Corridor of Shame

Bamberg is located off of the I-95 corridor, which has recently been coined as the ‘Corridor of Shame’ by a group of whistle-blowing advocates of equal education in this region of the state. Bamberg, and other small, rural towns like it, suffers not only from a lack of government funding for schools and educational programs, but also from a limited amount of property tax revenues, as a large proportion of the housing in these areas is lower-income. In addition, this region of the state is prime for the location of industry, thus attracting lower paying jobs. What has been created in areas such as these is a cycle that takes children, primarily minorities who may already be disadvantaged, and provides them with less than adequate educational circumstances (i.e. out of date books, facilities in disrepair, insufficient supplies), leading to test scores that are far below the average for the rest of the state. The cycle is not easily broken, and many children remain under the same circumstances until adulthood. Those that escape the system do so at their own volition.
This seems to be a general characteristic of the south: an ever-widening gap between the urban haves and the rural have-nots. For any public service (not specifically education), more of the state’s tax dollars are allocated to the larger cities and the more affluent suburbs, often leaving the rural communities with the meager leftovers. Especially now, when funding for education for all communities across the state is being cut, rural schools have felt the crunch more then ever before. I am not saying that there is no affluence in rural communities. Clearly, some of Bamberg’s residents are well to do, however they do not endure the lack of funding in the same ways as those who cannot afford to go elsewhere for services or seek education for their children at private institutions.
This dichotomy between the haves and have-nots is deeply embedded in our society today; however, it did not always exist in the same manner. According to Cash in A Mind of the South the distinction between the haves (those who owned the property) and the have-nots (those who worked for the property owners) was at one time not that great at all, and in fact, those who where the first to venture to the States from their respective countries were not the wealthy gentlemen, but rather the laborers and the debtors. Even at the time of the Civil War, those who considered themselves gentlemen were little more than ‘superior farmers’, and many still fairly illiterate. An educated and eloquent gentry with their laidback lifestyle and hospitable nature paints a distinctive, yet decisively inaccurate vision of the Old South. When, then, did this dichotomy appear? I suspect it was when the original landowners began to die off and their progeny became heir to the ‘old money’ that began to accrue. Embedded dichotomy or not, the provision of public services can and should be offered equally to all members of a community. The gap does not have to be so apparent.