No Vote, No Schools, No Chance

In South Carolina, black children attended schools in outbuildings provided by black churches or landowners, in abandoned hunting lodges, or in sturdier structures designed and funded, with local matches, by philanthropists such as Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Co. This Clarendon County school, photographed around 1938, was provided by Spring Hill African Methodist Church (in the background). The state of South Carolina and its local school officials ignored public education for black children. This school served black children until 1951— without desks, heat, running water, or indoor toilets, their school books discards from white children’s schools. Photograph courtesy of South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina

In the Beginning….

The nation’s first public school —a secondary school for white boys called Boston Latin School and located in Boston, Massachusetts — was established in 1635.

In 1647, Massachusetts required towns of sufficient size to hire a teacher or establish a grammar school paid for by residents.

More than 60 years later, around 1710, South Carolina’s colonial assembly approved funds for free public schools in and about what was then Charlestown. The schools educated poor or orphaned white boys.

In 1740, South Carolina law forbade teaching enslaved people to write.

In 1789, girls could attend Massachusetts’ public schools but only from April to October.

Not until 1811 did South Carolina decide to place one public school in each of its 44 election districts. The state’s total of 124 schools gave preference to white orphans and white children of impoverished parents. However, poor and middle-class parents scorned these free or “pauper schools” and preferred their children work instead. Wealthy parents employed private tutors or sent their male (and sometimes female) children to private academies or to England for private education.

In the 1830s, New England reformers pushed common schools, which were publicly funded and locally governed schools with a common curriculum of reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and geography.

In 1843, South Carolina punished with fines or imprisonment anyone teaching enslaved people to read.

A special committee in 1846 bewailed South Carolinians’ indifference to education: “There is scarcely a State in the Union in which so great apathy exists on the subject of education of the people, as in the state of South Carolina.”

The state’s 1865 Constitution, following the Civil War, made no mention of public schools or, for that matter, of education at all. This constitution allowed only free white men to vote or to be elected to the state’s legislature, its members apportioned according to the numbers of white inhabitants. The anti-literacy laws meant only five percent of formerly enslaved people could read.

In 1867, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act, which required Southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment for acceptance back into the Union, called for new state constitutions granting black men the right to vote, and instituted new voter registration. Freedmen became the voting majority in South Carolina, with nearly two black men registered to vote for every white man.

No education was offered black children in Columbia, South Carolina’s capital city. In 1865, the Freedman’s Bureau opened a school for black children in the basement of a Lincoln Street church. In 1867, the Freedmen’s Bureau and the New York Society opened Howard School in Columbia. (In 1880, Howard School became part of the public school system, remaining the only possibility for black schoolchildren until Booker T. Washington opened in 1916.)

Briefly, South Carolina promised to educate all children. The 1868 Constitution of South Carolina, written during Reconstruction, required “a liberal and uniform system of free public schools throughout the state,” open for at least six months of each year, with compulsory attendance of all children six to sixteen years old for at least twenty-four months total. A poll tax, which was not linked to suffrage, and a property tax supported the schools, the funds distributed in proportion to the number of pupils in each school district. Religious sects were not allowed access to any school funds.

Black men comprised 71-76 of the 124 delegates at this all-male constitutional convention. The constitution began, “All men are born free and equal” and guaranteed the vote to all men who had resided in the state for at least a year and were 21 years old or older, “without distinction of race, color, or former condition.” Radical Republicans supported far more than black men’s enfranchisement. The new constitution also expanded, from single women to married women, a woman’s right to make contracts and control property; enacted the state’s first divorce law, and legalized racial intermarriage.

A Freedman’s School on Edisto Island was photographed by Sam A. Cooley between 1862-1865. At the beginning of the Civil War, Edisto Island was home to a colony of enslaved refugees supervised by a Union general. At the end of the war, Edisto Island was home to formerly enslaved people supervised by the Freedmen’s Bureau. Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress, Gladstone Collection of African American Photographs.

In the 1869-1870 school year, the state counted 11,122 white children and 15,891 black children, attendance almost evenly split between boys and girls, in the free common schools.

