Democracy for Some or Democracy for None? The Effects of Disenfranchisement on Public Education in the Jim Crow South
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Between 1890 and 1910, the eleven states of the old Confederacy each passed a series of disenfranchising reforms that would deny blacks and poor whites in the South their right to vote for the next 75 years. Recently, some political scientists have sought to characterize the South of this time period not just as a democracy for whites only, but rather as a set of subnational authoritarian enclaves within the democratic United States. This subnational authoritarian thesis of Southern politics immerses itself in the larger historical debate over the extent to which disenfranchisement in the Jim Crow South was either class motivated or race motivated. This thesis attempts to inform that debate by assessing the effects of Southern disenfranchisement on government support for black and white public education between 1891 and 1919. Previous work on the effects of disenfranchisement in the South has shown that it suppressed both black and white political participation. However, the work on the policy effects of disenfranchisement fails to test whether disenfranchisement led to less favorable policy outcomes for poor whites like it did for blacks. This project seeks to fill this hole in the literature by comparing student/teacher ratios in black and white schools in Kentucky to student/teacher ratios in black and white schools in a sample of 4 disenfranchising states. The incorporation of Kentucky as a case of a Southern ‘border state’ that never enacted disenfranchisement represents a new approach to the study of the effects of disenfranchisement in the South. I find that disenfranchisement had no discernible impact on student/teacher ratios in black or white schools, but explain why and how it still likely impacted government support for public education overall.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 10, 2019 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Lucas Rodríguez |
|---|---|
| Advisor | Wrigtht, Gavin |
Subjects
| Subject | Disenfranchisement |
|---|---|
| Subject | Jim Crow |
| Subject | Public Education |
| Subject | Economics |
| Subject | Political Science |
| Subject | Democracy Development and the Rule of Law |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
Lucas Rodríguez. (2019). Democracy for Some or Democracy for None?
The Effects of Disenfranchisement on Public Education in the Jim Crow South. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/hm670ry5943
Collection
Stanford University, Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. (CDDRL)
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- lucasr7@alumni.stanford.edu
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