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“Beyond the Buffalo Hunt”: Educating for Economic Development in the
North Carolina Black Belt, 1965 – 2002
William D. Goldsmith
Dissertation Prospectus, Duke History Department
8 April 2014
“Shadows in the Sunbelt,” was the phrase that a blue-ribbon panel of southern politicians and
economic policy experts in 1986 invoked for the plantation South’s economic problems. The
1970s had been a hopeful era of “rural renaissance,” as dubbed by such policy elites, including
for the black belt—those rural, heavily African American counties that span the rich soil from
Virginia to Texas where Old South slave-based agriculture predominated prior to emancipation.
A steady stream of firms shifted manufacturing operations there from the deindustrializing
North, and blacks were successfully challenging employment discrimination while directly
influencing local politics in ways they had not since Reconstruction. But with the recession of
the early 1980s, this economic upswing faltered, forcing a search for new means of economic
growth. In the estimation of this panel on rural economic development—which included the
governors of Virginia and Mississippi as well as esteemed economists Charles E. Bishop and
Juanita M. Kreps—globalization meant that southern states and localities had to move “beyond
the buffalo hunt” for low-wage manufacturing jobs. They instead had to focus on education and
entrepreneurship for economic development, a theme that emerged from a wide array of policy
experts and embraced by many southern politicians. As the executive director of a southern
economic policy nonprofit, MDC Inc, phrased the problem in 1988: “If we in North Carolina are
going to compete with Japan, as we have to, in this global economy that we’re entering, then
we’re going to have to compete with them on the basis of education—and the basis of education
of our least equipped, not just our best and brightest.”1
1
MDC Panel on Rural Economic Development, “Shadows in the Sunbelt: Developing the Rural South in an Era of
Economic Change,” (Chapel Hill, NC: MDC, Inc. 1986); “1988 North Carolina People Interview with George
Autry,” MDC, Inc., 1988. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dnvPCOEYlY.
“Beyond the Buffalo Hunt”: Dissertation Prospectus
Goldsmith 2
This was a pitch for development of people rather than place, and improving education
for economic development had broad buy in beyond the state level. At the local level, African
Americans had long sought equitable education to improve economic security—and they had
increasing local political power—while at the federal level, policy elites concerned about a
“nation at risk” of economic malaise pitched educational improvement and worker retraining as a
means of boosting American competitiveness. During an age of intellectual fracture in the U.S.,
disparate policy actors came together around education as an answer that solved both national
economic needs and rural poverty in the black belt. Yet despite this investment in people through
education, public schools would be hard pressed to deliver both economic growth and economic
equality for the plantation South. As judged both by new testing-based accountability metrics as
well as student graduation and college completion rates, public schools in the subregion did not
provide an equitable education to the predominately African American children who attended
them. Despite successful school finance lawsuits and federal law meant to leave no child behind,
a state judge would accuse educators in the North Carolina black belt of committing “academic
genocide.”2
One of the fundamental tasks for historians of the late 20th century is to understand how
economic inequality increased so dramatically in the United States after the 1970s, reckoning
with the political, economic, and cultural changes that facilitated this trend and the many
2
“Nation at risk” refers to the 1983 report issued by President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence
in Education. I borrow language regarding fracture from Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). Superior Court Judge Howard Manning, Jr. has used the expression
“academic genocide” repeatedly, referring at times to selected Charlotte-Mecklenburg high schools as well as
Halifax County Schools from 2005 to the present. “Report from the Court: The High School Problem,” Hoke County
Board of Education v. State of North Carolina, 95 CVS 1158 (NC Superior Court, 24 May 2005); “Notice of
Hearing,” Hoke County Board of Education v. State of North Carolina, 95 CVS 1158 (NC Superior Court, 16 March
2009). The case is also known as Leandro II.
