Fiscal cost of separate schools drove communities to expel black families

Evidence

Another reason the number of sundown towns rapidly increased was because majority white communities did not want to bear the expense of building separate schools when black Americans with school-age children moved into town. This was during segregation, before Brown v. Board of Education declared segregated schools unconstitutional. The law required separate but equal schools, which meant states had to spend the resources to create “blacks only” school districts. The white officials who were responsible for building and overseeing these districts “sometimes encouraged threats or violence against a black family to avoid the expense of setting up a new black school for them.” Opportunity hoarding is never clearer than when we see what white parents are willing to do in order to give their children a leg up on everybody else. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 342

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s standing theme of small interpersonal acts and economic self-interest behind exclusion; also strengthens the “why would communities do this” causal case for reparations.