Palmetto Education Association

The Palmetto Education Association was a professional association and teachers' union representing teachers in colored schools in South Carolina during racial segregation in the United States.

History

One of the mandates of Reconstruction placed on the former Confederate states was that each had to write a new constitution acceptable to Congress before rejoining the Union. South Carolina convened a Constitutional Convention in 1868. Since twenty-one of South Carolina's thirty-one counties were majority African-American, black delegates outnumbered white delegates seventy-six to forty-eight. As a result, the new Constitution did not reflect the traditional desires of the white power structure. The Constitution not only outlawed slavery, it "abolished imprisonment for debt, authorized universal male suffrage, gave the state its first divorce law" and, most significantly, established a "public school system for poor and rich, black and white." The Palmetto Education Association was founded in 1900.