ABSTRACT
Home rule in the South was accompanied by the very small presence of state governments. By the 1890s, state government in the former federally occupied states was back in the hands of the ruling planters and their supporters. With no permanent federal agency established to maintain the civil rights of citizens, both black and white, there was no way to override what Southern state governments did to keep out African-American voters. The continued creation of a segregated system of life that helped to maintain African Americans in an inferior position in Southern society was based on rigging an educational system, state by state, that shortchanged black schools. In some states, the property taxes collected by the counties and distributed within each school district demonstrated wide differences in funding by race. The District of Columbia was always a Southern city, but the presence of the federal government made a difference during the Reconstruction era.
