Notebook: Sorting It Out

First African-American student accepted to Arlington State College (1962). University of Texas at Arlington Photograph Collection, Wikimedia Commons

The nonprofit news site ProPublica had a startling investigation last week, on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, about the perseverance of private “segregation academies” that maintained de facto segregated schooling in the South after the decision. ProPublica found that “about three hundred schools that likely opened as segregation academies in the South are still operating … across Alabama’s eighteen Black Belt counties, all of the remaining segregation academies ProPublica identified—about a dozen—are still vastly white, even though the region’s population is majority Black.” In conversations they found families who were eager to form ties across racial differences, but traditions and habits of school life had perpetuated their mutual isolation.

After Tuskeegee High School was desegregated by court order in 1975, ProPublica tells us, the Alabama legislature approved $3.75 million ($36 million today) to fund tuition grants “to attend private schools rather than go to public school classes with Negroes.” The seven states adopting such programs “enabled the largest growth of private schools in the South’s history,” according to historian Steve Suitts. Advocates of such measures appealed to “‘choice,’ ‘freedom,’ and higher-quality (often Christian) education.” By 1978, public school enrollment Alabama’s seven Black Belt counties was more than 90 percent Black.