Introduction

On the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in the nation’s public schools, the states of the southern US are pushing to reestablish publicly financed, dual school systems—one primarily for higher-income and white children and the other primarily for lower-income and minority children. This seismic shift in how states fund K–12 education through universal vouchers isn’t confined to the South. But it is centered among the states that once mandated racially separate, unequal schools and where segregationists in the 1960s attempted to use private school vouchers to evade the watershed US Supreme Court decision.

More than thirty-five states have created voucher programs to send public dollars to private schools. At least twenty, including most in the South, have adopted or are on a path to enact legislation making state-funded “Educational Savings Accounts” (ESAs)—the newest type of voucher approach—available to all or most families who forego public schools. These families can use the funds to send their children to almost any K–12 private school, including home-schooling, or purchase a wide range of educational materials and services, such as tutoring, summer camps, and counseling.

In recent times, private school vouchers were pitched to the public for the purpose of giving a targeted group of disadvantaged children new educational options, but legislatures are now expanding eligibility and funding for vouchers to include advantaged students. By adopting universal or near universal eligibility for ESAs, states will be obligating tens of billions of tax dollars to finance private schooling while creating a voucher system for use by affluent families with children already attending or planning to attend private school.

States are rushing to enact ESAs while they still have the last of huge federal COVID appropriations to distribute among public schools. This timing allows ESAs' sponsors—Republican legislative leaders and governors—to entice once-reluctant, rural legislators to support vouchers. It also camouflages the severe fiscal impact this scheme will have on routinely underfunded public schools after the special federal funds run out.

The states adopting ESAs are also structuring this emerging, publicly funded, dual system so that private schools and homeschooling remain free of almost all regulations, academic standards, accountability, and oversight. These sorts of rules and regulations are always imposed by state legislatures on public schools and are understood as essential to protect students and to advance learning. Even as legislatures are adding restrictive laws on how local public schools teach topics involving race, sex, ethnicity, and gender they are providing new state funding for private schools and home-schooling that will enable racist, sexist, and other bigoted teaching.

If state legislatures succeed in establishing and broadening this dual, tax-funded system of schools, the tremors will transform the landscape of US elementary and secondary education for decades to come. Calling for “freedom of choice,” a battle cry first voiced by segregationists who fought to overturn the Brown decision,¹Steve Suitts, “Segregationists, Libertarians, and the Modern 'School Choice' Movement,” Southern Spaces, June 4, 2019, https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2019/segregationists-libertarians-and-modern-school-choice-movement. Available in book form as Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement (Montgomery: NewSouth Books, 2020). predominantly white Republicans will take states back to a future of separate and unequal education.

The Universal Voucher System

By the seventieth anniversary of Brown, five states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina) have enacted ESA programs that allow all or a vast majority of families with school-age children to send their children to private schools with state funds that equal or closely match the states’ per pupil expenditures for public schools. South Carolina adopted a “pilot” ESA last year, and a bill making its program permanent has already passed one chamber. The lower house of the Louisiana legislature passed a bill for a statewide universal ESA program to start next year, but the state senate is likely to delay adoption for another year to confirm estimated costs. Both states have governors who are likely to push adoption again next year.²The best source for the current status and terms of voucher and ESA legislation, including those bills passed and pending in 2023–2024, can be found at FutureEd, an independent think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. https://www.future-ed.org/legislative-tracker-2024-state-private-school-choice-bills/; Seanna Adcox, “‘Universal’ school choice approved in SC House before pilot even begins,” South Carolina Daily Gazette, Mar. 21, 2024, https://scdailygazette.com/2024/03/21/universal-school-choice-approved-in-sc-house-before-pilot-even-begins/; Greg LaRose, “Lawmakers advance education savings accounts, parents’ curriculum choice,” Louisiana Illuminator, Mar. 20, 2024, https://lailluminator.com/2024/03/20/education-savings-accounts/; Greg LaRose, “High price tag for education savings accounts leads to proposal overhaul,” Louisiana Illuminator, May 2, 2024, https://lailluminator.com/2024/05/02/education-savings-account/.

The Tennessee legislature adjourned in April without passing either of two pending universal ESA bills—only because Governor Bill Lee and legislative leaders failed to agree on which voucher bill to enact. They vow to pass legislation next session. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott used campaign funds from a Pennsylvania billionaire in the state’s Republican primary to defeat a handful of legislators who blocked his ESA bill last year. Abbott expects to defeat the two remaining state house members who failed to vote for his legislation—giving him the number he needs to pass his bill, while sending a political message that will keep his supporters in line.³Sam Stockard and Adam Friedman, “Tennessee’s statewide school voucher bill dead, but not forgotten,” Tennessee Outlook, Apr. 22, 2024, https://tennesseelookout.com/2024/04/22/tennessees-statewide-school-voucher-bill-dead-but-not-forgotten/. Karen Brooks Harper, “School voucher supporters bask in primary wins, say goals are within reach,” Texas Tribune, Mar. 6, 2024, https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/06/texas-primaries-vouchers-school-choice/; Renzo Downey, “Gov. Greg Abbott says Texas is two House votes away from passing school vouchers,” Texas Tribune, Mar. 20, 2024, https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/20/greg-abbott-tppf-vouchers-primary-runoff/. In identifying ESAs, this essay does not distinguish between those funded by state appropriations and those funded by state tax credits.

Only two southern states have not yet joined this reactionary movement. Republicans in Virginia’s legislature introduced a half-dozen bills to establish universal ESAs during the last two sessions but were stymied by bipartisan concerns about how vouchers benefited the wealthy and drained funds from public schools, and by Democrats who narrowly control both houses. In prior years, the Virginia legislature passed bills establishing limited ESAs but those too were blocked by the state’s last two Democratic governors.⁴Joe Landcaster, “Virginia Is Considering 4 Different School Choice Bills,” Reason, Jan. 22, 2023, https://reason.com/2023/01/22/virginia-is-considering-4-different-school-choice-bills/; Megan Pauly, “Wealthiest Virginians are benefiting most from contributions to school voucher program,” VPM News, July 11, 2022, https://www.vpm.org/news/2022-07-11/wealthiest-virginians-are-benefiting-most-from-contributions-to-school-voucher/.

In Mississippi, once the nation’s symbol of truculent political opposition to Brown and home to a vast number of segregation academies set up to evade school desegregation, Republicans control both legislative houses and the governor’s mansion. But, at the end of its 2024 session, the legislature failed to enact both a proposed new $40 million voucher program and a near-universal ESA bill that Governor Tate Reeves sought.⁵Suitts, Overturning Brown, 29–32; Bracey Harris, “Reckoning with Mississippi’s ‘segregation academies’,” The Hechinger Report, Nov. 29, 2019, https://hechingerreport.org/reckoning-with-mississippis-segregation-academies/; Russ Latino, “New Legislation Would Create Universal School Choice Program in Mississippi by 2029,” Magnolia Tribune, Feb. 20, 2024, https://magnoliatribune.com/2024/02/20/new-legislation-would-create-universal-school-choice-program-in-mississippi-by-2029/; Bobby Harrison, “House advances bill that would establish close study of universal school vouchers,” Mississippi Today, Mar. 5, 2024, https://mississippitoday.org/2024/03/05/house-committee-universal-vouchers/; Bobby Harrison, “Bill increasing tax credits for private schools defeated at end of session,” Mississippi Today, May 7, 2024, https://mississippitoday.org/2024/05/07/private-schools-tax-credits-mississippi-legislature/.

Why is Mississippi currently an exception to the rush to ESAs? First, the state is more rural and poorer than any other southern state, with vastly underfunded public schools and most of its private school children in a few suburban and urban areas. The Democrats who oppose vouchers in the legislature comprise a larger number than in other states (the Black population accounts for the largest percentage of any state). Significant, too, is the work of effective public interest lobbyists in Mississippi, led on school issues by an interracial coalition, The Parents Campaign. The group's director, Nancy Loome, has built a rare reputation on both sides of the legislative aisle as a trusted, honest voice for school children.

Border South states have already joined the separate and unequal movement. In 2021, Oklahoma and West Virginia passed ESA programs that have eligibility guidelines allowing almost every family with school-age children to receive state funding for private schooling and related educational expenses. Missouri expanded its tax credit ESA voucher program to include students across the state in four-person households with incomes up to $147,000. Kentucky passed a tax credit voucher program in 2021, but its supreme court held that the state constitution prohibits financing nonpublic schools. In 2024, the Republican-led legislature passed a bill authorizing a referendum to change the state constitution to permit ESAs.⁶For the bills terms, see FutureEd, https://www.future-ed.org/legislative-tracker-2024-state-private-school-choice-bills/; Amelia Ferrell Knisely, “Public schools likely to lose $21M after thousands of students left for Hope Scholarship,” West Virginia Watch, Dec. 13, 2023, https://westvirginiawatch.com/2023/12/13/public-schools-likely-to-lose-21m-after-thousands-of-students-left-for-hope-scholarship/; Annelise Hanshaw, “Opposition remains for sprawling education bill expanding Missouri private school tax credits,” Missouri Independent, Mar. 28, 2024, https://missouriindependent.com/2024/03/28/opposition-remains-for-sprawling-education-bill-expanding-missouri-private-school-tax-credits/; McKenna Horsley, “‘Game changer:’ Amendment for public dollars to nonpublic schools clears General Assembly,” Kentucky Lantern, Mar. 15, 2024, https://kentuckylantern.com/2024/03/15/game-changer-amendment-for-public-dollars-to-nonpublic-schools-clears-general-assembly/.

Arizona and Indiana are the leading states for voucher programs outside the South. In 1997, Arizona was one of the earliest adopters. Its ESA now costs more than $900 million a year. Indiana’s near-universal program, enacted in 2022, costs roughly $500 million in 2024.⁷Beth Lewis and Karen Kirsch, “One year in, Arizona’s universal school vouchers are a cautionary tale for the rest of the nation,” AZMirror, Dec. 11, 2023, https://azmirror.com/2023/12/11/one-year-in-arizonas-universal-school-vouchers-are-a-cautionary-tale-for-the-rest-of-the-nation/; Casey Smith, “Indiana’s ‘school choice’ voucher program grew 20% last year—with more growth coming” Indiana Capital Chronicle, June 14, 2023, https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2023/06/14/indianas-school-choice-program-grew-20-percent-last-year-with-more-growth-coming/.

The remaining states with ESAs are Kansas, Ohio, Utah, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Wyoming. By 2027, approximately 86 percent of Kansas families could be eligible for a voucher. In Utah, families with a child eligible to attend public schools can receive up to $8,000. Legislation introduced in 2024 would increase the ceiling to $150 million. Iowa’s ESA cost over $100 million in its first year and 60 percent of the recipients were already attending private schools. The New Hampshire ESA program is more restrictive, spending less than $25 million in 2023 and permitting only children from households with incomes below 350 percent of poverty to participate, although school choice advocates are pushing for expansion. Wyoming’s Republican legislature voted to allow families with household incomes of up to $146,000 to receive state funds, but Republican Governor Mark Gordon used a line-item veto to cut the eligibility down to 150 percent of poverty since the state constitution prohibits funding private individuals or organizations “except for the necessary support of the poor.”⁸Author’s calculations based on the bills’ terms and each state’s median income; FutureEd. Also see Jay Waagmeester, “County-by-county distribution of education savings accounts released,” Iowa Capital Dispatch, Aug. 8, 2023.

So far, sixteen states have set up ESAs to publicly finance private school attendance, home-schooling, and a range of educational services available to a majority of the states’ school-age children. Southern states are leading this movement by undertaking a classic bait and switch—first selling the public on voucher programs to help poor and disadvantaged students in “chronically failing public schools,” and then building and publicly financing an alternative, dual system of private schooling.

The historical context is shameful. Five of the southern states that now have universal vouchers also enacted open-ended vouchers in the 1960s—attempting to defeat Brown’s mandate for school desegregation. All but four of the states that have already embraced publicly financed ESAs were the only states authorizing segregated public schools on the eve of the Supreme Court’s decision.⁹Suitts, Overturning Brown, 18–53, 87–89; Suitts, “Segregationists, Libertarians, and the Modern 'School Choice' Movement,”; Pauli Murray, States' Laws on Race and Color (Cincinnati, OH: Women's Division of Christian Service of the Methodist Church, 1951). Indiana had school segregation laws from 1869 until 1949, when five years before the Brown decision the legislature revoked the laws, See Murray, 145–147. The eighteen states are the eleven states of the South: West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and Oklahoma in the Border South; Kansas, Indiana, Arizona, and Wyoming.

The fiscal impact of this rush to fund private schooling will be devastating to public schools. In 2018, all fifty states allocated $2.6 billion to finance private school vouchers. In 2021, legislatures increased the total amount to $3.3 billion and more recently to over $6 billion. If the eleven southern states enact the bills currently adopted or pending in their legislatures, their total funding for vouchers will be as much as $6.8 billion in 2025–26 and, according to independent estimates, as much as $20 billion for private schooling in 2030. This sum would equal the total state funds to public schools among six southern states in 2021.¹⁰Suitts, Overturning Brown, 3; EdChoice, The ABCs of School Choice, 2024, https://www.edchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/2024-ABCs-of-School-Choice.pdf; author's computations based on the provisions of enacted and pending bills, fiscal notes accompanying legislation and independent estimates by non-profits in the southern states.

