air Force base. Yet they

quickly discovered that the local labor force pool sorely lacked the range of high-skill employees

that targeted businesses wanted.25 Attracting high-wage employers required high-skill

23 Gavin Wright, Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 208-213. See also Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). 24 Frederick M. Wirt, We Ain't What We Was: Civil Rights in the New South (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 157-191. 25 Karlyn Denae Forner, “If Selma Were Heaven: Economic Transformation and Black Freedom Struggles in the Alabama Black Belt, 1901-2000” (Ph.D. diss, Duke University, 2014).


employees, but attracting high-skill employees required high-wage employers. Did a similar

chicken-and-egg dilemma strike the North Carolina black belt?

Some people in the black belt, particularly former civil rights activists who eschewed

electoral politics, kept alive alternative ideas to the more traditional industrial development.

Keeping sight of these entrepreneurial endeavors helps show how local people’s underlying

vision for new jobs diverged: while white-led chambers of commerce were satisfied with low-

wage, low-skill manufacturing jobs that at least reduced welfare rolls, former civil rights activists

hoped that these initiatives would foster economic independence from white property owners.

After 1965, black civil rights leaders from the Mississippi to North Carolina turned to the task of

economic development, establishing rural co-operatives, catfish farms, and fruitcake factories.26

In the view of people like Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi or Nathan Garrett in North Carolina,

economic development and political self-determination went hand in hand.27 Some former civil

rights leaders had grand visions for entirely new cities, built on the widespread belief that

northern industrial loss inevitably meant the South’s gain. Former Congress on Racial Equality

(CORE) leader Floyd McKissick broke ground on an entirely new town—Soul City, North

Carolina—one that might attract industry as well as urban blacks through the backing of the

Nixon administration and more than $30 million in federal and state funding.28

Such projects exhibited enormous optimism about the rural South’s potential, and my

26 Minchin, From Rights to Economics; Asch, The Senator and the Sharecropper. Existing scholarship on North Carolina cooperatives is limited, but see Korstad and Leloudis. 27 Both founded organizations to address economic development in black communities. On Hamer, see Asch, The Senator and the Sharecropper, 221-252. On Garrett and his organization, the Foundation for Community Development, see Christina Greene, Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 165-194; Devin Fergus, Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965-1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009), 13-90. 28 Soul City is a prominent example of the role that modern conservatives played in undermining economic advancement in the black belt: Jessie Helms was instrumental in derailing McKissick’s project. Devin Fergus, "Black Power, Soft Power: Floyd Mckissick, Soul City, and the Death of Moderate Black Republicanism," Journal of Policy History 22, no. 2 (2010).


dissertation will explore why these economic development strategies came up short. Problems of

credit and business strategy plagued these organizations. Historian Susan Youngblood

Ashmore’s look at the twelve-year lifespan of the Southwest Alabama Farmers Cooperative

Association (SWAFCA) in the Alabama black belt is instructive. She emphasizes the enormous

opposition that it faced from state level officials, local white would-be purchasers, and even the

“rural black elite” upset that the new group did not pay proper dues to established African

American leaders. Still, it was not this opposition that doomed the organization: in her telling,

the SWAFCA collapsed in 1980 after a poor business decision to shift from cucumbers to corn

for ethanol. In addition to strategic miscalculations, such organizations struggled to find adequate

credit, whether from federal sources, private banks, or nonprofit foundations. During the late

1960s and early 1970s, the Ford Foundation was particularly willing to provide through a

venture capital fund marked for risky “high social yield” commercial enterprises.29 As Ford

scaled back its funding during the late 1970s, nonprofit credit unions like Self Help in North

Carolina filled some of the lending void. Nevertheless, credit for unconventional social ventures

would remain a problem in the black belt.

