The Wichita Eagle carried an article today by Halimah Abdullah of McClatchy Newspapers, titled "Majority of students in South are poor":

For the first time in more than 40 years, the majority of children in public schools in the South are poor, according to a report released today. [ . . . ]

Twenty years ago, Mississippi was the only state in the country with such a high percentage of poor public school students. However, as textile mills shut down in the Carolinas, Appalachian coal mines cut workers and a recession swept the nation, families in the South were especially hard hit, the Southern Education Foundation report found.

Also hitting the South disproportionately were federal cutbacks in anti-poverty programs, the region's higher rates of underemployment and the increased birth rates of Hispanic and African-American children, who are statistically more likely than their white peers to be born into poverty.

Now, a majority of public school students are considered low income in a total of 14 states, including 11 in the South. The South shows tremendous variability, with 84 percent of students considered low-income in Louisiana, 75 percent in Mississippi, 62 percent in Florida, 49 percent in North Carolina, but only 33 percent in Virginia.

According to the report, public schools in the West may face similar problems in the next five to seven years. Already, 51 percent of public school children in California and 62 percent of those in New Mexico are considered low income.

All told, the report said, 54 percent of students in Southern states are judged to be poor, a significant increase from the 37 percent so classified in the late 1980s. Nationally, 46 percent of public school students are low-income.

This isn't much of a surprise. All my life it's been clear that the people who run Mississippi would rather be part of a third world banana republic than a developed first world democracy, and probably for no better reason than spite: having lost the Civil War, they resolved to keep blacks as poor as they were during slavery, and wound up treating most whites little better, lest anyone get the idea that progress was possible. I've been reading Ira Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America, which has many examples of this. Katznelson quotes a letter to Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo in 1944, which displays the basic sentiment (p. 81):

I am a typical American, a southerner, and 27 years of age, and never in the world will I be convined that race mixing in any field is good. All the social "do-gooders," the philanthropic "greats" of this day, the reds and the pinks . . . the disciples of Eleanor . . . can never alter my convictions on this question. I am loyal to my country and know but reverence to her flag, but I shall never submit to fight beneath that banner with a negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see this old glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.

For whatever it's worth, the author was Robert Byrd, who became (and still is) a Senator himself, representing West Virginia. I picked out Katznelson's book because it follows up on a main theme in Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal: the single most important reason why America abandoned the New Deal welfare state was race hatred. In doing so, the white middle class created in "the Great Compression" of the New Deal and WWII has allowed itself to dissolve into inequality and uncertainty for no better reason than spiteful resolve to keep blacks from joining in the same benefits. As Katznelson points out, the white south took the lead, especially in turning against organized labor in the 1940s. The crippling of the south then (and now) cannot be attributed to diminished political power. Rather, in both cases it is the fruit of the south's political ascendency -- abetted, of course, by alliance with the Republicans, which finally have been remade in the confederacy's image.

Lack of education is nothing new to the south. Katznelson writes (p. 101):

The 1940 Census had revealed that some 10 million Americans had not been schooled past the fourth grade, and that one in eight could not read and write. This, primarily, was a southern problem. A higher proportion of blacks living in the North had completed grade school than whites in the South.

To blame the current rising figure on "federal cutbacks" ignores the fact that southern politicians have agitated for those cutbacks, and that southern states do little if anything on their own to make up for them -- unlike northern states, which are consistently better off precisely because their state governments take some interest in the welfare of their citizens.

Most likely, the trends noted are due to more than increasing poverty, although that's certainly the tide that lifts the entire region. The numbers are also increased by whites withdrawing from the public education systems their political power has wrecked. Backlash against immigrants (illegal and otherwise) is also a likely factor, especially in the west. But all three trends are squarely the fault of the political right and the wrath they take out on the poor. Not realizing that we all depend on each other for our overall welfare, they, like Byrd, would rather perish than share. The numbers show that they are succeeding.