The Past Is Future

Segregationists’ attempts to use private schools to prevent the implementation of Brown shaped the demography of private school enrollment. After the 1954 decision, enrollment in southern private schools accelerated. With federal court enforcement of Brown, private school growth exploded in the 1960s and 1970s as white families, especially in areas with large Black populations, fled public schools. This was the era of “segregation academies”—private schools created in response to federal court orders to desegregate local public schools. With little or no attempt to hide their intent to evade Brown, seven southern legislatures enacted voucher programs providing families with tax dollars to send their children to private schools. The other four states of the former Confederacy came close to adopting such programs, but abandoned consideration once the federal courts invalidated voucher programs. Adopted as an effort to allow public funds to “fund the child,” Georgia voluntarily defunded its vouchers after segregationist lawmakers realized that they were mostly subsidizing well-to-do families whose children were already attending private schools. In Louisiana, both white and Black families were provided private school vouchers before the federal courts voided the program.¹¹Suitts, “Segregationists, Libertarians, and the Modern 'School Choice' Movement.”

Southern states’ private school enrollment quickened across the decades, especially in the 1990s as population, economy, and personal income markedly increased. To retain a non-profit, federal tax exemption, segregation academies ditched their strict, all-white admission policies, and reoriented their appeal as places of religious education or of higher educational standards. Other private schools became more willing to admit children of color as a new generation of white people was less indoctrinated by received habits, institutions, leaders, and media on the necessity and virtue of total segregation. Whatever non-racial rationale private schools adopted, the vast majority maintained a common character: “These are schools for whites,” observed a group of scholars in the 1970s. “The common thread that runs through them all, Christian, secular, or otherwise, is that they provide white ground to which blacks are admitted only on the school’s terms if at all.”¹²David Nevin and Robert E. Bills, The Schools that Fear Built: Segregationist Academies in the South (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1976), 11.

­Private and Public: Vastly Disparate Students

The character of most southern private schools has persisted, but, beginning in the 1990s, the student population of the South’s public schools began to change. Today, the southern states’ private schools remain predominately white and their public schools are predominately non-white, serving children of color. In 2021 (the latest comparable data), white students comprised 63 percent of the South’s private school enrollment and only 39 percent of the public schools. Black and Hispanic children constituted 53 percent of all students in public schools but less than half that proportion—26 percent—in the private schools of the eleven states.¹³Private school enrollment retrieved and computed from National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), accessed at https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pss/privateschoolsearch/. Public school enrollment taken from NCES’ Table 203.70 of 2023 Digest of Education Statistics, accessed at https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/2023menu_tables.asp.

Income also separates the public and private schools as worlds apart. Private school students come from homes with vastly higher incomes than public school students. The median incomes of private school households in Georgia, Florida, Louisiana North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virgina have been from 170 percent to nearly 200 percent greater than incomes of public school households over the last two decades. A recent scholarly, national study found that enrollment of higher-income students in private schools had increased over prior decades.¹⁴Jacob Fabina, Erik L. Hernandez, and Kevin McElrath, “School Enrollment in the United States: 2021,” American Community Survey Reports, US Census Bureau, Washington, DC, 2023; Bruce D. Baker, Danielle Farrie, David Sciarra, Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card, 2012, 2014, 2017, “Coverage” appendices; R.J Murnane and Sean Reardon, “Long-Term Trends in Private School Enrollments by Family Income,” AERA Open 4, no. 1 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858417751355. The Murname and Reardon study measured the Census South.

As private school enrollment has become wealthier, public school enrollment has become poorer. By 2006, a majority of the South’s public school students came from low-income households, and in 2013, for the first time in recent history, a majority of the nation’s public school children came from low-income households. Despite continued growth in the US economy, these patterns persist. Fifty-two percent of the public school students in the eleven-state South were eligible for free or reduced school meals in 2021, due in large part to the enrollment of so many low-income children. Nationwide, the rate was 49 percent, only slightly down from more than 50 percent during the two prior years.

A sizable number of public school children also have special needs that involve extraordinary educational challenges for teachers and schools. The southern states have almost 40 percent of the nation’s five million school children who are English learners. Students with disabilities (IDEA) range from one in every ten students in Texas to one in every six students in Arkansas public schools. On average, one child out of every fifty in the South’s public schools is homeless.¹⁵Steve Suitts, A New Majority: Low Income Students in the South’s Public Schools, Southern Education Foundation, 2008, https://southerneducation.org/publications/newmajority/; Steve Suitts, A New Majority Update: Low Income Students in the South and Nation, Southern Education Foundation, 2013, https://southerneducation.org/wp-content/uploads/documents/new-majority-update-bulletin.pdf; computations from Tables 102.40, 204.10, 204.20, 204.70, 204.75d, “Digest of Education Statistics, 2022,” National Center for Education Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/2022menu_tables.asp.

There is no reliable data on the number of children with special needs enrolled in private schools. A small number were established to serve special needs students, but the vast majority do not. As a matter of law and mission, most private schools maintain no responsibility to educate disadvantaged students.

Vouchers Worsen School Disparities in a Dual System

Wherever states have abandoned narrow, targeted voucher programs, the expanded public funding has usually been grabbed by the higher-income households, often with children already attending private schools. In 2023, Education Week magazine, which has impartially covered K–12 schools for more than forty years, reported that in states with recently expanded voucher programs a “majority of students participating in these programs were already enrolled in private schools or were homeschool students prior to signing up for the newly expanded, publicly funded education subsidy."¹⁶Mark Lieberman, “Most Students Getting New School Choice Funds Aren’t Ditching Public Schools," Education Week, Oct. 4, 2023, https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/most-students-getting-new-school-choice-funds-arent-ditching-public-schools/2023/10.

During Arkansas’ first year of financing universal ESAs, “95% of the students receiving vouchers” did not attend public schools before receiving the state money. And in four other states that have enacted near-universal ESAs, including Florida, a majority of the new households receiving vouchers have children already attending private schools.¹⁷Arkansas Department of Education, LEARNS, Education Freedom Account Annual Report, 2023–2024, https://arktimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/EFA-Transparency-Report37.pdf; “Iowa’s Students First Education Savings Account program generates more than 29,000 applications,” press of Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, July 6, 2023, https://governor.iowa.gov/press-release/2023-07-06/iowas-students-first-education-savings-account-program-generates-more; Robin Opsahl, “More than 29,000 apply for Iowa private-school funds in first year,” Iowa Capital Dispatch, July 6, 2023, https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2023/07/06/more-than-29000-apply-for-iowa-private-school-funds-in-first-year; Ethan Dewitt, “Most education freedom account recipients not leaving public schools, department says,” New Hampshire Bulletin, Mar. 22, 2022, https://newhampshirebulletin.com/briefs/mosteducation-freedom-account-recipients-not-leaving-public-schools-department-says/; News Service Florida, “New report shows nearly 123,000 new students received Florida school vouchers in 2023,” NBC 6 South Florida, https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/new-report-shows-nearly-123000-new-students-received-florida-school-vouchers-in-2023/3112869; Florida Department of Education (2023). "Florida’s Private Schools 2022–23: School Year Annual Report," https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/7562/urlt/PS-annualReport2023.pdf; Alec MacGillis, “Private Schools, Public Money: School Leaders Are Pushing Parents to Exploit Voucher Programs,” ProPublica, Jan. 21, 2024, https://www.propublica.org/article/private-schools-vouchers-parents-ohio-public-funds.

Data on household income among new ESA recipients is not widely available, but an analysis by Ohio’s former chair of the state house education committee finds that the state’s near-universal voucher programs is subsidizing private school tuition for families in higher income brackets, and that nine of ten of the new recipients have been white. Arizona does not collect income data from its rapidly expanded universal ESA, but Princeton sociologist Jennifer Jennings found in 2024 that “Arizona’s school vouchers are subsidizing its most fortunate families, reinforcing existing disparities rather than mitigating them.” In Florida, the lastest available numbers show that two out of every three new recipients in its universal voucher programs had incomes above 185 percent of poverty. As many as 44 percent had incomes no less than 400 percent above the poverty line.¹⁸Stephne Dyer, “Ohio's Disastrous Voucher Explosion,” Tenth Period, Nov. 29, 2023, https://10thperiod.substack.com/p/ohios-disastrous-voucher-explosion?subscribe_prompt=free; Jennifer Jennings, “Arizona’s school vouchers are helping the wealthy and are widening educational opportunity gaps,” Arizona Mirror, Jan. 12, 2024, https://azmirror.com/2024/01/12/arizonas-school-vouchers-are-helping-the-wealthy-and-are-widening-educational-opportunity-gaps; “Transparency in Scholarship Programs,” Step Up for Students via Florida Phoenix Sep. 2023, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yyl80Jbs9mU6GlV1ktA6zZg8GUjLnsP4/view. The Arizona Common Sense Institute argues that its zip code analysis shows that the state’s ESAs are assisting mostly middle-class families but their analysis lumps together zip codes with median household incomes with those more than twice the state median. In Florida, Step Up for Students expanded the grouping of voucher recipients—the lowest income category showing recipients’ income as high as 185 percent of poverty. Glenn Farley and Kamryn Brunner, Universal ESA’s: Where We Are and Where We Are Going, Arizona Common Sense Institute, May 2023, https://commonsenseinstituteaz.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/CSI-Report-_Universal-ESAs_May-2023-2.pdf; Glenn Farley, Growth and Change: How One Year of Universal Empowerment Scholarship Accounts Has (and Has Not) Altered Arizona’s K–12 Landscape, Arizona Common Sense Institute, April 2024, https://commonsenseinstituteaz.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/CSI_REPORT_ESA_GROWTH_APRIL_2024.pdf.

It has been evident for years that wealthier households are the primary beneficiaries of open-eligibility tax credit voucher programs. In 2023 the non-profit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy examined programs in three states that permitted any family to divert state taxes to private school vouchers. Ninety-nine percent of all voucher tax credits in Louisiana and 87 percent in Virginia went to families with annual incomes over $200,000. In Arizona, it was 60 percent. In Georgia, $100 million can now be taken annually from the treasury through state tax credit for funding private school vouchers, and higher-income families have received the majority of the vouchers since 2013. The actual number may be much greater as the program has been plagued by irregularities, deceit, and misrepresentations by private groups distributing the tax credit vouchers. The Georgia Department of Revenue does not use tax records to verify the self-reporting of those receiving the tax credits or vouchers.¹⁹Carl Davis, Tax Avoidance Continues to Fuel School Privatization Efforts, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Mar. 3, 2023, https://itep.org/tax-avoidance-fuels-school-vouchers-privatization-efforts/; author’s computations from annual Qualified Education Expense Credit Report, Georgia Department of Revenue, 2013–2021, https://dor.georgia.gov/calendar-year-qualified-education-expense-credit-report; Steve Suitts and Katherine Dunn, A Failed Experiment: Georgia's Tax Credit Scholarships for Private Schools (Summary Report), Southern Education Foundation, 2008, https://southerneducation.org/publications/a-failed-experiment; Nancy Badertscher, “Group targets tax credit scholarships - Revenue Department asked to stem students from private schools,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 22, 2011, B-2; Steve Suitts, “Program encourages deception and helps those who don't need it,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 5, 2011, A-13.

Even with vouchers, few low-income families in the South can afford to keep their children in K–12 private schools. The average cost of private school tuition in ten of eleven southern states exceeds those states’ per-pupil funding of public schools. In other words, even if a voucher equals the state per pupil allocation for public school, it is not enough to match the private school tuition. After including additional expenses of attending a private school—books, supplies, uniforms, technology, athletics, and field trips—the total average cost in all southern states except Arkansas exceeds the state per pupil appropriation. In Texas, that total cost is more than $9,000 over the state’s per pupil public school appropriation. It is more than $2,300 in Mississippi.²⁰Calculations based data on average private tuition prices by state and other costs reported at Raise Right website, https://www.raiseright.com/blog/how-much-do-private-schools-cost, and Prosperity for America website, https://www.prosperityforamerica.org/average-private-school-tuition/. Data on state revenue for state per pupil revenue is found at “2021 Public Elementary-Secondary Education Finance Data, US Census. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2021/econ/school-finances/secondary-education-finance.html. These back-of-the envelope calculations capture the real-life financial barriers many families will encounter if they rely on an ESA voucher to send a child to a private school, and the calculations don’t even include cost of transportation, something that few private schools provide and is far beyond the resources of most low-income families.

The emerging ESAs are apparently designed for higher-income families that can already afford to pay all or much of the cost of private schooling. Wealthy families can use these vouchers to cover tuition costs and a wide range of expenses. As in several other states, Alabama’s vouchers can go toward tuition, textbooks, fees, after-school care, summer education programs, private tutoring, curriculum and instructional materials, online learning, educational software and applications, standardized assessments, including college admissions tests and advanced placement exams, and college prep courses.

