Public Education Movement Transformed ‘Mummy’ States

The movement for universal public education in the U.S. finally took hold in the late 19th century, which one could argue led eventually to the civil rights movement. Not until the mid-to-late 1940s, when far more Americans had been educated and their prejudices challenged, did a powerful civil rights movement emerge that sparked significant changes in the South, after WWII. More and more Americans began to recognize the inconsistency of opposing Nazis and “master race” foolishness abroad while accepting white supremacy and segregation at home.

“By 1900, 34 states had compulsory schooling laws; four were in the South. Thirty states with compulsory schooling laws required attendance until age 14 (or higher). By 1910, 72 percent of American children attended school. Half the nation’s children attended one-room schools. By 1930, every state required students to complete elementary school.” (Wikipedia.)

As examples of the dire situation prior to the establishment of modern public schools: in 1880, nearly half of North Carolinians were illiterate, unable to write their names. Even more deprived of education, two-thirds of African Americans were illiterate in 1880.

Journalist (and later diplomat) Walter Hines Page fled NC in the late 1880s for the North, claiming that the state was filled with “mummies” — leaders who were dead in mind and spirit, and living in the past. Well after the civil war, illiterate Southerners were trying to hold onto “the Southern way of life” — first slavery, then share-cropping, and persistent poverty, leading to pejorative characterizations of the South. North Carolina was, in the 19th century, mocked as the Rip Van Winkle state.

Growing up in this environment, men like Alexander Graham (1844-1934) of Fayetteville, NC saw the region’s potential but not without universal education. Descendant of Scottish immigrants who were “devoted to church, reading and literacy, and community-building,” Graham “subscribed to a Calvinistic conception of Christian calling, the belief that Presbyterians had an obligation to service in professionals like the ministry, the law, and teaching,” wrote Professor William Link, a biographer of the Graham family.

Privately tutored, Alexander Graham became a teacher at age 16, working at Richmond Academy near Spring Hill, NC in 1862. By 20, after the war ended, he was teaching at another school, but so impoverished he ran a peddler’s wagon to try to make ends meet. Doing this, he saved up enough money to enroll at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Since his roommate and best friend went on to Yale and Columbia University in New York after UNC, his horizons were widened and he thought perhaps he could, too.

After graduating from UNC, Graham taught at the Columbia Grammer School and attended law school at night. After practicing law for three years back in Fayetteville, he became head of the school system for 10 years, as well as an education leader in the state, and later became superintendent of the Charlotte school system.

Graham is considered the father of the state’s graded school system. He envisioned a voluntary network of graded primary and high schools in every county, open to all white children between the ages of 6 and 21.

It was the work of public servants like Graham that caused journalist  Henry Grady (1850-1889) of Atlanta to observe that there was a New South willing to move past the civil war.

Not coincidentally, because Alexander Graham so valued education, his son — Frank Porter Graham — became a history professor, president of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a leading progressive voice in the state, U.S. Senator, United Nations mediator, and “citizen of the world.”

Related:

Towards a Neo-Moreheadism Politics in NC by Alexander Jones

Progressive Southern Coalitions Emerged Briefly After Civil War, But Then ‘The Nadir’ Or Low Point of Race Relations Endured for Decades, Even During ‘New South’

Frank Porter Graham Helped Transform North Carolina from Backwater to Leading Progressive State.