Stability and Change in Discrimination Against Black Public Schools: Birmingham, Alabama, 1871-1931

EVERYWHERE IN THE POSTBELLUM SOUTH THE BLACK PUBLIC schools were separate and inferior, but the rate of discrimination against black students varied significantly from place to place and from decade to decade. Most studies of the chronology of school discrimination have dealt with entire states and have focused on rural areas, where the majority of southerners, black and white, lived. But recent scholarship has called notice to the postbellum southern city as a crucial arena for setting the twentieth-century pattern of southern race relations,' and this article focuses on the chronological pattern of stability and change in school discrimination in one major New South city Birmingham, Alabama from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. It seeks also to explore the array of political, organizational, economic, financial, and ideological factors that shaped