The South Cannot Afford a Dual School System

Southern states, while serving a large proportion of disadvantaged children, provide among the lowest per pupil funding in the nation to their public schools. Any given K–12 student in the South received on average $5,831 less for education during 2021–2022 than a student in public school elsewhere in the United States. Public school children in North Carolina, which ranks 48th in state and local funding, received nearly $7,500 less per child than what the rest of the nation provides.

This pattern of underfunding public schools is longstanding and was aggravated over decades, in large part, by the fact that the southern states maintained separate, unequal, dual school systems.²¹Steve Suitts, “The South: America’s Legacy of Gross Disparities in Funding Education,” No Time to Lose: Why America Needs an Education Amendment to the Constitution, Southern Education Foundation, 2009, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED524094.pdf. And the legacy persists. A recent study by University of Miami Professor Bruce Baker and his colleagues found no less than three out of every four public school districts in the South were chronically underfunded by national standards of need and resources.²²Bruce D. Baker, Matthew Di Carlo, and Mark Weber, The Adequacy and Fairness of State School Finance Systems, Jan. 2024, https://www.schoolfinancedata.org/the-adequacy-and-fairness-of-state-school-finance-systems-2024/.

States will soon realize the damage of these disparities. The vast federal funds that were appropriated shortly after the COVID epidemic to shore up schools will run out in 2024. Governors and state legislatures have allocated these temporary funds as if they were state appropriations and often have been able to increase public school funding using federal funds. As that funding is exhausted, public schools in the southern states will suffer extraordinary shortfalls—more so than any other area of the United States.

Approximately nine percent of Louisiana’s education budget across the last three years has been financed with federal funds, almost all of which will be spent by 2025.²³Joanna LeFebvre and Sonali Master, Expiration of Federal K–12 Emergency Funds Could Pose Challenges for States, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Feb. 2024, https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/2-28-24sfp.pdf. The legislature will be forced to cut K–12 education funding and/or raise additional revenue. If Louisiana's legislature enacts the pending universal ESA it could add more than $65 million in expenses by 2026, and by independent estimates, as much as a half a billion dollars in annual expenditures to the state education budget by 2030.²⁴“Expanding School Choice: Education Savings Accounts Raise Cost, Accountability Concerns,” Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, https://parlouisiana.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/PAR-Commentary-Expanding-School-Choice-1.pdf.

Such grim estimates extend to all states that have enacted or are moving to adopt universal ESAs, including Arizona where 6.9 percent of the state’s recent annual education appropriations will be lost. Yet the fiscal calamities will happen foremost in the southern states where federal funds have constituted an average of 6.4 percent of annual state education spending—and as much as 10.5 percent in Mississippi.

According to ERS, a consulting firm that collaborates with urban school districts, children in fifteen states will be hit hardest as the federal government’s COVID funding ends.²⁵“Here’s Why Some States Are Facing a Steeper ESSER Funding Cliff in 2024,” ERS, Mar. 2023, https://www.erstrategies.org/tap/analysis-esser-funds-fiscal-cliff-by-state/#factor3. Nine of these are southern states, with Florida falling just outside the list. Among the states that will be hardest hit, all except New Mexico have or are currently considering ESA voucher plans.

Replacing $41.5 billion in special federal funding during the last three years will be a daunting challenge for southern states, especially since they also received billions of dollars from other federal COVID relief funding for health care, roads, transportation, and childcare. These funds are also ending. Without massive cutbacks in funding public schools and services, how can the southern states meet this crisis while spending hundreds of millions financing new ESA vouchers in support of a separate system of private schooling? It’s a fool’s errand that will involve educational and financial catastrophe for all but the South’s upper-income households, for whom ESAs will provide a nice subsidy. For public school children, especially most low-income and minority children, it is the making of a disaster.

Dismantling Public Schools

Perhaps it is the aim of some school choice backers who are pushing for a state-financed system of universal vouchers to incapacitate the public education system’s mission and mandate to serve all students with equal educational opportunities. In April 2024, a lead sponsor of universal ESA vouchers in the Tennessee legislature, Republican Scott Cepicky, was caught on tape privately telling home-school parents that his goal for the state’s public schools was to “throw the whole freaking system in the trash at one time and just blow it all back up."²⁶Phil Williams, "'We're trying to throw the whole freaking system in the trash,' school voucher sponsor says," NewsChannel 5 Nashville, Apr. 15, 2024, https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates/revealed/revealed-were-trying-to-throw-the-whole-freaking-system-in-the-trash-school-voucher-sponsor-says

Last year, in a closed meeting of Christian millionaires, one attendee declared that the goal was to “take down the education system as we know it today.” Michael Farris, the Virginia lawyer who has become a prominent leader of the modern home-schooling movement, told the group, “We’ve got to recognize that we’re swinging for the fences here, that any time you try to take down a giant of this nature, it’s an uphill battle,” according to a recording obtained by the Washington Post.²⁷Emma Brown and Peter Jamison, “The Christian home-schooler who made ‘parental rights’ a GOP rallying cry,” Washington Post, Aug. 29, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/08/29/michael-farris-homeschoolers-parents-rights-ziklag/.

Few backers of universal vouchers say as much in public, but they no longer keep up a pretense that the school choice movement is about finding ways to provide targeted assistance and opportunities for low-income and minority children. But, Southern governors still like to parade out a group of children of color when they sign voucher bills, as did Georgia Governor Brian Kemp when he held his signing ceremony for the ESA law.²⁸Ty Tagami, “Kemp signs voucher bill he championed,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Apr. 24, 2024. Most voucher proponents and wealthy donors who have coalesced for decades, spending enormous energy and money to advance public financing of private education, have confessed openly to a variety of other motives.

This diverse coalition seeks state-supported Christian education, free-market competition, elite-only schooling, unfettered parental control of education, and regulation-free schools, among other objectives. Their movement has progressed over the decades through the collective organizational work and political action committees bankrolled by the super-rich and corporate leaders who believe that the government is too large, taxes too much, and has little or no business in providing education.²⁹David Montgomery, “School Voucher Proponents Spend Big to Overcome Rural Resistance,” Governing, Mar. 28, 2024, https://www.governing.com/finance/school-voucher-proponents-spend-big-to-overcome-rural-resistance; Jimmy Cloutier, “‘School choice’ super PAC targets Texas GOP incumbents,” Open Secrets, Mar. 4, 2024, https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2024/03/school-choice-super-pac-targets-texas-gop-incumbents/; Katie Meyer, “Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pa., is single handedly keeping school choice PACs flush,” WHYY, May 12, 2021, https://www.phillytrib.com/jeff-yass-the-richest-man-in-pa-is-single-handedly-keeping-school-choice-pacs-flush/article_ee7dde98-1989-5ef1-925c-06473429466c.html; James Holmann with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve, “Koch network laying groundwork to fundamentally transform America’s education system,” Washington Post, Jan. 20, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2018/01/30/daily-202-koch-network-laying-groundwork-to-fundamentally-transform-america-s-education-system/5a6feb8530fb041c3c7d74db/.

Consider the voucher advocates who believe in economist Milton Freidman’s vision of public education that is entirely based on the government’s providing a voucher to all families with school-age children to go to any school of their choosing. Friedman laid out his free-market idea for voucher-schooling in 1955, a year after Brown. To realize Friedman’s vision today, his adherents’ goal is not a dual school system, but a unitary system of only ESA vouchers. In other words, they seek to destroy public education as it exists.

These free-market proponents fail to grapple deeply with the same issues that Friedman blithely dismissed when condemning “government schools.” In 1955, he acknowledged that his voucher proposal had already been “suggested in several states as a means of evading the Supreme Court ruling against segregation." Friedman’s solution was simple: vouchers paid by government funds would create a system of "exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools. Parents can choose which to send their children to." Friedman also opposed a federal fair employment commission to bar racial discrimination in private employment and later the 1964 Civil Rights Act—since it involved government regulation of private businesses for the purpose of prohibiting racial discrimination.³⁰See Suitts, “Segregationists, Libertarians, and the Modern 'School Choice' Movement.”

The belief in the unqualified virtue of private choice means that by design school choice should trump any role government has to prohibit discrimination based on race, sex, and religion in providing the nation’s children with an education. It means the destruction of public schools and their core democratic values.

The emergence of universal vouchers has convinced Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Cara Fitzpatrick to write in The Death of Public Education (2023) that the aim of the movement is to “radically redefine public education in America” with consequences that most citizens have not begun to fully consider.³¹Cara Fitzpatrick, The Death of Public Education: How Conservatives Won the War over Education in America (New York: Basic Books, 2023). In their revised preface to A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door (2023), Jack Schneider and Jennifer C. Berkshire write that there is now “a very real threat to public education in the United States . . . we’ve seen more destruction than we imagined could be done in a decade. And we’re worried when we next sit down to update this book, we’ll be writing a eulogy rather than a polemic."³²Jack Schneider and Jennifer C. Berkshire, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School (New York: The New Press, 2023).

The Bizarre Disparities in Governing the Emerging Dual School Systems

Ending public schools may be the clear goal of the primary advocates behind the private choice movement, but what is emerging in states that are on their way to adopting universal ESAs is a dual school system with vastly, differing, unequal ground rules, responsibilities, and oversight for educating children with public funds.

Most ESA legislation requires minimal regulations of private schools. Children may be rejected by a private school receiving state vouchers for any number of reasons, spoken or unspoken, relating to income, religion, race, ethnicity, dress, sex, gender identity, or disability. The schools will have the ultimate choice—not the children and their families. State legislation usually prohibits discrimination based on race and national origin, but as with most ESAs, there are no mechanisms for oversight, reporting, investigation of complaints, or enforcement.³³Kevin G. Welner & Preston C. Green, “Vouchers as a Mechanism for State-Sanctioned Private Discrimination,” in The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, eds., Kevin Welner, Gary Orfield and Luis A. Huerta (New York: Teacher College Press, 2023), 87–109; Chase M. Billingham and Matthew O. Hunt, “School Racial Composition and Parental Choice: New Evidence on the Preferences of White Parents in the United States,” Sociology of Education, 89, 2 (2016): 99–117, https://doi.org/10.1177/0038040716635718.

The standards for educating children and methods of accountability are minimal or illusory in voucher-supported private schools. The bills establishing ESAs allow these schools to be accredited by a range of private associations, usually comprised of representatives of the schools they accredit. In most southern states, private schools receiving vouchers are not required to assess students for achievement, or, they can use a nationally normed test of their preference, which undermines comparisons among schools. In any case, the results are not always available to the public. Most of these states do not specify, regulate, or review a private school’s curriculum before or after providing voucher funding.

This near-complete freedom to instruct children in whatever way the voucher-supported private schools choose is often justified on the basis that such schools provide students a better education than public schools. There is no factual grounding for this assumption.³⁴Christopher Lubienski, T. Jameson Brewer, and Joel R. Malin, “Bait and Switch: How Voucher Advocates Shift Policy Objectives,” The School Voucher Illusion, 127–141; John Schaaf, “School vouchers hurting students’ academic performance, several studies show,” Kentucky Lantern, Feb. 19, 2024; also, Public Funds, Public Schools has complied a long list of the studies on how private voucher-supported schools have had chronic achievement problems, https://pfps.org/research/. Some private schools are renowned for their high-quality education, but academic study after study has proven this supposition is false. Voucher students are academically harmed on average, particularly in math. Yet, as Cara Fitzpatrick has observed “what the research shows no longer matters.” Private schools are free to indoctrinate students as much as educate them, so long as their parents tolerate or endorse it.³⁵Fitzpatrick, 13.

Some voucher-supported private schools instruct students exclusively about a biblical story of creation. Some require students to pledge allegiance to religious flags and to memorize and recite school-chosen Bible verses. Some teach that homosexuality is a sin. Some expel LGBTQ+ students or even those who associate with LGBTQ+ people. Some use textbooks that belittle the significance of slavery and ignore or downplay the role of Black leaders and the civil rights movement.³⁶Adam Laats, “The Right-Wing Textbooks Shaping What Many Americans Know About History," Time, Oct. 12, 2023, https://time.com/6316978/conservative-textbooks/; Jenna Scaramanga and Michael J. Reiss, “Evolutionary stasis: creationism, evolution and climate change in the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum,” Cultural Studies of Science Education 18 (2023): 809–827. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11422-023-10187-; Jenna Scaramanga and Michael J. Reiss, “Accelerated Christian Education: a case study of the use of race in voucher-funded private Christian schools,” Curriculum Studies 50, no. 1 (Nov. 2017): 1–19, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321373088_Accelerated_Christian_Education_a_case_study_of_the_use_of_race_in_voucher-funded_private_Christian_schools; Adam Laats, Forging a Fundamentalist ‘‘'One Best System’': Struggles Over Curriculum and Educational Philosophy for Christian Day Schools, 1970–1989," History of Education Quarterly 49, no. 1 (Jan. 2010): 55–83; Zack Kopplin, “Hundreds of Voucher Schools Teach Creationism in Science Classes,” PBS News, Jan. 29, 2013; “The Loch Ness Monster Is Real; The KKK Is Good: The Shocking Content of Publicly Paid for Christian School Textbooks," Alternet, June 19, 2012; Steve Suitts, Race and Ethnicity in a New Era of Public Funding of Private Schools: Private School Enrollment in the South and the Nation, Southern Education Foundation, 2015, Appendix 14 (available on request); Julie F. Mead and Suzanne E. Eckes, How School Privatization Opens the Door for Discrimination, National Education Policy Center, Nov. 2018; Steve Suitts, Georgia’s Tax Dollars Help Finance Private Schools with Severe Anti-Gay Policies, Practices, & Teachings, Southern Education Foundation, Jan. 2013. There is nothing in the ESA laws, enacted or pending, that restricts a private school teacher, or home-schooling parent from engaging in a lesson plan of indoctrination on the inherent superiority of the white race, the heroism of John Wilkes Booth and James Earl Ray, the need to exterminate LGBTQ+ people, or to punish any woman who seeks an abortion.

