Stolen Futures

Despite profound transformations in educational law and policy in the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, racial discrimination in school finance has continued to limit resources, opportunities, and generational wealth for communities of color. Policymakers and propertied elites, from Reconstruction to the present, have manipulated taxation, school district boundaries, and funding policies to divert public resources away from Black and Native American communities to protect and consolidate White property wealth and socioeconomic advantage. Stolen Futures uncovers this long history of racialized theft through public school funding.

Focusing on North Carolina as a window into the broader South, historian Esther Cyna follows policymakers, educators, and families as they fought over taxes, district lines, and school resources in urban, suburban, and rural communities. Cyna analyzes archival evidence to argue that racial discrimination in school funding has outlived the civil rights movement and persists to this day. While school finance is often treated as a technical or legal issue, Stolen Futures reframes it as a history of power struggles, democracy, and theft to offer a new understanding of educational inequality and challenges readers to reckon with its enduring consequences.