The state and federal embrace of people over place

Accounting for the economic declension in the black belt after 1965 requires not just an

29 Ashmore, Carry It On, 198-252; “Ford Foundation's Risks Produce 'High Social Yield': Though a Catfish Farm Went Belly Up,” Washington Post, 11 October 1977. The papers of George Esser, who worked at the Ford Foundation on its southern projects during this period, contains numerous documentation of these many programs, with some evidence on their issues. A 1971 internal review of Foundation-funded programs concerned with economic development in the rural South showed that it was beginning to doubt the long-term chances of many of these organizations—the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the Southern Consumers’ Development Fund, the East Central Catfish Operations in Hancock County, Georgia. It pointed out examples of unsustainable economics, inexperienced management, and over-estimated operational capacity. David Heaps, “Review of Foundation Programs Concerned With Economic Development in the Rural South,” July, 1971, Box 18, George Esser Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


examination of modern conservatism or local efforts to craft a more equitable political economy.

It requires a broader consideration of international political economy, particularly the spread of

global supply chains that broke apart production processes that had been tightly bound within

nations. The “footloose” factories that had only just migrated to the rural American South kept

moving further abroad to the Global South, facilitated by the changes to the political economy

that reduced barriers to trade and technological changes that facilitated coordination with

farflung suppliers.30 In other words, the winds of globalization did not favor the plantation belt,

putting its workforce awkwardly in between the high skill, high wage labor needs of many firms

and the low skill, low wage labor demands of other manufacturers (see Figure 6). It was a

predicament that resembled the deindustrialization woes experienced elsewhere in the country.31

But in some ways, this created new opportunities for the black belt to gain from alliance

with economic development policy entrepreneurs—people like George Esser, Ray Marshall,

Juanita Kreps, Stuart Rosenfeld, and George Autry who were professionally devoted to pursuing

new policy ideas.32 These academics and nonprofiters noticed that the rural South did not recover

as expected from the recession of the early 1980s, and they called for new strategies to help the

region “after the factories.” As the Southern Growth Policies Board concluded in the 1985 report

After the Factories, “Future growth in the nonmetro South may depend on its ability to build a

30 William S. Milberg and Deborah Winkler, Outsourcing Economics: Global Value Chains in Capitalist Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). For a long history of one company’s movement, see Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 31 In some U.S. communities, these problems went back to the 1940s and 1950s. See Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); Cowie, Capital Moves; Tami J. Friedman, “Communities in Competition: Capital Migration and Plant Relocation in the United States Carpet Industry, 1929-1975” (Ph.D. diss, Columbia University, 2001); Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2003). 32 Esser, Kreps, and Marshall are discussed elsewhere in this prospectus. George Autry served as executive director of MDC, Inc. Stuart Rosenfeld, an employee of the Southern Growth Policies Board in the 1980s, has published on rural economic development policy for decades. Stuart A. Rosenfeld, Competitive Manufacturing: New Strategies for Regional Development (New Brunswick: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1992).


different sort of infrastructure, more dependent on improved human resources, in order to retain

the jobs that will undoubtedly replace standardized manufacturing.”33 While these strategies

included improvements in health care and other aspects of basic welfare, the central pitch

involved education—both a bolstered general education at the K-12 level as well as improved

skills development specific to particular industries or professions. That “different sort of

infrastructure” included pre-K, community colleges, and universities.

This was a call to reverse the trend that historian Bruce Schulman observed regarding

economic development in the South from the Great Depression to the 1970s. He argued that the

33 Stuart A. Rosenfeld, Edward M. Bergman, and Sarah Rubin, After the Factories: Changing Employment Patterns in the Rural South (Research Triangle Park: Southern Growth Policies Board, 1985), 52.