In contrast, southern legislatures have piled up decades of regulations, assessments, reporting requirements, and penalties for traditional public schools and more recently are micro-managing what and how teachers can teach and what books local school libraries can keep on their shelves. From 2008 through 2022, the eleven southern states enacted a total of 3,552 laws regulating their public schools. There are nearly a thousand pages devoted to student discipline.³⁷Compilations developed at Education Legislation/Bill Tracking, National Conference of State Legislatures, https://www.ncsl.org/education/education-legislation-bill-tracking; Compendium of School Discipline Laws and Regulations for the 50 States, Washington, DC and the US Territories, National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments, 2023, https://safesupportivelearning.ed.gov/school-discipline-compendium.

Southern state legislatures have moved to prohibit what they consider to be inappropriate curricula, lesson plans, and books involving diversity, inclusion, and equity—primarily about how and when persons and groups who are not white or heterosexual should be portrayed in the classroom and in library books. Every southern state has passed laws restricting discussions of race and/or gender identity. Most, like Alabama’s recent law, include restrictions for K–12 public schools on “divisive topics,” or like Arkansas, prohibit “indoctrination or critical race theory." No other area of the US has been as aggressive in restricting public school teachers and librarians, who face penalties or dismissal if they fail to adhere to the regulations banning what they can say and what books students may read.³⁸Hannah Natanson, Lauren Tierney and Clara Ence Morse, “Which states are restricting, or requiring, lessons on race, sex and gender,” Washington Post, Apr. 4, 2024; “America’s Censored Classrooms,” PEN America, Aug. 17, 2022, https://pen.org/report/americas-censored-classrooms/.

It is hard to imagine a more divergent, unequal arrangement. The state-supported private schools can expel a student or teacher for almost any reason, and their teachers and librarians have complete freedom from governmental interference as to what subjects they teach and how they teach it. They have complete freedom to indoctrinate students—with no consequences.

As Vouchers Spread, Brown’s Promise Dies

During the last seventy years, the nation’s public schools have struggled in meeting the promise of Brown, despite clear proof that racially integrated, well-funded schools improve outcomes for Black children.³⁹Rucker C. Johnson, Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works (New York: Basic Books, 2019). This promise has been especially important to the South, where the states’ first education laws prohibited Black persons from being taught to read or write; where racially segregated schools offered children of color an inferior education across more than a half century. Due to stubborn, racially defined housing patterns, increasing class disparities, adverse, even hostile Supreme Court decisions, a lack of local, interracial community support, and, as recent research confirms, the growth of school choice, public schools continue to face far too many hurdles in providing all children with a good education.⁴⁰Gary Orfield and Ryan Pfleger, The Unfinished Battle for Integration in a Multiracial America—from Brown to Now, The Civil Rights Project, UCLA, April 2024. https://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/the-unfinished-battle-for-integration-in-a-multiracial-america-2013-from-brown-to-now/National-Segregation-041624-CORRECTED-for.pdf. Also, see Tomas Monarrez, Brian Kisida, and Matthew Chingos, When Is a School Segregated? Making Sense of Segregation 65 Years after Brown v. Board of Education, Urban Institute, Sep. 2019. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/when-school-segregated-making-sense-segregation-65-years-after-brown-v-board-education; Laura Meckler, “The unexpected explanation for why school segregation spiked,” Washington Post, May 6, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/05/06/school-segregation-study-policies-court-orders/.

The South’s new dual school system renounces and annuls the mandates and hopes of Brown v. Board of Education. As universal vouchers spread, Brown’s promise dies. By their design, vouchers are an abandonment of Brown’s goal of equality of educational opportunity.

Reestablishing a dual school system will damage the prospects of a good education for all who attend public schools—not just low-income and minority children. The southern states were not able to finance two separate school systems during the era of segregation, even though Black students received a pittance of funding. Today that inability remains. The South continues to be far behind the rest of the nation in state and local funding of public schools. The new schemes of universal Education Savings Account vouchers will exacerbate the lack of sufficient funds for all except those higher-income families whose school-age children can attend private schools or home-schools and enjoy the enhancements and enriching experience that vouchers will subsidize.

Parents, grandparents, and others who support public schools and the democratic promise of public education must raise our voices against this reactionary movement and in furtherance of the importance of public schools. Like democracy itself, public schools may be the worst system for delivering all children an equal opportunity for a good education—except for all the others. We must not betray or abandon public education if we are committed to the democratic goal of a more perfect union and a good society for all.

About the Author

An adjunct with Emory University's Institute for the Liberal Arts, Steve Suitts is the author of A War of Sections: How Deep South Political Suppression Shaped Voting Rights in America (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2024). Earlier in his career, Suitts served as the executive director of the Southern Regional Council, vice president of the Southern Education Foundation, and executive producer and writer of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," a thirteen-hour public radio series that received a Peabody Award for its history of the civil rights movement in five Deep South cities.

Excerpt

Georgetown, April 2017

It was early morning when I crossed the Francis Scott Key Bridge from Virginia into Georgetown. College spires loomed in the distance, gray in the dawn light. I was headed to a religious service at Georgetown University that would acknowledge the trauma of a massive slave sale in 1838, a deal that shored up the finances of the struggling college and sent more than two hundred men, women, and children into the cane fields of Louisiana. Most of the families torn apart in the sale could trace their lineage to White Marsh, one of the Jesuit-owned plantations located in Prince George's County, Maryland.

I had been researching the history of the White Marsh families for nearly a decade, uncovering the lawsuits they had brought against the Jesuits and other prominent Maryland slaveholders long before the 1838 sale. Some won their freedom. Others didn't—but each of their cases challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law. Together they counted among the most significant freedom suits in U.S. history. And there were hundreds of others. Yet their particular stories would lead me, like the Georgetown Jesuits, to reckon with what I did not know about my own family and its role in this story.

More than a hundred descendants, a dozen university officials, and a cluster of Jesuit priests assembled inside Healy Hall for the liturgy and slowly processed into an ornate, wood-paneled auditorium on the third floor. After the opening prayer Sandra Green Thomas rose to address the congregation. Thomas, a descendant of the Harris and Ware families and president of the GU272 Descendants Association, waited a long moment before speaking. "My people were humble," she began. "They provided for their families. They tried to protect their children as best they could from the cruelties of this world, but given what the world is and what people can be, they were not always as successful as they would have hoped." The anguish and fortitude of her ancestors echoed in the firmness of her tone. "Their pain was unparalleled," she observed. "Their pain is still here. It burns in the soul of every person of African descent in the United States. It lives in people, some of whom have no knowledge of its origins but cope with the ever-present longing and lack it causes."¹"Liturgy of Remembrance, Contrition, and Hope," Georgetown University, April 18, 2017. Notes and recording in possession of the author. A full recording is available at from Georgetown University at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO4Xsz36kTU, with Sandra Green Thomas's remarks beginning at minute 29:33. Several major research projects have come to the fore around the Georgetown history. First, the Georgetown Slavery Archive (slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu, herein abbreviated GSA) is a repository of archival materials related to the Maryland Jesuits and Georgetown University. Second, the Georgetown Memory Project (www.georgetownmemoryproject.org) is an independent nonprofit dedicated to researching, finding, and advocating for the descendants of the 272. The project released its database of descendants in May 2019 with American Ancestors by the New England Historic Genealogical Society (see the GU272 Descendants, 1785–2000 database, www.americanancestors.org/search/databasesearch/2756/gu272-descendants-1785-2000). Third, historian Sharon Leon has undertaken a highly significant digital history-based analysis of the families on the Jesuit plantations. See Sharon Leon, The Jesuit Plantation Project: An Examination of the Enslaved Persons Owned (and Sold) by the Maryland Province Jesuits, 1717–1838 (https://jesuitplantationproject.org). I have also followed closely the Universities Studying Slavery working group at the University of Virginia since 2014 (slavery.virginia.edu/universities-studying-slavery) and other university reports, especially Stephen Mullen and Simon Newman, Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow, Report and Recommendations of the University of Glasgow History of Slavery Steering Committee (September 2018), and Princeton Seminary and Slavery: A Report of the Historical Audit Committee (slavery.ptsem.edu/full-report). Also see Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities, reprint ed. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).

I had met Thomas in New Orleans for the first time a few weeks before the ceremony. I had asked her then what slavery meant to her family, and she had said that slavery was quite simply one thing: theft. To understand American history required dealing with the fact that slavery was premised on a series of lies. The slaveholders, whether Jesuit priests or English tobacco planters, saw themselves differently, of course. We had talked about how they rationalized slavery on the basis of race, religion, law, science, and history and with myriad other prejudices, doctrines, sentiments, and myths.

Now, I wondered how Thomas would broach the lies that slaveholders told and the theft that slavery was. She turned to the heart of the matter, and to the Jesuits whose predecessors had enslaved her ancestors. "I know it is difficult to honestly look at yourself, the way you operate in the world, and your true motivations and priorities." Americans face an uncomfortable truth, she noted. History demanded "self-revelation" about the stories we accept without questioning, about the narratives we use without thinking. She offered forgiveness to the Jesuits, but she sought justice. Thomas spoke for all of the descendants who thirsted for an acknowledgment of their family's particular enslavement, and after she finished thunderous applause erupted in the room.

An expectant hush fell across the auditorium as the Reverend Tim Kesicki, a Jesuit priest and president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, rose to address the descendants. He wore a plain black business suit and Roman clerical collar. With an air of earnestness, he spoke slowly, like a pastor to his flock. The long shadow of enslavement, Kesicki said, "remains with us to this day, trapping us in an historic truth." The truth, he admitted, was that the Jesuits had "betrayed the very name of Jesus." Kesicki offered a sweeping apology, confessed the sin of enslavement, and sought "on bended knee" forgiveness for the Jesuits' entire participation in slavery.

But he did not kneel. The remarks, sincere and heartfelt as they were, seemed strangely inadequate. Kesicki wished to acknowledge the sins of the past but was unprepared to deal with the real trauma the Church had caused and offered no meaningful pathway forward. His apology and the request for forgiveness fell flat. Descendants turned their heads away.

In this uncomfortable moment, something more than a Jesuit failure came into view—Kesicki's words symbolized an American failure to deal with a hurtful history. He had not referred to a single descendant or ancestor by name; he had directed his apology to his "sisters and brothers." For hundreds of years the Jesuits had spoken to the enslaved families on similar occasions without addressing them individually, and here at Georgetown the particularity of their enslavement appeared again to be disregarded. Kesicki's apology, nonetheless, marked a subtle but decisive departure in the Jesuits' acknowledgment of their role in slavery. Even the most recent Jesuit histories had failed to fully acknowledge the Society of Jesus's complicity. Indeed, until Kesicki spoke, most attempts to come to terms with this history had downplayed the Jesuit slaveholders' actions: decisions explained, rationalized, and inspected, all pointing to something called "slavery" but not to the families they enslaved. The same vagueness could describe how Americans more generally regard slavery.²Robert Emmett Curran, Shaping American Catholicism: Maryland and New York, 1805–1915 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 2012), 36–38. See also Edward F. Beckett, "Listening to Our History: Inculturation and Jesuit Slaveholding," Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 28, no. 5 (1996), which explains the Jesuits as paternalists: "To a certain extent, the plantation formed a kind of domestic parish to which slaves belonged" (11). Beckett concludes that Jesuits treated slaves "no worse than" other slaveholders, but following Curran, he emphasizes that the Jesuits encouraged slaves to gain skills. In the most recent and thorough review of Jesuit slaveholding in Maryland, Thomas Murphy, S.J., argues that the Jesuits understood themselves as paternalists and as superior, like all other enslavers in the early American republic. His account is the most balanced examination of the Jesuit role in slaveholding, yet his stance is similarly apologetic. As for their decision to sell supernumerary slaves, Murphy concludes that the Jesuits could not bring themselves to do so and instead sold the physically fit and "missed an opportunity to develop a morally strong case for making profits out of right motives." See Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717–1838 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 72.

