My book manuscript, Educating for a New Economy: The Struggle to Redevelop a Jim Crow State, shows how a set of policymakers in North Carolina, empowered by the civil rights revolution, seeded through educational institutions what they thought would be a better economy, with high wages for ordinary workers, a system that might at last redress the injustices of plantation slavery and Jim Crow. The book will suggest the limits of people-based development strategies for rooting out inequalities as well as how such policies complicated urban–rural politics in North Carolina. While this is in part a story about the South and its Jim Crow struggles, it also helps explain the disappointments of an eds-and-meds economy in postindustrial America writ large.