Goldsmith 3
attempts to mitigate or reverse it.3 As one small part of that research agenda, this dissertation
project traces the construction and implementation of economic development policy regarding
one of the poorest subregions in the nation, the U.S. black belt, with a focus on the portion within
North Carolina (see Figure 1 for a map highlighting the communities targeted for this
dissertation). In the rural, black-majority counties of the plantation belt, major political and
economic changes in the 1960s—notably the civil rights revolution and agricultural
mechanization—created new opportunities for African Americans and impoverished residents of
all races. As a state, North Carolina pursued many economic policies that favored the
development of human capital, particularly in comparison to other southern states. And yet by
many economic metrics, North Carolina’s plantation belt today looks remarkably similar to
plantation belt communities in the rest of the South (see Figure 2).4 By looking at the place
where education as economic development policy had one of its best chances to succeed, I hope
to illuminate why geographic and racial inequality has persisted despite the many structural
disruptions during the 1960s, despite the dedicated efforts of many people to even shares of U.S.
prosperity.
Focusing on the North Carolina black belt from 1965 to 2002 allows for a fresh view of
the political and economic possibilities for greater equality in the late 20th century. First, it
further illuminates what the civil rights movement did and did not change by focusing on
3
As depicted by the work of Judith Stein, Jefferson Cowie, Kim Phillips-Fein, Jacob Hacker, Paul Pierson and a
growing list of scholars (historians as well as other social scientists), economic policy shifted direction in the 1970s
as part of a renewed search for growth, a path influenced at least indirectly—if not directly—by organized business
interests. Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Jefferson Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working
Class (New York: New Press, 2010); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative
Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009); Jacob S. Hacker and Paul
Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle
Class (New York: Simon & Schustser, 2010); Benjamin C. Waterhouse, Lobbying America: The Politics of Business
from Nixon to NAFTA (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great
Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001); Robert M. Collins, "The Economic
Crisis of 1968 and the Waning of the 'American Century'," The American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (1996).
4
For interactive maps, visit http://sites.duke.edu/williamgoldsmith/dissertation/interactive-maps/
Goldsmith 4
Figure 1: The North Carolina Black Belt
The core counties for this project are within the thick black line: Warren, Halifax, Northampton, and Edgecombe. Halifax
and Northampton comprise the Roanoke Rapids micropolitan area; Edgecome is part of the Rocky Mount metropolitan
area; and Warren County is outside such statistical areas. The counties within the thin outer black line are of secondary
focus. They include the cities of Wilson and Greenville.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau via Social Explorer
economic development, attempts to grow the pie, rather than economic redistribution, attempts to
re-cut the existing pie. Scholars have now explored in some detail civil rights struggles for equal
access to employment, housing, and education, but few have studied how the movement
reshaped strategies for adding jobs and improving economic opportunity through growth.5
Second, this dissertation highlights a much more interventionist U.S. government than some
scholars of this neoliberal period have appreciated by paying attention to how policy actors at the
local, state, and federal levels sought to develop its poorest communities in a swiftly integrating
5
Scholarship on such civil rights endeavors grows ever more voluminous, but see especially Nancy MacLean,
Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006);
Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random
House, 2008); Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban
Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Goldsmith 5
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.
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).
Goldsmith 6
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
Goldsmith 7
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-takeall” 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
Goldsmith 8
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.
Goldsmith 9
Goldsmith 10
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 votingage 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
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).
Goldsmith 11
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
Figure 5: Poverty by Race and Region, 1959-1978
Source: Wright, Sharing the Prize (2013), 245
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.
Goldsmith 12
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).
Goldsmith 13
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
Goldsmith 14
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.
Goldsmith 15
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.
Goldsmith 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).
Goldsmith 17
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).
Goldsmith 18
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 lowwage, 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).
Goldsmith 19
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.
Goldsmith 20
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).
Goldsmith 21
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
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.
Goldsmith 22
“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. Statebased 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.
Goldsmith 23
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 statelevel 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.
Goldsmith 24
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.
Goldsmith 25
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
Goldsmith 26
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
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).
Goldsmith 27
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 preK 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 placebased 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.
Goldsmith 28
$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.
Goldsmith 29
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.
Goldsmith 30
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.
Goldsmith 31
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.
Goldsmith 32
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
Goldsmith 33
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.
Goldsmith 34
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/;
Goldsmith 35
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#.U0L96OP00l. 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.
Goldsmith 36
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.
Goldsmith 37
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