Determined to return to a white supremacist rule that ended black people’s striving for education, citizenship, and economic autonomy, white men used violence; mob and militia rule; Black Codes, also called Jim Crow laws; and electoral fraud. In 1871, Congress passed what was called the Ku Klux Klan Act, the third enforcement act to ensure implementation of the 14th Amendment. The act authorized the president to suspend habeas corpus and send in federal troops to combat conspiracies and violence intent on denying people their constitutional rights.

A federal investigation of the KKK in South Carolina determined no community “nominally civilized has been so fully under the domination of systematic and organized depravity.” With evidence of at least 11 murders and 600 whippings in York County alone, “a carnival of crime,” authorities suspended habeas corpus in nine counties, initially arrested 600 white men in York County, and indicted 220 for serious crimes. Fifty-three pled guilty; five were prosecuted and convicted in 1871 and 37 in 1872; other cases were postponed.

Read the 1871 “Ku Klux Trials” proceedings in Columbia, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

This didn’t end efforts to enforce what former South Carolina governor and U.S. Senator Benjamin Ryan Tillman called “Anglo-Saxon supremacy.” In 1876, about 100 members of white rifle clubs, known as Red Shirts, opened fire on black militiamen, who had barricaded themselves in their drill room above a Hamburg store. When the militiamen tried to escape, the Red Shirts wounded a few, captured thirty, and murdered seven in cold blood, executing them with a shot to the head or firing upon them as they fled. Tillman described this as “teaching the negroes a lesson,” demonstrating white superiority “by killing as many of them as was justifiable.”

The 1895 Constitution existed because Tillman and other former Confederates and enslavers wanted disfranchised, disempowered, and terrorized laborers. White men comprised 154 of 160 delegates at this all-male convention, their goals to end black males voting, ban marriage between a white person and a person “who shall have one-eighth or more negro blood,” and require segregated schools.

This constitution required a liberal system of free public schools for children between the ages of 6 and 21 years old, an annual property tax and poll tax to support public schools, and also this: “Separate schools shall be provided for children of the white and colored races, and no child of either race shall ever be permitted to attend a school provided for children of the other race.”

Voting was limited to men who had lived for two years in the state, paid a poll tax six months before any election, could read (or, until 1898, understand) any section of the state constitution, and prove payment of all taxes, including that of property assessed in the previous year at $300 or more. The convention refused to grant women suffrage, and the new constitution barred interracial marriages and did not return the right to divorce, which had been repealed in 1878.

The new government cut school spending, never adequate. No requirement that local and county school officials share tax funds equally among white and black schools meant dramatically reduced funding for black students. In 1895, schools serving white students received $3.11 per pupil while schools serving black students received $1.05 per pupil.

Over the next 20 years, funding increased to $14.94 per pupil for schools serving white students and to all of $1.86 per pupil for schools serving black students. In 1920, South Carolina spent less per pupil than any state in the nation.

Very few black students in South Carolina had access to A high school education. This 1932 Photo shows the teacherage at the black-only Macedonia high school in blackville, Barnwell County. In 1930, the state spent per pupil $58.09 for white students and $8 for black students. in 1940, only 36 accredited black high schools existed in the entire state. Photo courtesy of South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina.

The 1920 census reported 6.5 percent of white South Carolinians 10 years old or older were illiterate compared to 29.3 percent of black residents 10 years old or older. However, this reflected reported, not tested, literacy. Three-fourths of the state’s children did not attend school beyond fifth grade, and the school year was short, 90 to 180 days. The outcome of a World War I intelligence test designed for literate troops uncovered a truer story: The test found half of all South Carolina recruits illiterate compared to 25 percent of recruits nationally. Tellingly, black recruits from some Northern states — with greater access to education — tested better than white recruits from many Southern states.

Without schooling little hope existed for a better life. Without a vote black South Carolinians couldn’t elect officeholders interested in their welfare. They couldn’t sit on juries and participate in verdicts regarding violence against them. They couldn’t vote to raise taxes for schools or apportion taxes fairly for their schools. They couldn’t make their world a better place for themselves.