Figure 6: Southern states by and large made significant strides in closing the per capita personal income gap with the rest of the U.S. While black belt communities closed the gap as well or better than broader state averages during the 1970s, that trajectory slowed or reversed after 1980. Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Department of Commerce


“shadows on the sunbelt” resulted from federal economic policy “designed not so much to uplift

poor people as to enrich poor places.” Federal postwar policies that benefited the South

economically often did so through place-based strategies: providing cheap electricity through the

Tennessee Valley Authority, funding transportation infrastructure, locating military bases. State-

based policies also tended to favor places over people by incentivizing industry to relocate to

southern states through infrastructure improvements, tax subsidies, and employer-specific

worker training programs. In many ways after 1965, however, the preponderance of federal and

state policy reversed to favor the development of human capital over place-specific development.

Educational investment could lead to a high skill competitive advantage in a globally integrated

economy—to borrow the parlance of more current economic development policy, it was a means

of moving up the value chain.34

In many ways, this was not new in the South, though previous scholarship has

deemphasized the link that southern politicians made between educational investment and

economic development.35 North Carolina, for instance, had a long (albeit intermittent) history of

educational investment. It established white common schools in the antebellum era, a system that

the biracial Republican Party updated during Radical Reconstruction and expanded to African

Americans. Education was tied to other modernization efforts in North Carolina designed to

boost economic development, such as railroad subsidy and internal improvements. Even after

Redemption and its violent sequel in 1898 (highlighted by the Wilmington Coup) ended the brief

34 Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), xii; James C. Cobb, The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936-1990 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). For a review of economic development policy as it relates to global value chains, see for instance, Gary Gereffi, "Global Value Chains in a Post-Washington Consensus World," Review of International Political Economy 21, no. 1 (2014). 35 This oversight seems to stem in part because Schulman drew heavily on the reports from MDC, Inc. and the Southern Growth Policies Board. The point of many of these reports was to compel sitting southern governors and legislators to increase spending on human development, and they consequently underplayed the efforts of previous administrations.


Fusionist insurgence, segregationist “education governor” Charles Aycock in 1900 tied together

Jim Crow, economic development, and educational spending. But such policies encountered a

serious roadblock: the regional labor market, which disincentivized this sort of southern state-

level investment in human capital. Economic historian Gavin Wright notes that “as a low-wage

region in a high-wage country, the South had no expectation that it could capture the return on

investment in its own people.” Such a “brain drain” further reduced the incentives for southern

investment in educational opportunity. Louisiana in fact saw literacy rates worsen during the last

two decades of the 19th century. Partly as a result, some southern leaders actually led the charge

for federal spending after the Great Depression. Alabama Senator Lister Hill, for instance,

defended his attempts to socialize the costs of upgrading southern schools, claiming it was a

“national problem” given the “increasing mobility of our people.” But segregation was a serious

impediment to boosting educational funding for the South: these bills faltered on the issue of

whether funding could go to segregated schools.36

Still, North Carolina had not given up on state funded education, which state leaders

continually linked with industrial development after the Great Depression. During the 1950s,

industrial development conferences stressed the importance of quality public schools to local

officials. The administration of Governor Luther Hodges (1957-1961) established industrial

education centers throughout the state to facilitate balanced manufacturing growth, while also

pioneering the Research Triangle Park as a private-public venture to boost economic

development by leveraging the strength of the state’s universities. His successor, Terry Sanford,

significantly increased spending on education, and expanded Hodges’ industrial education

36 James L. Leloudis, Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, Self, and Society in North Carolina, 1880-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 137; Wright, Old South, New South, 80; Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, 193. This was also a reflection of the increasing political influence of black southern migrants in urban northern and western congressional districts: northern politicians attached equal access amendments as a way of scoring points while also killing legislation that they would not proportionately benefit from.


centers into the state’s community college system. The connection between education and

economic development penetrated even to many small town black belt elites.37 The civil rights

revolution further opened the state to pursue people-based policies, as federal support could

finally become a reality with the end of Jim Crow. Thanks to the 1965 ESEA, which targeted

impoverished schools with its Title I, the South received more than 40 percent of federal

education spending by 1970-1.38

My dissertation research will examine how people-based policies took root at the state

level. Numerous southern governors during the 1970s and 1980s rode to office with promises

and plans to improve education systems as a means of job creation.39 As Tennessee Governor