But America's founding, like Georgetown University's, cannot be disentangled from its enslavement of particular families. Our national imagination still sees slavery as an aberration, a detour, from the true story of the country. Many Americans see enslaved people in history as faceless and nameless, victims of a long-ago system that has now disappeared. In such a situation, the nation needs to experience what we at the liturgy experienced: a confrontation, a reckoning, with real people, with real histories, with real families whose descendants live among us. Until such encounters happen more widely, Americans will continue to live in separate historical spheres of understanding, a condition that more than anything limits our ability to come to terms with the past. We cannot, of course, do anything to change what happened long ago, but we can change the way we understand what happened and what it means to us in the present.³A central aspect of the approach taken here is historical imagination. This asks readers to experience a world other than their own and to step outside of themselves into the characters in this history. Recent examples of narrative imagination include Imani Perry, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018); Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); and Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). Each is an inspiration in the form of its narrative and in its attention to re-creating the voices, situations, and daily experiences of people left out of the archive. See also Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).

About the Author

William G. Thomas III is the John and Catherine Angle Chair in the Humanities and Professor of History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is on the Southern Spaces editorial board, and was co-founder and director of the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia.

Blog post

In a case decided on the grounds of religious freedom, the US Supreme Court took another big step on June 30 in supporting religious discrimination in publicly financed schooling and, more broadly, in overturning Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 landmark opinion that promised the end of racial segregation in public education.

The Court ruled in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue that the US Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom prohibits a state from excluding religious schools when it finances attendance in private schools. There should be no misunderstanding about what this case means in regard to religion: states are now free to finance private schools that discriminate against students on the basis of students’ religions.

As troubling as that holding is, the opinion also constitutes a major, often ignored long-term impact on school desegregation. Today most students attending private schools are in religious schools, and most religious schools are effectively segregated and exclusionary by race. For this reason, Espinoza constitutes a regrettable, and significant, decision in the Supreme Court’s long and certain movement over the last forty years to overturn the Brown decision.

In the short run, the Court’s decision adds momentum to the school choice movement that has been lobbying in Washington and the state capitols to increase public funding of private schools through programs that often safeguard the private schools’ discretion to choose whomever they wish to admit as students. Already twenty-six of the fifty states have yielded to school choice advocates by enacting a variety of voucher programs financed by state appropriations and state tax credits.

Together these voucher programs are diverting more than $2.1 billion annually to private schools. That sum is larger than the annual state funding of public schools in thirteen of the nation’s fifty states. And in January, decrying “failing government schools,” President Trump renewed his support for US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s plan to spend billions of federal dollars on private school vouchers.

Advocates of “school choice” claim they are advancing religious freedom, social justice, and civil rights when in fact, as I document in “Segregationists, Libertarians, and the Modern ‘School Choice’ Movement," they echo the language and tactics used by southern segregationists in their efforts to evade school desegregation after Brown. It is there—in the history of the segregationists’ fight against Brown and in how the federal courts addressed their strategies—that the long-range impact of Espinoza becomes evident.

In the years following Brown, southern states passed dozens of bills to condemn and frustrate school desegregation. The overall strategy of massive resistance was based on two basic tactics. One was placing pupils in public schools according to what the segregationists claimed were children’s “ability to learn”—which they believed, but after Brown carefully avoiding saying, was inherently different due to race. The other was funding vouchers for private academies where segregationists were free to set up exclusionary admission standards.

By the end of the 1960s, the Supreme Court and other federal courts had effectively confronted this two-pronged strategy by ruling that most of the pupil placement laws for public schools were racially discriminatory in their application and that the South’s voucher programs were a violation of the US Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.” By that time, however, local and state funding had enabled the rapid growth of private schools—schools that were segregated, often with a token number of Black students to deflect federal scrutiny, and that increasingly professed nonracial reasons for their practices, often citing religion.

Many headmasters of the “segregation academies” by the early 1970s claimed their schools were motivated by religion. “Our people—supporters of the Independent schools—are convinced God is behind us,” asserted the head of the Louisiana segregated private schools. “People believe wholeheartedly that God doesn’t want us to mix.”¹Steve Suitts, Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement (Montgomery: NewSouth Books, 2020), 71. Whatever their purported nonracial rationale, the vast majority of the South’s private schools had become religion-based and remained nearly entirely segregated.²Ironically, the Court’s decision in Espinoza removes one of the few restrictions that the Southern segregationists’ voucher programs in the 1960s actually upheld—a prohibition against financing vouchers for students in religious private schools.

In retrospect, the 1970s also was the era signaling how and when the Supreme Court would turn away from its vigilant efforts over the previous two decades to implement the promise of Brown. The Court began issuing decisions that would block desegregation efforts in public schools—where most students of color seek a better education—and enable public financing of private schools that preserve virtually segregated, exclusionary education for white students.

As early as 1973, Justice William Rehnquist became the first member of the Court to issue a dissent from a school desegregation case relying on the precedent of Brown.  In a case concerning school segregation in Denver, he condemned the Court’s opinion for requiring a school district to advance desegregation—employing the old scare word, “racial mixing”—where there were “neutrally drawn boundary lines” that sustained segregation.³Keyes v. School Dist. No. 1, Denver, 413 US 189 (1973), 258. See Justin Driver, The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind (New York: Pantheon Books, 2018), 278–283.  As Driver notes, Justice Rehnquist as a Supreme Court law clerk had argued while Brown was being considered that the Court should not overrule Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), which had sanctioned state-sponsored segregation and the South’s Jim Crowism for three generations. Chief Justice Roberts was a law clerk to Justice Rehnquist in 1980.

With the ascendency of Justice Rehnquist as Chief Justice and the appointment of other justices across more than three decades, the Court increasingly refused to require public school districts to use effective methods of dismantling school segregation. In 2007, the Court turned Brown on its head when Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Brown commanded school districts to avoid using race as a consideration, even for the purpose of recognizing and diminishing public school segregation. “When it comes to using race to assign children to schools,” Roberts wrote without doubt or irony, “history will be heard.”⁴Parents Inv. In Community Schools v. Seattle School, 127 S. Ct. 2738 (2007). In truth, the Court silenced the historical voices and promise of Brown.

The Supreme Court’s strategy in addressing the second prong of the old segregationists’ strategies—banning government financing of segregated private schools—had a robust but short-lived revival in the early 1980s. Chief Justice Warren Burger used majestic language in 1983, holding that a religious school, Bob Jones University, could not require segregation on its campus and retain an IRS tax exemption. “The Government has a fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education—discrimination that prevailed, with official approval, for the first 165 years of this Nation’s constitutional history,” he wrote. “That governmental interest substantially outweighs whatever burden denial of tax benefits places on petitioners’ exercise of their religious beliefs.”⁵Bob Jones Univ. v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983).

But barely a year after the Bob Jones decision, the Supreme Court slammed shut the courthouse door on those seeking to challenge the IRS’s weak enforcement of that decision and other violations among private schools. Parents of twenty-five Black public school children sued the IRS, charging that its standards and procedures were inadequate to fulfill its obligation to deny tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory private schools. In 1984, the US Supreme Court held that the parents had no standing to bring such a suit.⁶Allen v. Wright, 468 US 737 (1984).

In more recent years, Justice Anthony Kennedy led the Court in nailing that door completely closed and unleashing private schools from constitutional restraints on receiving taxpayer funds. Arizona’s program of tax credit vouchers allowed individuals and corporations to give tax dollars to private schools instead of paying them to the state. The program was similar to the Montana program in Espinoza and to the private school funding programs that the Supreme Court had outlawed in prior cases in the 1960s, including in Prince Edward County, Virginia, where Justice Hugo Black struck down both direct and tax credit-based vouchers.⁷Griffin v. School Bd. of Prince Edward Cty, 377 US 218 (1964).

In 2011, Justice Kennedy held for the majority that tax credit vouchers did not involve public funds or any state action that the Bill of Rights would prohibit. “While the State, at the outset, affords the opportunity to create and contribute,” Kennedy wrote, “the tax credit system is implemented by private action and with no state intervention,” with the result that citizens had no standing to challenge the constitutionality of the tax credit voucher program.⁸Arizona Christian School Tuition Org. v. Winn, 131 S. Ct. 1436 (2011), 1448. Justice Kennedy’s opinion considered whether the First Amendment’s clause requiring separation of church and state, by way of application to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, prohibited providing state tax credit vouchers to religious schools.

The Court’s opinion in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue holds that there is state action involving constitutional principles that citizens can enforce when they challenge a state exclusion of religious schools from its program of tax credit funding on the basis of religious freedom. However, according to the earlier Arizona ruling, there is no state action when citizens challenge a program of tax credit funding of religious schools on the basis of separation of church and state. It is an odd double standard that makes no sense and represents result-directed law.

Worse, Espinoza moves the Court one step closer to overturning Brown. With Espinoza, state programs can now finance private schools that discriminate on the basis of religion, which has become over the decades a frequent proxy for race. It sanctions expanding state programs that permit private schools across the nation to maintain what strategic southern segregationists sought to achieve after Brown—virtual segregation and exclusion of children of color—while its prior rulings have insured that public school districts cannot recognize race to voluntarily employ effective strategies to desegregate its own schools.

Long gone is the nation’s “fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education.”

About the Author

An adjunct with Emory University's Institute for the Liberal Arts, Steve Suitts is the author of Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution. Earlier in his career, Suitts served as the executive director of the Southern Regional Council, vice president of the Southern Education Foundation, and executive producer and writer of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," a thirteen-hour public radio series that received a Peabody Award for its history of the civil rights movement in five Deep South cities.

A New Era for "School Choice" and Vouchers

The United States has never been closer to adopting a nationwide program in which the state and federal governments spend billions of tax dollars to finance largely unaccountable private schools to educate children from kindergarten through the twelfth grade. By the beginning of 2019, more than half of the fifty states had enacted a variety of voucher programs diverting public funds to private schools and in some places to home-schooling—often for the purported purpose of improving the education of low-income African American and Hispanic students. These programs use state appropriations or tax credits to divert public monies to support self-governing private schools, often with few requirements or restrictions.

The states have steadily enlarged these programs during recent decades as a result of persistent, intense lobbying from school choice advocates. Often, programs have started modestly with special-needs children, then expanded to a broader student population. School choice programs are spread across the nation, although the South has more than anywhere else.¹"Interactive Guide to School Choice Laws," National Conference of State Legislatures, June 15, 2017, http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/interactive-guide-to-school-choice.aspx; "School Choice in America," EdChoice, last modified April 9, 2019, https://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/school-choice-in-america/. Twelve of the twenty-six states with voucher programs using direct appropriations, indirect tax credits, or tax savings education accounts are in the South: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Oklahoma, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. State programs vary in form and scope, but some, like Georgia, permit state tax dollars to be diverted for home-schooling. All charts and maps with labels indicating "South" in this article refer to a fifteen-state South, which includes the twelve states listed above as well as Kentucky, Texas, and West Virginia. In 2018, more than $2.1 billion dollars in state funds went to support private schooling—a sum larger than the annual state appropriation for public schools in any of thirteen states across the nation.²School Choice Guidebook 2017–2018 (Washington, DC: American Federation for Children Growth Fund, 2018), 7–9, https://www.federationforchildren.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/AFC_School_Choice_Guidebook_2017-18_10.3.pdf; "2016 Public Elementary-Secondary Education Finance Data," Annual Survey of School System Finances, US Census, last modified May 17, 2018, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2016/econ/school-finances/secondary-education-finance.html.

In addition, there is growing support in Washington for establishing school choice nationwide. In his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump declared:

Education is the civil rights issue of our time. (Applause.) I am calling upon members of both parties to pass an education bill that funds school choice for disadvantaged youth, including millions of African American and Latino children. (Applause.) These families should be free to choose the public, private, charter, magnet, religious, or home school that is right for them.³"Trump's Speech to Congress: Video and Transcript," New York Times, February 28, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/us/politics/trump-congress-video-transcript.html. During his speech, the President also introduced an African American student who had received a tax credit voucher.

During his campaign, Trump pledged that he would become the "nation's biggest cheerleader for school choice" and would provide states with the means to use $20 billion in federal money to create vouchers allowing children to attend the private schools of their choice. "There is no policy more in need of urgent change than our government-run education monopoly," he said, "[that] has trapped millions of African American and Hispanic youth" in failing schools.

Trump's secretary of education, Elizabeth "Betsy" DeVos, a wealthy donor to Republican causes and a leading advocate of public funding of religious private schools, stated in May 2017 that the Trump administration would propose "the most ambitious expansion of education choice in our nation's history" because the "cause is both right and just." The Trump administration proposed to divert more than $1 billion to private schools in the 2019 budget in order to fund "scholarships to students from low-income families that could be used to transfer to a private school." But DeVos has so far been unable to convince Congress to fund such programs directly.⁴Jane Mayer, "Betsy DeVos, Trump's Big-Donor Education Secretary," New Yorker, November 23, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/betsy-devos-trumps-big-donor-education-secretary; Emma Brown, "DeVos Promises 'the Most Ambitious Expansion of Education Choice in Our Nation's History'—but Offers No Details," Washington Post, May 22, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/betsy-devos-promises-the-most-ambitious-expansion-of-education-choice-in-our-nations-history--but-offers-no-details/2017/05/22/ae90f55e-3f03-11e7-8c25-44d09ff5a4a8_story.html; Valerie Strauss, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, and Moriah Balingit, "DeVos Seeks Cuts from Education Department to Support School Choice," Washington Post, February 13, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2018/02/12/devos-seeks-massive-cuts-from-education-department-to-support-school-choice; Laura Meckler, "The Education of Betsy DeVos: Why Her School Choice Agenda Has Not Advanced," Washington Post, September 4, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/the-education-of-betsy-devos-why-her-school-choice-agenda-has-crashed/2018/09/04/c21119b8-9666-11e8-810c-5fa705927d54_story.html; US Department of Education, Fiscal Year 2019 Budget: Summary and Background Information, last modified February 12, 2018, https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget19/summary/19summary.pdf.

