 They effectively disappeared from political life, as they could not influence the state legislatures, and their interests were overlooked.While public schools had been established by Reconstruction legislatures for the first time in most Southern states, those for black children were consistently underfunded compared to schools for white children, even when considered within the strained finances of the postwar South where the decreasing price of cotton kept the agricultural economy at a low.Like schools, public libraries for blacks were underfunded, if they existed at all, and they were often stocked with secondhand books and other resources.