Lamar Alexander put it, “More than anything, it is the threat to the jobs of the people who elect

us [that gets our attention.] Better schools mean better jobs. Unless the states face these

questions, we will forfeit our high standard of living.”40 They got advice and goading about

developing “human capital” for economic development from the Southern Growth Policies

Board (SGPB), started in 1971 by Terry Sanford to counsel the Southern Governors’ Association

on ways to pursue southern modernization while avoiding the problems of the deindustrializing

North. The SGPB and other organizations like MDC, Inc. (an outgrowth of the North Carolina

Fund) provide two of my central organizations to research, as they constructed the policy menus

37 In northeastern North Carolina during the late 1960s, they justified establishing predominately white township school districts on the grounds that it was necessary to maintain quality education for industrial development. William D. Goldsmith, “Not ‘Just a School’: Race, taxes, and education in black belt school desegregation,” unpublished paper. 38 James C. Cobb, Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877-1984 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 104-109; Korstad and Leloudis, To Right These Wrongs; Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, 193-197. 39 I include here 1970s governors such as Jimmy Carter (GA), Reubin Askew (FL), John West (SC), Dale Bumpers (AR). But the early 1980s also proved an especially marked period during which southern governors came together around education, most notably Bill Clinton (AR), William Winter (MS), Lamar Alexander (TN), Richard Riley (SC), Jim Hunt (NC), Bob Graham (FL), and Chuck Robb (VA). 40 Daniel P. Gitterman, "The Southern 'Consensus' on Education and Economic Development," in A Way Forward: Building a Globally Competitive South, ed. Daniel P. Gitterman and Peter A. Coclanis, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 38. Alexander, a Republican, went on to serve as education secretary for George H.W. Bush.


that governors and legislators chose from. Other prominent organizations included the Southern

Regional Education Board, the Rural Advancement Fund, and the Sunbelt Institute. During the

1970s and 1980s, my preliminary research suggests that these policy advocates pushed for a

political economy that political scientist Peter Eisinger called “the entrepreneurial state,” focused

not so much on luring relocating firms as developing small business and creating new markets

through venture capital and research funding.41

Among southern states, North Carolina charted a course that most closely hued to these

recommendations, as my dissertation will explore. Projects like the Research Triangle Park

exemplified the “entrepreneurial state” policies. The administration of NC Governor Bob Scott

(1969-73) built out a workplace skill development program into the community college system.

Governor Jim Hunt (1977-85, 1993-2001) pushed the expansion of educational spending from

pre-K to universities during both stints as governor. Like so many of his predecessors, he linked

state support for education with economic development, even creating a state-wide Commission

on Education for Economic Growth in order to justify educational spending increases. The

struggles of the rural South to recover from the recession of the early 1980s served as another

indicator that low-wage, low-skill manufacturing was not the answer. Though Republican

Governor Jim Martin (1985-1993) initially pulled back on the “entrepreneurial state” approach,

the North Carolina Department of Labor, for instance, continued to promote an industrial

development policy that emphasized four points: greater educational opportunities for young

people, more worker training opportunities, expanded public services, and small business

promotion.42 As a percentage of GDP, North Carolina’s educational investment surpassed the

41 Peter K. Eisinger, The Rise of the Entrepreneurial State: State and Local Economic Development Policy in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 42 Hawkins, "Coastal Progress", 330-382; Cobb, The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936-1990; Rick Carlisle and Rachel Escobar, An Overview of Economic Development Policy in


U.S. average until the late 1990s (see Figure 7).

Among the many research questions that I do not yet have a satisfactory answer for is

why, by the 1990s, commitment to these “entrepreneurial state” principles began to falter in

North Carolina, both in policy circles as well as among voters. But instead of simply abandoning

government intervention, it shifted back to place-based strategies. Martin’s administration

funded the NC Rural Economic Development Center in order to address the specific problems of

the state’s communities outside the Sunbelt corridor, the first of its kind at the state level. State

North Carolina: Transforming the State from Poverty to Prosperity (Institute for Emerging Issues: NC State University, 2010); North Carolina Department of Labor, “Industrial Recruitment and the Path of North Carolina’s Economic Development to the Year 2000,” 1988 ed. (1982).