Support for federal funding of private schools is not a phenomenon only of the Trump administration. In 2012, the Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney, issued an education "white paper" proposing public financing of tuition costs in private schools as the centerpiece of a new national education reform. The Romney for President position paper proposed to overhaul the primary federal funding of K–12 public schools "so that low-income and special-needs students can choose which school to attend and bring their funding with them. The choices offered to students under this policy will include . . . private schools if permitted by state law."⁵Romney for President, "A Chance for Every Child: Mitt Romney's Plan for Restoring the Promise of American Education," May 23, 2012, Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group, Georgetown Law Library, https://web.archive.org/web/20180624193755/http:/cdm16064.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p266901coll4/id/3980. The white paper was endorsed in a foreword by former Florida governor Jeb Bush.

In 2014, US senators Tim Scott of South Carolina and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee (ranking Republican on the committee for education) introduced legislation to enable federal funding for low-income and special-needs students in public schools to attend private schools. Alexander explained: "Allowing $2,100 federal scholarships to follow 11 million children to whatever school they attend would enable other school choice innovations, in the same way that developers rushed to provide applications for the iPhone platform."⁶Motoko Rich, "Bill to Offer an Option to Give Vouchers," New York Times, January 27, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/education/senator-to-propose-school-vouchers-program.html; American Enterprise Institute, "Senators Lamar Alexander and Tim Scott Unveil Ambitious Proposal to Expand School Choice," January 28, 2014, http://www.aei.org/events/senators-lamar-alexander-and-tim-scott-unveil-ambitious-proposals-to-expand-school-choice/; Lamar Alexander, "Weekly Column by Lamar Alexander: The 'Scholarship for Kids' Act," Weekly Columns, Lamar Alexander: United States Senator for Tennessee, February 18, 2014, https://www.alexander.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2014/2/weekly-column-by-lamar-alexander-the-scholarships-for-kids-act; See also CHOICE Act, S. 1909, 113^th Cong. (2014) and Scholarships for Kids Act, S. 1968, 115^th Cong. (2017).

This momentum for vouchers found its way into the major federal tax overhaul enacted in 2017. Congress expanded the use of "529 savings plans" beyond paying for college costs so that tax-advantaged funds can now be used to pay up to $10,000 annually for costs of elementary and secondary education in K–12 private schools.⁷Ron Lieber, "Yes, You Really Can Pay for Private School With 529 Plans Now," New York Times, December 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/your-money/529-plans-taxes-private-school.html. This federal change supplements the Coverdell Education Savings Accounts passed first in the Clinton administration and expanded during the George W. Bush administration. It allows a limited use of federal tax dollars to support attendance at private elementary and secondary schools. See Coverdell Education Savings Accounts, 26 U.S.C. § 530 (2006). Most private schools, as non-profit organizations, receive contributions that are deductible for donors from federal income taxes. They also are exempt from income taxes and often local property taxes. This change promises to become quite significant, especially for wealthier households. It opens up a fund—$328 billion and growing—from which monies can be diverted yearly to private K–12 schools.⁸"529 Plan Data," College Savings Plan Network, June 30, 2018, http://www.collegesavings.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/June-2018-529-plan-data-10.15.18.pdf.

Civil Rights Rhetoric Echoes in "School Choice" and Vouchers

"School choice" has no traditional or intrinsic meaning in the field of education, but over the last several decades it has become a political slogan for the claim that government should finance children's education from pre-kindergarten through the twelfth grade in schools outside the public system in order to provide parents with a choice. In recent years, charter schools have been included as a "school choice" option because many local districts and some states now authorize private profit-making or non-profit entities to operate these schools independently, often without meeting requirements and rules that public schools must follow. In 2015, there were 2.8 million students in charter schools and 5.8 million students in private elementary and secondary schools across the United States.⁹"Public Charter School Enrollment," The Condition of Education 2018, National Center for Education Statistics, 2018, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cgb.pdf; "Private School Enrollment," The Condition of Education 2018, National Center for Education Statistics, 2018, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cgc.pdf. Also, see Peter Bergman and Isaac McFarlin Jr., "Education for All? A Nationwide Audit Study of Schools of Choice" (working paper 25396, National Bureau of Economic Research, December 2018). This article examines the history of government support for private schools as both the origin and primary foundation for the current movement for "school choice."

In claiming private "school choice" as right and just, President Trump and Secretary DeVos echo rhetoric that others have used to argue that publicly financed vouchers for children to attend private K–12 schools are a moral imperative. In articles such as "How School Choice Helps Advance Martin Luther King's Legacy," the Heritage Foundation has insisted that vouchers continue the civil rights movement. In 2011, the founder of the tax credit voucher program in Florida declared that school choice for low-income families "is one of the most important social justice issues of our time."¹⁰John Kirtley, "Facing a Harsh Truth When Fighting for a Bipartisan Cause," RedefinED, May 20, 2011, https://www.redefinedonline.org/2011/05/facing-a-harsh-truth-when-fighting-for-a-bipartisan-cause/; Katie Nielsen, "How School Choice Helps Advance Martin Luther King's Legacy," My Heritage, Heritage Foundation, August 28, 2013, https://www.myheritage.org/news/how-school-choice-helps-advance-martin-luther-kings-legacy/.

One of Dr. King's children, in fact, joined the cause of vouchers for private schools in Florida to give "black, Latino, and Hispanic" children the same options as others. "This is about justice," Martin Luther King III stated in 2016. "This is about righteousness. This is about freedom—the freedom to choose for your family and your child."¹¹Kristen M. Clark, "Thousands Rally in Support of Program Opposed by Union," Miami Herald, January 19, 2016, www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article55454785.html. Martin Luther King III attended and graduated from the private Galloway School, created in Atlanta in 1969. Earlier, his parents attempted to enter him into another Atlanta private school when he reached school-age in the 1960s, after they were misinformed by an Episcopal priest that the all-white, private Lovett School would accept their son. Their written application for his admission was denied without reference to a reason, although the chairman of the school board later stated that he believed that both the "negro and the white man has some individual rights." "Diversity and Inclusion at Galloway," The Galloway School, accessed March 27, 2019, https://www.gallowayschool.org/community-life/diversity-inclusion; Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 175–177.

The political movement for "school choice" is employing the icons and language of civil rights and social justice to advance private school vouchers that fifty years ago were primary tools for segregationists to preserve unequal education for African American and Hispanic children. President Trump's call for a national program of "school choice" echoes the language of George Wallace and others who demanded the federal government and US courts permit Alabama and the South to administer "freedom of choice" for elementary and secondary schools.

These apparent contradictions emerge from the unexamined legacy of segregationists who designed and developed effective, lasting strategies that frustrated and blocked K–12 school desegregation. It is a legacy that turns the icons and language of civil rights inside-out while thwarting the national goal of an effective, equitable system of education for all children.

Forgotten Segregationists

Historically, the methods and forms of segregation have been neither monolithic nor inert.¹²See C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966); Pauli Murray, States' Laws on Race and Color (Cincinnati, OH: Women's Division of Christian Service of the Methodist Church, 1951), 3–20; J. Mills Thornton III, "Segregation and the City: White Supremacy in Alabama in the Mid-Twentieth Century," in Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement, eds. Kevin M. Kruse and Stephen Tuck (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 52–55. Southern segregationists held differing notions about the best ways to preserve school segregation along with their beliefs in racial superiority. As Sylvan Meyer observed in 1960, southern segregationists included "all those whose views varied from a mild belief that the South would be better off maintaining as much racial separation as possible to those advocating insurrection rather than 'surrender' to any compromise whatsoever."¹³Walter Spearman and Sylvan Meyer, Racial Crisis and the Press (Atlanta, GA: Southern Regional Council, 1960), 47. Many segregationist leaders who designed and implemented plans for school choice have been forgotten, as have their plethora of rationales, strategies, and tactics. They were never widely known, and popular culture has narrowed the cast to a small rogues' gallery.

Prevalent images include segregationists such as Alabama governor George Wallace, Birmingham police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor, and a bevy of other white leaders such as Mississippi senator James Eastland who endure as premiere political symbols—in large part because their defiant images in multiple confrontations with and condemnations of federal officials often were captured as television came of age in the 1960s.¹⁴See Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Random House, 2006), 56, 301–325, 376–379. A few, such as Wallace and North Carolina's Jesse Helms, remained on the national political stage for more than a decade.¹⁵See Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 451–468. Wallace prompted controversies over "free speech" rights on college campuses into the 1970s and remains today a popular reference for personifying the southern segregationist. See Peter Salovey, "Free Speech, Personified," New York Times, November 26, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/26/opinion/free-speech-yale-civil-rights.html.

But George Wallace was only one type of segregationist—and hardly a representative figure for those more successful over time in frustrating and blocking school desegregation. Segregationists with other styles and backgrounds built the more lasting terms, tools, and tactics that obstructed the Supreme Court's unanimous 1954 opinion in Brown v. Board of Education¹⁶Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). outlawing segregated public education. This wider cast of white supremacists competed fiercely in shaping how and where segregated schools could be preserved. When political self-interest and racial ideology aligned, they occasionally cooperated. At times they shared a vocabulary against Brown, depicted as a federal edict to force the South to create "mixed schools," never to create equitable, desegregated or integrated schools.¹⁷Spearman and Meyer, Racial Crisis and the Press, 19, 25, 46–48, 52. Meyer explains how "mix" was a "scare word." Justin Driver, "Supremacies and the Southern Manifesto," Texas Law Review 92 (2014): 1082, https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/journal_articles/4043/.

These white men included die-hards, such as those found in the middle-class Citizens' Councils who usually pushed to abandon all public schooling rather than accept any desegregation. Some Citizens' Council leaders, however, came to recognize exceptions to absolute, complete segregation. Ku Klux Klanners, especially in the Deep South, were also dead-set against a single Black child entering an all-white school and were willing to use extra-legal intimidation and violence. Others, such as South Carolina governor Jimmy Byrnes, believed that the impact of Brown could be postponed indefinitely or avoided in large measure by building new Black schools so that separate schools appeared closer to equal.

Political leaders such as Georgia's Ernest Vandiver won office by campaigning on a slogan of "No, not one" African American child would ever be allowed in a white school but discovered after entering the governor's office that complete, absolute segregation was impossible to achieve—and counter-productive to preserving as many virtually segregated schools as possible. There were segregationists such as Alabama state senator Albert Boutwell—who later as a "moderate" mayoral candidate defeated "Bull" Connor—and Birmingham corporate attorney Forney Johnston. While Wallace began as a white liberal before shifting his politics to become governor, Boutwell and Johnston were the first segregationist leaders to develop a variety of strategies, tactics, and rationales for school choice that often delayed and defeated the promise of Brown.

Resistance to school desegregation differed across the states of the former Confederacy according to class, geography, religion, and political ambition.¹⁸David L. Chappell, "The Divided Mind of Southern Segregationists," Georgia Historical Quarterly 82, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 45–72; James Graham Cook, The Segregationists (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962), 5–6; Clive Webb, ed., Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8–9. The different factors influencing all policy issues, including race, in the segregated South were detailed by state in V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949). These different factors also were evident in southern white attitudes toward African American education. See Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), 893–900. For an example of class divisions during desegregation, see Karen Anderson, "The Little Rock School Desegregation Crisis: Moderation and Social Conflict," Journal of Southern History 70, no. 3 (August 2004): 603–636. Only by recovering and understanding the work of a wider cast of white actors who crafted enduring tools and strategies protecting segregation can the reactionary heritage of today's school choice become clear. As Justin Driver has found, the efforts of these segregationist leaders "to maintain white supremacy were often considerably more sophisticated, self-aware, and nuanced than the cartoonish depiction of southern stupidity and hostility would admit."¹⁹Driver, "Supremacies and the Southern Manifesto," 1079. These forgotten and ignored strategies help explain how today's proponents of public financing of private schools can employ the language of civil rights without widespread discredit. They also reveal how the origins and historical development of "freedom of choice" have shaped and continue to define the impact and role of "school choice" and vouchers in public education across the nation.²⁰This study is, of course, not the first essay to explore the southern segregationist origins of private school vouchers for elementary and secondary schools. See, for example, Chris Ford, Stephenie Johnson, and Lisette Partelow, The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, July 12, 2017), https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/reports/2017/07/12/435629/racist-origins-private-school-vouchers/, and Mark A. Gooden, Huriya Jabbar, and Mario S. Torres Jr., "Race and School Vouchers: Legal, Historical, and Political Contexts," Peabody Journal of Education 91, no. 4 (2016): 522–536.

