Making Separate Equal: The Integration of Black and White School Funds in Kentucky, 1882

Abstract

On August 6, 1882, the Kentucky electorate, 84 percent of which was white, approved by a 54 to 46 percent margin a referendum proposal to increase school property taxes for whites by 10 percent in order to triple state-level educational expenditures for black children, thereby bringing them up to the same amount as white expenditures. Passage of the measure equalizing state spending, which accounted for about 64 percent of the total amount allocated to public primary and secondary schools in Kentucky in the 1880s, was, according to state school superintendent Joshua Desha Pickett, "the most remarkable fact in the school history of Kentucky.” Why did this referendum, an event not directly paralleled, so far as I know, in any other Southern state, take place? What does the passage of the proposal indicate about attitudes toward blacks and black education held by various segments of the Kentucky electorate blacks themselves, as well as white Republicans and various factions of the Democracy? How did the equalization issue fit into the larger, ongoing political struggles in Kentucky and the South? By bringing both quantitative and impressionistic evidence to bear on these questions, I hope in this paper to illuminate at least one important and previously almost unnoticed corner of the largely murky political and educational history of the border states, as well as to demonstrate the usefulness of a statistical technique--Logit analysis--which has so far escaped the attention of historians.