Figure 7: As a percentage of state domestic product, North Carolina education spending at all levels surpassed aggregated U.S. state and local education spending as percentage of GDP from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. Source: State and Local Government Finances, U.S. Census


leaders financed a “Global TransPark” in eastern North Carolina, building out the Kinston airport

to serve as a ring of just-in-time suppliers (a project that has demonstrated few returns to date).

Yet NC politicians also faced pressure from the competition of neighboring states as part of the

high profile auto-assembly attraction game, and during Martin’s second term, North Carolina

began allowing more generous incentive packages for relocating companies. Terry Sanford’s

Republican opponent in the 1994 Senate race bested the aging incumbent, painting Sanford’s

educational initiatives as ineffective “tax-and-spend” liberalism. Even Jim Hunt returned to

supply-side economic development policies during his second stint as governor, allowing for

potentially more generous incentives with 1996 legislation, though he also pursued stronger pre-

K investment. These incentives prioritized distressed areas, and northeastern North Carolina got

a steel plant with a few hundred jobs, at an estimated cost of $175 million in tax incentives.43 On

the whole, however, the economic benefits of state and federal policies continued concentrating

in the Sunbelt South.

After 1965, federal economic development policy involved a resurgent attention to place-

based assistance that fell out of favor by the late 1970s—but a closer examination of specific

attempts at regional development show that they involved fundamentally people-based strategies.

Rural congressmen championed the new Coastal Plains Regional Commission, a federal body

established in 1966 to spur economic development in North Carolina, South Carolina, and

Georgia, modeled on the Appalachian Regional Commission. In North Carolina, some of these

grants went to the development of water and sewage systems to attract new industry, but many

went to rural community colleges and research projects to stimulate new business in the coastal

plains. Though the money it dispersed was modest on the scale of federal intervention—about

43 Donald E. Voth, "A Brief History and Assessment of Federal Rural Development Programs and Policies," The University of Memphis Law Review 25, (1995); Carlisle and Escobar, An Overview of Economic Development Policy in North Carolina.


$10 million annually—its records of grant proposals and correspondence files serve as useful

indicators of how economic development strategy shifted, how local communities sought to

develop, and how U.S. policy makers thought of these regions vis-a-vis other developing nations.

More than for place-based economic development, federal spending came to educational

endeavors. Though it would initially cut federal funding for public schools, Reagan’s

administration produced the 1983 Nation at Risk report, which focused national attention on

educational improvement for the new “knowledge” economy, decrying a 15-year decline in

industrial productivity and the loss of “one great American industry after another” to world

competition. Education remained a prominent solution at the federal level as a way to cope with

job losses from free trade.44 This dissertation helps make sense of this increasing federal devotion

to educational policy during a time usually noted for the ascendency of antistatist politics.

Yet all of this points to a gaping question: if local, state, and federal policy came together

around education in so many important ways, why did school systems in the black belt appear to

be failing so badly by the 2000s that they might be accused of “academic genocide”? Answering

this question involves assessing the implementation and outcomes of education as economic

development policy. This dissertation will consider the emergence of school accountability

regimes and their means of evaluating these school systems, looking for ties to this emphasis on

education for economic development. As education became more economically crucial,

legislators ratcheted up accountability pressures to demonstrate that school systems were making

progress.45 North Carolina was a pioneering adopter of widespread state testing to measure,

mark, and rank schools and districts, and one of the templates for the federal No Child Left

44 A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, 1983. I borrow the term “global shift” from Peter Dicken, Global Shift: Transforming the World Economy, Sixth ed. (London: SAGE, 2011). 45 At least in some states, this was also part of conservative strategy to limit the impact of the civil rights movement. See Baker, Paradoxes of Desegregation, 172-180.


