North Carolina was once known — and not affectionately — as the Rip van Winkle state. For most of the 19th century, the state lolled about in a mire of ignorance and stasis, its illiteracy rates high, its population large, but stagnant and staid. National observers scorned it as an outlier from the great century of American progress. Few of the state’s slaveholding leaders extracting wealth from African Americans could bring themselves to care about the mass social failure that surrounded them.
Something shifted in the late 1800s. Suddenlys cotton mills began to spring up in the rolling hills of the Piedmont; notably, these factories were erected by homegrown companies, not Northern industrial concerns seeking an economic colony. By 1900, North Carolina was the second-most industrialized state in the South after Texas. While its leaders committed terrible crimes in the name of establishing white rule, the state had begun its journey toward joining the American mainstream and the modern world.
The chief motivator was education. A state that had once allowed 26% of its white population and nearly all of its Black residents to live lives of illiteracy invested in public schools and trusted in the power of education to lift people toward a fuller life. North Carolina was one of the only states to keep its schools open throughout the Great Depression. Governor Terry Sanford broke new ground with his Quality Education Program and North Carolina Fund, which would become the model for the national Head Start program. Governor Jim Hunt capped off the century with a dizzying array of initiatives that earned him the title of America’s Education Governor. By the time Hunt left office, our students were performing above the national average on math and reading.
The results of this long crusade were impressive to behold. North Carolina grew by 21% in the 1990s and 19% in the 2000s. Blue-chip companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Nortel built huge campuses in the Research Triangle Park, and the once-modest North Carolina National Bank became NationsBank and then Bank of America. Standing in contrast to most of the South with their fetishization of the Confederacy and stubborn commitment to a failed way of life, North Carolina was a destination for the world. In the words of Chuck Todd, it was a “future state.”
This was the promise of North Carolina: a state founded on slavery and long resistant to the march of progress would lift itself up into the realm of national accomplishment. We almost got there. But things began to regress even as parts of the state stood on the cusp of success. Between 2000-2010, North Carolina lost 42% of its manufacturing base. Textile employment was cut in half. Changing attitudes toward smoking decimated the revenues of tobacco farmers, to the point where more people worked for IBM in RTP than grew the golden leaf in North Carolina. Rural North Carolina fell first, fastest and farthest, and it was just the canary in the coal mine.
The promise of North Carolina was dealt a body blow in the 2011 budget. Dramatically walking away from 100 years of civic religion, the state’s brand-new Republican majority cut education at all levels. The state’s prized university system saw its budget cut by 15-18%, depending on the campus, with tuition at Chapel Hill eventually doubling. SmartStart and More at Four, nationally recognized for their excellence in pre-K education, barely escaped being completely eliminated. We have now had almost an entire student cohort attend public schools under austerity conditions.
The state’s status as haven for transplants and businesses followed public schools into obsolescence. Having been the sixth-fastest growing state in the union from 2000-2010, North Carolina has fallen over the last decade to 11th. Our state has now missed out on numerous economic-development prizes because of a perceived intolerance in its political climate. No business survey is complete without noting the state’s entrenched and well-publicized problems with accommodating diversity. Our personal income growth lags the national average by a large margin. In the new Census numbers, 51 of our counties lost population. Much of our great state, long known for its beautiful scenery, now more closely resembles an old factory: dilapidated, silent and locked.
Alexander H. Jones is a policy analyst with Carolina Forward. He lives in Chapel Hill.
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