School Choice and Vouchers Become Segregationist Tools

During the middle of the twentieth century, K–12 private schooling became intertwined with race and ethnicity as the Supreme Court issued opinions outlawing segregated graduate and professional public education.²¹Dick M. Carpenter II and Krista Kafer, "A History of Private School Choice," Peabody Journal of Education 87, no. 3 (2012): 336–338. For a review of the Court's decisions leading up to Brown, see Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 256–284; Sam P. Wiggins, Higher Education in the South (Berkeley, CA: McCutchan Pub. Corp., 1966), 169. There is an earlier history of school choice in the United States, when Catholic schools competed with public schools, often decidedly Protestant in nature, that carried forward into the twentieth century. See Robert N. Gross, Public vs. Private: The Early History of School Choice in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Yet, Gross largely ignores the pivotal period of Reconstruction when African American representatives helped to write new southern state constitutions mandating public schools as an essential duty of state governments. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: MacMillan, 1992), 637–669. These decisions had no impact on elementary and secondary public schools, but they signaled the direction the Court was moving.

From 1940 to 1950, private school enrollment in the South rose by more than 125,000 students—a 43-percent increase, and, for the first time since private enrollment numbers were documented, the rate of growth doubled that of the rest of the nation.

From 1950 to 1965, US private school enrollment grew at unprecedented rates while the South's rate again exceeded the nation's. Whites in record numbers fled to traditional and newly formed private schools. From 1950 to 1958, the South's private school enrollment increased by more than 250,000 students. By 1965, there were nearly one million southern private school students. Almost all were white.²²See Norman Dorsen, "Racial Discrimination in 'Private' Schools," William & Mary Law Review 9, no. 1 (1967): 46, https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol9/iss1/4/.

Legislatures passed laws authorizing vouchers and other means of transferring public assets and monies to private schools.²³Reaction to Brown was comparatively muted outside the South since the Supreme Court struck down only school segregation established by law, and most segregation laws were in southern states. There was widespread de facto school segregation outside the South but only in a relatively few places did the law erect a dual system of publicly financed education based on race or ethnicity. See Murray, States' Laws on Race and Color; Robin M. Williams Jr. and Margaret W. Ryan, eds., Schools in Transition: Community Experiences in Desegregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954); Will Maslow, "De Facto Public School Segregation," Villanova Law Review 6, no. 3 (1961), https://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/vlr/vol6/iss3/2/. In November 1953, as it appeared the Supreme Court might strike down school segregation, white South Carolinians voted to repeal a section of their state constitution that provided for a "liberal system of free public schools"—to clear the way for establishing a private school system. Georgia became the first southern state to pass a constitutional amendment enabling the legislature to send state, county, and municipal funds to "citizens of the State for educational purposes, in discharge of all obligation of the State to provide adequate education for its citizens." A month later, white Mississippians voted for a constitutional amendment granting the legislature power to close public schools and finance private ones. By the end of 1956, Virginia, Alabama, and North Carolina passed similar measures.²⁴W. D. Workman Jr., "The Deep South," in With All Deliberate Speed: Segregation-Desegregation in Southern Schools, ed. Don Shoemaker (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), 97–100; House Resolution No. 225, Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 1953, November–December Session, vol. 2, 241; Molly Townes O'Brien, "Private School Tuition Vouchers and the Realities of Racial Politics," Tennessee Law Review 64, no. 2 (1997): 359–407. Louisiana adopted a constitutional amendment in 1954 affirming its police powers to prevent desegregation of public schools, and this amendment apparently was interpreted to provide the state legislature will the power to fund private schools. See Poindexter v. Louisiana Financial Assistance Commission, 275 F. Supp. 833 (1967).

From 1954 to 1965, southern legislatures enacted as many as 450 laws and resolutions attempting to discredit, block, postpone, limit, or evade school desegregation. A large number of these acts allowed the re-direction of public resources, including school resources, to benefit private schools.²⁵Tom Flake, "475 Legislative Actions Pertain to Race, Schools," Southern School News, May 1964, B-1. In 1956, the Georgia legislature permitted the leasing of public property to segregated private schools. Five years later, the state enacted a law to provide vouchers for students to attend any non-sectarian private school, boldly declaring the act was to advance "the constitutional rights of school children to attend private schools of their choice in lieu of public schools."²⁶For a full treatment of the methods and strategies of resistance, including diverting public resources to private schools, see Thomas V. O'Brien, The Politics of Race and Schooling: Public Education in Georgia, 1900–1961 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999), 99–198.

The North Carolina legislature enacted eight bills, the first of which was a constitutional amendment to authorize vouchers for private education and to allow whites to close public schools through a local referendum. In Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, legislatures passed laws to publicly fund vouchers for private schools and to transfer public school property to private educational organizations. Citizens' Councils were active in setting up private schools, especially in Mississippi. The Virginia legislature declared its support for this "freedom of choice" movement by enacting a system of vouchers for private organizations and citizens.²⁷Arthur Larentz Carlson, "With All Deliberate Speed: The Pearsall Plan and School Desegregation in North Carolina, 1954–1966" (master's thesis, East Carolina University, 2011); Jim Leeson, "Private Schools Continue to Increase in the South," Southern Education Report 2 (November 1966): 22–25; Walter F. Murphy, "Private Education with Public Funds," Journal of Politics 20, no. 4 (November 1954): 636–637; Lester Tanzer, "Private School Push: Integration of Virginia Public Schools Spurs Growth of Private Units," Wall Street Journal, February 6, 1959; Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens' Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954–64 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 297–304; Mary Ellen Goodman, Sanctuaries for Tradition: Virginia's New Private Schools (Atlanta, GA: Southern Regional Council, 1961).

In addition to direct transfers of public funds and assets, some states employed tax schemes, including tax credits, to build and finance private school systems. In the Little Rock Crisis of 1957, after President Dwight Eisenhower was forced to call out federal troops to protect a handful of Black children attempting to attend Central High School, Governor Orval Faubus funneled public monies through contracts and tax credits to the Little Rock Private School Corporation until the federal courts stopped the subterfuge (along with further attempts by Arkansas to enact vouchers). In 1959, Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver led the legislature in passing the six segregation bills, including one that supported "the establishment of bona fide private schools by allowing taxpayers credits upon their State income tax returns for contributions to such institutions."²⁸Clay Gowran, "Faubus Tells 'Legal Plan' To Segregate," Chicago Daily Tribune, September 19, 1958; Journal of the House of Representatives, State of Georgia, Regular Session, 1959, 80; "'Resistance' Laws Urged in Georgia: Governor Offers 6 Measures Designed to Strengthen Segregated Schools," New York Times, January 16, 1959; "Georgia Asked To Strengthen Segregation: Six Bills Offered by Governor," Chicago Daily Tribune, January 16, 1959.

In the same year, Florida governor LeRoy Collins successfully opposed a legislative initiative to pass a constitutional amendment to allow state tax credits for private school contributions. In Prince Edward County and other locations in Virginia, officials used both direct payments and tax credits to build private schools until the federal courts halted both. In Mississippi, after federal courts struck down a direct tuition grant to private schools, Governor John Bell Williams proposed a state tax credit as he searched for the "ways and means of rendering assistance" for white flight to private schools.²⁹"May Veto Plan To Sell Segregation," Daily Defender, June 8, 1959; Lester Tanzer, "Private School Push: Integration of Virginia Public Schools Spurs Growth of Private Units Norfolk Academy, Others Will Expand; State Aids Shift, Authorizes Tuition Grants A Pattern for Solid South? Private School Push: Integration in Virginia Spurs Growth of Units," Wall Street Journal, February 6, 1959; Raymond Moley, "Children Are the Real Victims of the School Integration War," Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1961; Jon Nordheimer, "Integration Raises the Issue of Coeducation in South," New York Times, June 4, 1970.

By 1965, seven states had enacted some type of voucher that enabled the largest growth of private schools in the South's history. Yet, vouchers as a preferred and essential method of resistance to Brown did not stand alone but worked most effectively through larger plans that emerged from the different states. These plans were not uniform, but most incorporated strategies and language that have evolved and endured as the ways and means by which vouchers, school choice, and private schooling have escaped the stigma of their segregationist origins without losing much of the same purpose or effect.

Preserving Virtual School Segregation through Vouchers

During the era of massive resistance, several state legislatures and governors established committees or commissions to develop options for preserving segregation. These strategy groups were often known by the name of the persons chairing them—usually a senior legislator or well-known businessman. In Alabama, it was the Boutwell Committee, led by a prominent, well-to-do state senator. In South Carolina, a wealthy state senator chaired the Gressette Committee. The Pearsall Committee in North Carolina was named for its businessman leader; an Atlanta business leader guided Georgia's Sibley Commission. In Virginia, both of its strategy commissions were named for their prominent businessmen chairs.

The strategy groups issued recommendations in written reports explaining the imperatives for segregation, the rationale for preserving it, including arguments for why segregation was advantageous to Black families, and the different tactics of resistance. These reports demonstrate that segregationist leaders came to understand that vouchers and other forms of aid to private schools worked best in conjunction with a variety of other tactics and strategies for defeating Brown.

Alabama: "Big Mules" Develop a Freedom of Choice Plan

In October 1954, barely five months after Brown, the Boutwell Committee became the first strategy group to lay out a complete, multifaceted plan of resistance. As a moderate segregationist, state senator Albert Boutwell did not believe it feasible or advisable to maintain old segregation laws and disavowed the use of force.³⁰Boutwell's reputation as a moderate grew larger after he ran against and defeated Birmingham Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor in a race for mayor. "Albert Boutwell Lieutenant Governor: 1959–1963," Alabama Department of Archives and History, last modified August 20, 2009, http://www.archives.state.al.us/conoff/Boutwell.html. Perhaps the Boutwell plan's chief architect and certainly its primary intellectual force was Forney Johnston, a brilliant segregationist and corporate attorney in Birmingham who represented Alabama's "Big Mules"—coal companies, railroads, and wealthy industrialists and investors who profited from Birmingham's exploitative heavy industries. As a backroom politician and former governor's son, Johnston adroitly maneuvered in politics and law to protect the corporate interests he represented and to preserve his notion of segregation. He had managed a 1924 presidential campaign, mounted major legal challenges to New Deal economic reforms, and worked behind the scenes to secure pardons for the "Scottsboro Boys"—but only to prevent growing national support for federal intervention in "states' rights."³¹Edward R. Crowther, "Alabama's Fight to Maintain Segregated Schools," Alabama Review 43 (1990): 209–210; Thomas Jasper Gilliam Sr., "The Second Folsom Administration: The Destruction of Alabama Liberalism" (PhD diss., Auburn University, 1975), 107, 116, 194, 384. Johnston played a behind-the-scenes role in Alabama on racial matters. As a life-long white supremacist, he worked with state political and business leaders after both world wars in developing laws and strategies to thwart the expectations and aspirations of returning Black soldiers. Yet after managing a presidential primary campaign, Johnston nominated Alabama senator Oscar W. Underwood as the anti-Klan candidate for president at the Democratic National Convention of 1924. John W. Davis, who later argued before the US Supreme Court on behalf of southern states in Brown, won the nomination over Underwood after an unprecedented number of ballots. Johnston was a formidable and talented legal opponent. Steve Suitts, Hugo Black of Alabama (Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books, 2005), 235–236, 462–472; "Roosevelt Stand on Policies Asked; Forney Johnston Urges Chamber to Seek Clarification of President's Objectives," New York Times, May 1, 1935; "Graves Is Accused in Scottsboro Case," New York Times, December 25, 1938; John Temple Graves, "The Wage-War Between the States," Nation's Business, June 1934, 42; Frank W. Boykin to Mrs. Forney Johnston, June 7, 1962, Frank W. Boykin Papers, Alabama Department of Archives and History.

The Boutwell report decried "forced integration," claiming it would lead to "violence, disorder, and tension for the state and its children." It warned that if the federal courts pursued "coerced integration," white employers would fire Black employees involved in such efforts and the federal courts would prompt inevitable violence among "the least stable and least mentally matured and responsible members of both races." The report also suggested that "compulsory integration" would devastate public school finances by estranging "white people, who pay by far the greater part of taxes which maintain the schools."

The Boutwell plan sought to assure two goals ("Education for all children of the state" and "No compulsory mixing of races in our schools") by proposing four basic strategies:

• Eliminate any "prohibition against the operation of mixed schools, attended by both races" in the current state constitution and laws. In other words, Alabama laws would "concede the right of white and negro families to send their children to mixed public schools." This change would enshrine "the principle of freedom of choice" to enable parents to select the school their children should attend—within certain predetermined conditions and qualifications.
• Remove any suggestion from the state constitution that there is a right of education or an obligation of the state to fund public schoolchildren and establish a "policy of the State of Alabama to foster and promote the education of its citizens in a manner and extent consistent with its available resources, and the willingness and ability of the individual student [emphasis added]."
• Invest the legislature with constitutional powers to enable local school officials to determine the conditions and qualifications for "eligibility, admission, and allocation of pupils, including the power to refuse admission to individuals or groups whose deficiencies in scholastic aptitude would compel undue lowering of school standards."
• Grant the legislature the constitutional power to provide vouchers and other tax funds in "support and furtherance of education in other ways than the operation of public schools" for both Black and white children.