Behind accountability system. With the economic value of education rising, wealthier families

and school districts devoted additional resources that furthered the gap with poor rural areas. In

North Carolina’s black belt, even as more outside and community resources went to education,

public general education schools became less capable of conferring comparative advantage to its

predominately black and poor students (see Figure 8). As pressure to improve educational

outcomes increased, these systems faced a vicious cycle: labeled bad schools because of low test

scores and high drop out rates, they became even worse as parents with means fled for other

Figure 8: Lowest performing schools in North Carolina, 2002 – 2005 Of the 17 lowest performing schools during this period as designated by state and federal benchmarks, eight were in eastern North Carolina and five were in black belt counties targeted for this dissertation.


communities or educational options. They became test sites for numerous reform experiments,

from extended school days in the 1980s to Teach for America and charter schools in the 1990s.

The state’s rural school districts—including several in northeastern North Carolina—pursued

litigation in the 1990s to address these funding inadequacies, but the awards were diffused as

urban districts joined the suit to the point that they proved inadequate to address resource

discrepancies.46 By 2002, under the No Child Left Behind testing and accountability regime that

built on programs already underway in many of these states, these schools were overburdened

with a conflicting agenda, meant to catalyze growth and redistribution, to serve as centers of both

economic development and anti-poverty. If such schools prepared the best and the brightest, they

would rarely return. If they

Research Plan

My first phase of research will begin with digging into southern regional policy debates and the

pitches to address the problems of rural development, particularly in North Carolina. I will start

by examining the records of the Southern Governors’ Association and its expert advisory group,

the Southern Growth Policies Board, as well as the reports produced by MDC, Inc. These will

help me understand the construction of various policy options that state governors and legislators

might chose among and see how policy shifted from the 1970s through the 1990s. As another

avenue for understanding the evolution of policy, I will examine the archived papers of standout

policy entrepreneurs George Esser and Juanita Kreps. Esser emerged as a prominent figure by

serving as the executive director of the North Carolina Fund (1963 – 1968), continuing the fight

46 Robert H. Tiller, "Litigating Educational Adequacy in North Carolina: A Personal Account of Leandro v. State," Nebraska Law Review 83, no. 3 (2005); John Charles Boger, "Education's "Perfect Storm"? Racial Resegregation, High Stakes Testing, and School Resource Inequities: The Case of North Carolina," North Carolina Law Review 81, no. 4 (2003). Additional funding has brought a wide array of technology to these rural classrooms, but it has done little to address one of the most important resource discrepancies: lower pay for system teachers.


against southern poverty at the Ford Foundation and then the Southern Regional Council. After

he left SRC, he returned to North Carolina to guide the rural efforts of the Local Initiatives

Support Corporation (LISC), an organization funded through the Ford Foundation that sought to

bolster the efforts of community development corporations at creating jobs and building

housing.47 Esser’s entire professional biography provides a particularly valuable window on rural

policy, particularly related to eastern North Carolina. Economist Juanita Kreps served on North

Carolina’s state manpower council during the early 1970s and for three years as Jimmy Carter’s

secretary of commerce. Her papers will help me understand the policy influence of business

regarding the economic development of impoverished communities. She served on several

corporate boards and during her time as secretary of commerce, she worked closely with

business groups anxious about inflation and economic stagnation. Her support both for global

integration and for antipoverty measures suggests that her papers provide a valuable window on

how policy makers saw alignment in both tasks. During this initial phase, I will also assess

locally available oral history collections. At Duke, the Southern Rural Poverty Collection holds

interviews with a variety of actors who attempted to bolster economic development and improve

education. A slew of interviews archived at the Southern Oral History Program at UNC offer

valuable perspectives on economic development policy regarding North Carolina and its

evolution over the course of the late 20th century.

