Lifting "The Forgotten Man."

The crippling poverty that devastated the American South after the Civil War and plagued that region for many years afterward had made southern schools, by the late nineteenth century, the least effective in the nation; but in the decade 1900-1909 determined southern progressives made an all-out effort to improve the region's public schooling. Believing that "southern backwardness" in economic and social matters could be eliminated through education, these southern progressives launched their educational campaign after being galvanized to action by the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Walter Hines Page. In his powerful speech titled "The Forgotten Man," delivered in 1897 at the North Carolina State Normal and Industrial College in Greensboro and published separately in 1902, Page had argued that the real victims of southern poverty and underdevelopment were poor white men, women, and children; and furthermore, that the...