and maintain a liberal system of public
schools throughout the state for the benefit of
the children thereof between the ages of
seven and twenty-one years. The public
school fund shall be apportioned to the
several counties in proportion to the number
of school children of school age therein, and
shall be so apportioned to the schools in the
districts or townships in the counties as to
provide, as nearly as practicable, school
terms of equal duration in such school
districts or townships. Separate schools shall
be provided for white and colored children,
and no child of either race shall be permitted
to attend a school of the other race.
An amendment to strike Section 256 from the
constitution was narrowly defeated in the state legislature in
2004.
Disenfranchisement, the vagrancy laws such as the
Black Code of Alabama, various Jim Crow laws, and the
actions of the Ku Klux Klan, often financed and supported
by the elite, turned the post–Civil War South into an
effective apartheid society, where blacks and whites lived
different lives. As in South Africa, these laws and practices
were aimed at controlling the black population and its labor.
Southern politicians in Washington also worked to make
sure that the extractive institutions of the South could
persist. For instance, they ensured that no federal projects
or public works that would have jeopardized southern elite
control over the black workforce ever got approved.
Consequently, the South entered the twentieth century as a
largely rural society with low levels of education and
backward technology, still employing hand labor and mule
power virtually unassisted by mechanical implements.
Though the proportion of people in urban areas increased,
it was far less than in the North. In 1900, for example, 13.5
percent of the population of the South was urbanized, as
compared with 60 percent in the Northeast.
All in all, the extractive institutions in the southern United
States, based on the power of the landed elite, plantation
agriculture, and low-wage, low-education labor, persisted