For my second phase, I will begin taking stock of how North Carolina implemented state

policy regarding education and economic development in eastern North Carolina, looking for

how the state was balancing place-based and people-based strategies. State-level economic

development structures—with numerous advisory councils, task forces, and planning boards—

47 LISC’s efforts in eastern NC were an experiment in fostering community development without strong preexisting local groups, started in large measure because of interest from an engine company that wanted to build a supplier network in the area.


were constantly in flux in the postwar period, and such shifts alone provide some insight into

state level debates. I will also examine the concerns of commerce secretaries, the membership of

these boards, and the projects funded and approaches pursued. Such records will help show the

degree to which firms, business groups, and the realigning politics of the two party South

affected policy decision making. I will selectively examine state-level educational records in

order to understand what drove the rise of school testing and accountability programs. My focus

will be on gubernatorial administrations, but where appropriate, I will look toward legislative

records.

My third research phase involves understanding the development of local economic

development policy and the place of educational investment as a means of attracting jobs. One

place to start is with the archives of the Institute of Government at UNC-CH. Local officials

received guidance from the Institute, which provided a meeting ground for local officials to share

ideas about the operation of government, a means of diffusing new economic development

strategies and tactics. State level associations of local government officials, such as the North

Carolina Association of County Commissioners, served a similar purpose. The records of local

economic development authorities, such as the Halifax County Economic Development

Commission, provide a way of understanding how this knowledge was put into practice as towns

like Roanoke Rapids, Rocky Mount, Warrenton, and Tarboro sought new industries. The records

of the Coastal Plains Regional Commission contain specific grant proposals from local

governments and economic development boards that will help me see how these localities tried

to put their development plans into action during the 1970s. Local business organizations in

these areas wielded considerable, though possibly waning, influence on local political decisions,

and local chambers of commerce records will be key resources for looking to see if there was a


broader local push to increase investment in education in the North Carolina black belt. More

difficult will be understanding the perspective of those courted by these policies: the firm

managers who made decisions about relocation. The records of state and local economic

development commissioners should indicate firms that considered relocating to the North

Carolina black belt, and using such leads, I will seek access to records of firms.48

As this research comes together at the state and local level, my fourth phase will involve

trips to the National Archives, presidential libraries, and the Ford Foundation archives to gain

additional understanding of the national changes in economic development policy. My first

priority will be the Carter administration. Carter’s secretaries of commerce and agriculture,

Kreps and Ray Marshall, had been intimately involved in previous councils and conferences on

rural economic development. Carter’s records will also prove valuable to understand how his

administration shifted policy as a result of stagflation. The Ford and Reagan administrations will

also be high priorities, to understand the shift in Republican views on education and regional

economic development. The Ford Foundation archives at the Rockefeller Archive Center in

Sleepy Hollow, New York should provide additional insight into national economic development

trends, as well as detailed project reports on more experimental endeavors that the Foundation

funded in the rural South. Time permitting at this stage, I will do limited research on other

southern states with significant black belt subregions to better contextualize the North Carolina

experience.

Collecting strategic oral histories will be an ongoing part of this research project. Given

that some of the policy entrepreneurs, firm managers, and locally significant actors are still alive,

48 Cummins, Inc., for instance opened a diesel engine plant in the area in the 1980s, and it sought to work with antipoverty nonprofits and the state to build a supplier network in northeastern North Carolina. The textile company, J.P. Stevens, is another obvious target, as it was a significant local employer that closed its area mill in the 1980s. Edgecombe County lost its major employer with the merger of a locally-owned telecommunications company, the former Carolina Telephone and Telegraph Company, with Sprint in the early 1990s.


