Some states made data centers pay their own way. Others handed the bill to you. Virginia settled this question in 1882.
By Ben Jealous
Pull up your electric bill. Somewhere in that number, you are paying for a building you will never enter.
Data centers are going up everywhere. They need enormous amounts of electricity. Somebody must pay to connect them and build the plants and lines they need.
In state after state, that somebody is you.
Not everywhere. Texas requires the largest new power users to pay more of their connection costs and cut demand when the grid is strained. The data centers came anyway.
Ohio now makes large new customers pay for much of the electricity they reserve, whether they use it or not. Projections for new demand then fell sharply. Much of the emergency was companies holding space they might never fill.
Virginia chose differently. It gives data centers a tax break on their equipment. Good Jobs First estimates that subsidy cost Virginia schools $267 million in one year.
Illinois lawmakers let a similar bill die without a vote.
Neither list sorts cleanly by party. Before you file this as a new problem, meet my great-great-grandfather. Edward David Bland was born into slavery in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, in 1848. Thirty-one years later, he was helping write that state’s laws.
He served three terms in the House of Delegates and sat on the Committee on Schools and Colleges. That was not a coincidence. That was the point.
Virginia was fighting over debt borrowed before the Civil War for canals and railroads. With interest, it had passed $45 million.
One side said pay every penny, whatever it took. They were called the Funders.
Here is what it was taking.
Virginia was starving its public schools to pay bondholders. The bondholders lived in New York and London. The children lived in Petersburg and Danville.
The other side said the debt would be paid, but not out of the schoolhouse. They were the Readjusters. Black and white together. Farmers, freedmen and a former Confederate general named William Mahone.
A man born into slavery and a man who wore gray were counting the same votes on one floor. They ran Virginia for four years. In 1882, they cut the state’s share of the debt by roughly a third and refinanced the rest over 50 years.
Then they spent the difference. They put money back into public schools. They funded schools with Black teachers. They repealed the poll tax. They tore down the whipping post.
The Readjusters knew something we forgot. Whoever profits should not get to send the bill to whoever cannot say no.
I am not against data centers. This country cannot afford to fall behind in artificial intelligence, and the reasons are not all about money.
I am against making working families subsidize the world’s richest companies.
It does not always take a governor. A small town in Illinois capped a data center’s water use, with penalties if it went over.
A town council did that. Now let me tell you how the Readjusters lost. That is the part we forget.
They were not beaten on the debt. They won that argument. In October 1883, their opponents warned that Black residents of Danville had gained too much power. On November 3, market day, a street fight became a shooting. Five men died. Four were Black.
For three days, armed white men walked the streets and kept Black Virginians from the polls. The election came that week. Democrats took both houses.
They never took the schools back. The new legislature left the school money alone. It left the whipping post gone. It left the debt settled.
They did not undo the policy. They undid the voters.
In 1902, a new state constitution stripped most Black Virginians of the ballot for more than 60 years. They were not defeated by a better plan. They were defeated by a campaign that made white farmers fear Black farmers more than the men taking money from both.
It is the cheapest trick in American politics, and it has never once been out of stock. The people paying for these deals live in Loudoun County and Memphis, in white towns in Iowa and Black neighborhoods in Atlanta, in union halls and farmhouses.
They are already paying the same bill. They just have not been asked to fight it together.
Somebody will work hard to make sure they never do.
My great-great-grandfather learned his letters at a night school for freedmen after the war. He was 17. Then he sat on the committee that funded schools so other children would not wait.
He knew exactly what a school was worth. Go find out what your state did.
Then find out who let it happen.
Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.
