The Jim Crow Playbook Returns
MAGA’s Attack on U.S. Education and America’s Future
Amid the ongoing federal government shutdown, the Trump administration is continuing its ‘wrecking ball’ demolition of the U.S. Department of Education. This follows the Trump administration’s previous moves to strip universities of grants, tuition aid, and library funding. For students of American history, there is nothing new about this attempt to intellectually beggar future generations of the electorate in order to ensure political quiescence.
Political elites have long recognized the threat of an informed electorate to their preferred order. Waves of similar anti-education policies have washed over the American South many times, but this is the first time such a wave has crashed over the rest of the country. By using racial grievances and culture war politics to justify tearing down education, today’s leaders aren’t just keeping voters uninformed—they’re setting America up to fall behind the rest of the world.
The first wave began after the end of Reconstruction in 1877. With the withdrawal of the last Union troops from the South, “White Redeemers” seized power through voter intimidation and racial terror. Seeking to maintain white supremacy and recognizing that uneducated populations are easier to control, they defunded public schools using rhetoric identical to that of today’s conservatives. In newspapers and speeches, Southern politicos railed against public education as a form of “socialism” imported by Yankee “carpetbaggers.”1 Within ten years, seven Southern states had slashed funding for public education and shuttered schools.2
Southern elites next imposed literacy tests to disenfranchise vast swaths of poor Americans, both black and white, who were likeliest to vote against their corrupt administrations. While slavery had left 80% of black Americans illiterate in 1870,3 literacy among poor whites initially increased after the Civil War. But, as the anti-education policies intensified, literacy among poor whites plummeted to a nadir unseen since antebellum days.4 By 1900, 90% of U.S. counties with white illiteracy rates higher than 20% lay south of the Mason-Dixon line.5
The second wave crested in the 1920s. Southern politicians feared Darwinism’s increasing threat to the South’s racially stratified economic order, which rested on Bible-ascribed polygenism—the belief that races have separate origins. The theory of evolution undermined this order by acknowledging a common ancestor and a shared humanity between all races. Declaring such a woke ideology to be “subversive,”6 Southern politicians stirred up a crusade against Darwinism, and half a dozen Southern states passed laws against teaching it.
When universities defied laws forbidding the teaching of Darwinism, Southern elites feared they would undermine their political order, much as Trump and Republicans fear today. They defunded colleges that didn’t fire professors who taught this “radical” ideology,7 accusing them of spreading a “contagion,”8 similar to today’s “woke mind virus.” Just as Florida state colleges today ban the teaching of “critical race theory,” Southern colleges in the 1920s required instructors to sign a pledge declaring America’s greatest menace to be “destructive criticism.”9
The third wave occurred in the 1950s. After Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down school segregation, Southern elites seized on integration as their new bogeyman. Invoking the same threats to “white civilization” that we hear today, they redirected state resources to private schools open only to wealthy white children. And now we witness the fourth wave of this war on education. Denouncing the “woke mind virus” and “DEI,” Trump has launched the greatest attack on public education in the history of the American republic.
Such anti-education policies come at great costs over the long term. The postbellum South became an economic slough for generations. In 1938, Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the region to be “the nation’s No. 1 economic problem.” Decades later, after much of the U.S. labor force had transitioned to a service economy, the South’s less-educated labor force remained trapped in low-wage, less-skilled jobs. By reproducing the education policies of the postbellum South on a national scale, the Trump administration is all but ensuring that future American children will end up not in universities but in the warehouses of billionaires.
America needs a better-educated workforce to compete with rival superpowers—not a less-educated one. Yet Trump’s actions will make U.S. labor less competitive globally. At a time when we don’t produce enough human capital, cutting funding to our world-class universities will remove the incentive that attracts scientists and engineers from around the globe. These actions will undercut America’s competitiveness and reduce GDP by 4% per year. This means fewer jobs, lower wages, and less funding for everything from schools to roads to Social Security. In the long term, it will mark the end of our so-called American exceptionalism.
And then come the social costs of such policies. Higher education is key to social mobility. By reducing Pell Grants and work-study programs, the Trump administration is restricting higher education to wealthy families, making it harder for working-class and non-white children to attain the American Dream. Students of American history have seen this before—in the postbellum South. The difference is that the sons of Southern gentry riding in carriages have given way to the grandsons of Klondike brothelkeepers riding in Teslas.
Despite the costs, Trump and his Republican allies continue to emulate the Jim Crow South’s destructive policies on a national scale. Their goal is not to build a stronger, more prosperous nation—it’s to stay in power, no matter the long-term damage. They care little if Americans can compete globally, so long as they remain uneducated and easily misled. History has shown us where this road leads. For years, MAGA Republicans pursuing this strategy have decried the expense of education. With the Trump administration’s mass defunding of our education system, America will learn the far greater cost of ignorance.
C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), pp. 61-62.
Ibid.
Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1960 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1961/2002), p. 230.
C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), pp. 62-63.
Ibid., pp. 331-332.
Ibid., p. 79.
Kenneth K. Bailey, Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), pp. 63-64.
Ibid., p. 74.
Ibid., pp. 63-64.