I will identify interviewees to target as I examine archival material. These oral histories will

provide insights that might not be available in the written record—such as occasions where

communities came close to landing big industrial fish, or a sharper sense of the most influential

people to economic development choices. Local interviewees will also provide a key means of

understanding the outcomes of these policies, providing qualitative insight to augment

quantitative measures of jobs, educational levels, incomes, and health. Where appropriate, I will

bring archival material to interviews in order to facilitate interviewees’ recollection. Another

source for such qualitative reflections is the Behind the Veil project at Duke, which offers a

wealth of interviews with African Americans in northeastern North Carolina, as well as black

belt communities across the South. Though these focused on daily life under Jim Crow, many

interviews offer insights into the evolution of the plantation South to the present.

Conclusion

In the last year, North Carolina’s governor and legislature have dismantled much of the

economic development infrastructure that this dissertation will explore. Republican Governor Pat

McCrory and the majority GOP legislature have dissolved the Southern Growth Policies Board

and defunded the NC Rural Economic Development Center. McCrory has moved to privatize the

economic development functions of the Department of Commerce. And these new state leaders

have sought to restructure the state education system through vouchers, charter schools, curtailed

due process rights for teachers, and diminished funding, particularly at the pre-K and university

levels.49

49 “Southern Growth Policies Board: RIP,” News and Observer, 16 September 2013, http://projects.newsobserver.com/under_the_dome/southern_growth_policies_board_rip; “Rural Center plan would halt grant-making, diminish agency,” News and Observer. 28 August 2013, http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/08/28/3141601/rural-centers-future-pay-for-ex.html?sp=/99/102/105/1568/;


But tying education to economic development might once again prove a political winner

in North Carolina. In Halifax County, North Carolina, the push for quality education has

developed into an explicit call once again for economic development. An interracial

organization, the Coalition for Education and Economic Security (CEES), has brought together

the Halifax County Black Caucus, various community organizations, and retirees who seek a

stronger business climate. They have advocated for higher local taxes to fund education and have

held public forums to explore the idea of school consolidation in an effort to improve the system

and attract new businesses.50

A basic policy question at the root of this history dissertation is whether CEES is right: to

what degree can educational investment spur economic development? The focus of my

dissertation is not on answering that, but what I think my research will indicate is that as

politically successful as that tie has been, education has not always succeeded in promoting

economic security, much less economic equality. It will take more than combining school

systems or even local tax dollars to improve the economic conditions of Halifax County. Local

efforts must be linked with other governmental layers, and educational policy must be connected

to broader antipoverty and job creation efforts. People- or place-based policy should not be an

either/or—one is not sufficient to cover the lack of the other.

There is a further policy question hovering over this dissertation topic, to which I

currently have no answer: whether it is even a good thing to develop this area, to have more

human beings inhabit this landscape. Urbanization is in many important ways more efficient, “McCrory plan seeks to get private sector more involved in NC economic development,” Charlotte Observer, 9 April 2013, http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/04/09/3968727/mccory-plan-seeks-to-get-private.html#.U0L-96OP00l. For a recap of changes to North Carolina’s public school system, see Helen F. Ladd and Edward B. Fiske, “A Guide to What Happened to Public Education in North Carolina,” Diane Ravitch’s blog, 6 March 2014, http://dianeravitch.net/2014/03/06/ladd-and-fiske-a-guide-to-what-happened-to-public-education-in-north-carolina/. 50 “Public forum: Should Halifax County school systems merge?” WRAL.com, 3 December 2013, http://www.wral.com/public-forum-should-halifax-county-school-systems-merge-/13178714/. In full disclosure, I moderated the forum.


both for human production and consumption. Perhaps policy should encourage people to seek

their fortunes elsewhere. Rural “self-deportation,” driven by stagnant economic opportunity,

might in some ways be the least coercive way of providing greater terrain for food production

and environmental offsets. But having lived in several rural communities myself, amidst people

whose families have been rooted in those geographies for well over a century, I suspect that there

are values of place that such a hard-hearted utilitarian policy fails to quantify. I doubt that my

dissertation will make strong claims to answer this question, but it is one that I will continue to

ponder as I make my way through my archives and conduct my interviews.


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