In effect, the plan would establish in the name of school "choice" a three-school system, instead of a dual school system. The new system would enable children to attend all-white schools, all-Black schools, or desegregated schools in a state-financed system of public and private schools.

With only one "nay" vote, the legislature passed the proposals to revise the state constitution, and white voters of Alabama ratified the amendments in 1956 to set up the plan's framework. Alabama's Citizens' Council (called "manicured Kluxism" by the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser) worried that the proposals were weak. The Council's leader, state senator Sam Engelhardt, had earlier proposed legislation to close all public schools and use vouchers for white parents to enroll in private schools in order to "keep every brick in our segregation wall intact." Alabama governor James E. "Big Jim" Folsom opposed all of these measures. "I wouldn't want to sign a bill that would let rich folks send their kids all to one school and the poor folks to another school," the populist Folsom declared.³²Fred Taylor, "'Freedom of Choice' Bill Seeks School Solution in Alabama," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 12, 1956; Fred Taylor, "3-School System Amendment Expected to Pass in Alabama," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 26, 1956; Crowther, "Alabama's Fight," 214; "Georgia," Southern School News, September 3, 1954; Carter, The Politics of Rage, 83.

While the constitutional amendments recommended by the Boutwell Committee were pending before the legislature, Forney Johnston gave a speech to the Alabama Bar Association that identified the plan's legal underpinnings: "the liberty of parents to direct the basic conditions under which their children shall be educated." Quoting from the 1925 US Supreme Court opinion that struck down an Oregon statute requiring all disability-free children to attend a public school,³³Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925). Johnston declared: "This parental liberty, like other liberties, is not absolute; but is limited only by an overriding necessity for community order or welfare, reflected not in some remote Federal pronouncement, but in the grass-root exercise of state police power, by the State acting in its sovereign capacity."

Johnston argued that the Boutwell plan provided freedom of choice without regard to race and, in that context, the federal courts could not require white parents to send their children to a desegregated school, although some white parents could decide to do so. "If the 14^th Amendment now says that a state cannot inhibit the freedom of negroes to attend schools with white people, what does it say about the freedom of white people to choose not to go to school with negroes?" Johnston answered his own question. Virtually segregated schools could continue through this freedom of choice in a new system of education where the government financed both public and private schools, where there was "ordinary and customary geographical districting" for public schools, and where the independent "application of accepted educational tests and standards" by both private and public schools were the terms for admitting students.

This type of school system would permit parental choice for a desegregated school, all-white school, or all-Black school within a structure and standards that were expressly non-racial. "If the members of a race are thereby deprived of access to a school attended by the other race," Johnston observed, "the result is attributable not to compulsion by the state but to the inconsistent choices of free citizens. Under such circumstances, the state is obliged to give effect to the desire of parents without compulsion against either side."³⁴Joseph F. Johnston, "Schools, the Supreme Court, and the States' Power To Direct the Removal of Gunpowder," Alabama Lawyer 17, no. 3 (1956): 3–10.

The full details of the Boutwell plan failed to become law in 1955 in large measure because of the direct and behind-the-scenes opposition of Governor Folsom, who downplayed the Brown decision and fought on many other issues with Black Belt politicians and Birmingham's "Big Mules" and their lawyers such as Johnston. Folsom also vetoed a handful of local bills that attempted to punish Black teachers if they voiced support for desegregation, but the legislature passed the segregationists' pupil placement bill by a veto-proof margin.

The new pupil placement law for public schools was sponsored by Senator Sam Engelhardt, the Citizens' Council leader who had come to embrace the Boutwell Committee's concepts and strategies. The law asserted it had nothing to do with segregation, but aimed to advance each child's education:

To establish a practical school system whereby the state's school program can be adapted to each pupil's ability to learn. To this end it provides a modern school placement system, so that pupils can be so grouped that the less advanced pupils shall not be penalized by being placed in the class with pupils who are more advanced or capable of learning at a more rapid rate, and conversely, that exceptionally bright and able pupils shall not be held back to a level below their ability to learn.

The law empowered local school boards alone to make decisions about which school each student was assigned to attend based on the following factors: tests of student aptitude and ability as well as the distance of school from a pupil's home; a pupil's educational background and home environment; a student's long-established ties of friendship or the dangers of placing a pupil in hostile surroundings absent former friends and "associates"; a pupil's own wishes as evidenced by a written request from his parents or guardian to be assigned to a particular school; and whether, in the judgment of the school board, the assignment would cause or tend to cause a breach of the peace, riot, or "affray." The law provided for a complicated, costly appeal process, if parents disagreed with the board's decision. Not one word in the legislation mentioned segregation, integration, or a child's race.³⁵Fred Taylor, "School Segregation Problem No. 1 on Ala. Legislature List: Measures Proposing Varied Plans Readied for Extra Session Call," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 2, 1955; "Alabama," Southern School News, February 3, 1955, 3; J. Tyra Harris, "Alabama Reaction to the Brown Decision, 1954–1956: A Case Study in Early Massive Resistance" (PhD diss., Middle Tennessee State University, 1978), 208–209.

A year later, with the Montgomery bus boycott threatening to end segregated seating in the state capital, the federal courts ordered the admission of Autherine Lucy, a Black woman, into the University of Alabama, and white-led race riots broke out in Tuscaloosa.³⁶Lucy was summarily suspended "for her own safety" after a series of riotous events on campus following her attendance. Charles Morgan Jr., A Time To Speak (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 37–39. Lucy remembered in 2017 at a university ceremony dedicating a historical marker in her honor that whites had chanted: "Hey, Hey, Ho! Where in the Hell did the nigger go?" See Jessa Reid Bolling and Rebecca Griesbach, "Autherine Lucy Foster Memorialized with Historical Marker," The Crimson White, September 18, 2017, 3, http://now.dirxion.com/Crimson_White/library/Crimson_White_09_18_2017.pdf; AL.com, "Autherine Lucy Foster Monument Unveiled," YouTube video, 1:56, September 17, 2017, https://youtu.be/6jriSBIwSHg. Afterwards, the legislature decided it was time to place before voters the basic parts of the Boutwell plan or, as it was publicly called, the "Freedom of Choice Plan." Folsom declared the legislation "hogwash" and many of his supporters opposed it. It also was opposed by die-hards such as Asa Carter, a Citizens' Council (and soon Klan) leader, since the proposal removed all constitutional requirements for the complete separation of the races in the schools.

Alabama's virtually all-white electorate approved the "freedom of choice" amendments to the constitution with 61 percent of the vote, and the Boutwell plan's key elements became the operating terms for the strategy to resist and slow school desegregation in the Heart of Dixie.

John Patterson won the race for governor in 1958 as a hard-edged, proven segregationist who, as Alabama attorney general, had attempted to put the NAACP out of business through a series of persistent, harassing lawsuits—an attack commenced after a strategy meeting that included Forney Johnston. As governor, Patterson assured white Alabamians that "I would not agree under any circumstances to operate an integrated school," but, with Boutwell serving as lieutenant governor, he followed the spirit and letter of the Boutwell-Johnston strategy. It proved remarkably successful. During Patterson's four years in the governor's mansion, the US Supreme Court upheld Alabama's pupil placement law on its face as constitutional and, as Patterson later boasted, no Alabama public school was ever desegregated while he was governor.³⁷Harris, "Alabama Reaction to the Brown Decision," 226–229, 241–249; Gilliam Sr., "The Second Folsom Administration," 316–321, 374–384, 423–436; Joseph M. Bagley, "School Desegregation, Law and Order, and Litigating Social Justice in Alabama, 1954–1973" (PhD diss., Georgia State University, 2013), 104–105; Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham Board of Education, 162 F. Supp. 372 (1958) affirmed by Shuttlesworth v. Board of Education, 358 U.S. 101 (1958); "Alabama: Governor Renews Vow to Resist Integration," Southern School News, February 1961, 14; Warren Trest, Nobody But the People: The Life and Times of Alabama's Youngest Governor (Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books, 2008), 260, 303–306; William Warren Rogers et al., Alabama: A History of a Deep South State (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 547–548.

Alabama's approach to controlling school desegregation changed dramatically in 1963 after George Wallace won the race for governor by making good on his promise—uttered after losing to Patterson in 1958—that "no other son-of-a-bitch will ever out-nigger me again."³⁸Carter, The Politics of Rage, 96–109. Wallace defeated Folsom, Boutwell, and "Bull" Connor, among others. In his inaugural speech written by Asa Carter, Wallace proclaimed words that have resounded across the decades:

Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood. . . . Let us . . . send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. . . . I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation now . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.³⁹George C. Wallace, "The Inaugural Address of Governor George C. Wallace," January 14, 1963, Alabama Textual Materials Collections, Alabama Department of Archives and History, transcript, http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/ref/collection/voices/id/2952.

Governor Wallace kicked off an orchestrated, theatrical performance of massive resistance a few months later when he stood in the schoolhouse door to decry federal encroachment on state sovereignty and to protest the admission of two Black students to the University of Alabama, which had a total enrollment of almost ten thousand students. Afterwards, Wallace led the state government in replaying strategies used earlier in Mississippi and Louisiana, including the formation of state spy commissions to monitor and intimidate civil right activists. His administration coordinated with the Klan and the Citizens' Council, and Wallace's frequent public pronouncements left little doubt that Alabama's school program had nothing to do with the Boutwell Committee's earlier stated purposes of advancing "each pupil's ability to learn" and everything to do with preserving absolute segregation.

Buoyed by national news coverage and by the enthusiastic support of white Alabamians that came as a result of Jim Crow grandstanding, Wallace had no intention of permitting any Alabama official to accept or implement token integration in the schools without an opportunity for him to publicly display his fight for complete segregation. The governor called out state troopers to surround school buildings in several Alabama towns—even when local white school boards had decided to permit a small number of Black children to cross the color line.

In response, civil rights attorneys returned to federal court with new evidence from Wallace's statements and actions that the school laws and their enforcement were intended to block Brown, and the courts began striking down the state's education laws—including its private school voucher law—and ordering school desegregation. As his lawyers lost in the federal courts, Wallace kept racial politics center stage, creating an environment for violence and capturing the adulation of the white die-hards. He also attracted the nation's attention by expanding and amplifying the provocative rhetoric of total, massive federal resistance. Wallace became in the political imaginary one of the nation's enduring southern segregationist icons.⁴⁰Carter, The Politics of Rage, 133–293; Stephan Lesher, George Wallace: American Populist (Boston, MA: Addison Wesley, 1994), 244–253; Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, 267 F. Supp. 458 (1967); Allen Tullos, Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 233–241.

The Other Southern States: "Freedom from Compulsory Association" by Any or Many Means

Six other states—Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia—also created strategy groups to block school desegregation. Each group had its own distinct design and role within the dynamics of how each state built massive resistance to Brown, but most shared similar characteristics and tactics. All adopted vouchers for private schools.

In Mississippi, white voters approved state constitutional changes recommended by Governor Hugh White's advisory group that authorized state funding for children to attend their parents' choice of a private school and for transferring public school properties to private schools. Afterwards, the strategy committee did little more since Mississippi's white leaders employed other groups and strategies as their first line of defense. The legislature approved small funding increases forBlack public schools in an attempt to convince Black citizens that the state would move closer to "separate but equal" facilities.

Mississippi's primary strategies to block school desegregation involved private and public agencies that undertook economic and social intimidation, behind-the-scenes spying, physical threats, and violence. The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission kept tabs on "agitators" in conjunction with the Citizens' Council, the Klan, and other vigilante groups.⁴¹"Mississippi," Southern School News, September 3, 1954; Charles C. Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle Over School Integration in Mississippi (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 65–68, 75–88; McMillen, The Citizens' Council, 15–32, 360–361; John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 45–72; Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 34–37.

Other states used legal and extra-legal tactics to keep schools segregated, but, as one author wrote, "Mississippi verged on totalitarianism."⁴²Michael J. Klarman, "Why Massive Resistance?" in Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction, ed. Clive Webb (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 27. "This is a fight for white supremacy," declared the editor of the Jackson Daily News, returning to public language often abandoned by segregationists elsewhere. "[T]here will be no room for neutrals or non-combatants." Local Black leaders such as Leake County sisters Winson and Dovie Hudson faced combatants as they continued to challenge school segregation, despite economic reprisals, physical threats, and more than one bombing of their own homes. "I'm going to stay here and pay the cost, no matter what it is," Dovie Hudson assured Mississippi NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, who soon afterwards was murdered in his own driveway in Jackson. Anyone connected to school desegregation or civil rights work in Mississippi ran a real risk of being fired from work, thrown out of their house, beaten, bombed, or shot at. Several were killed.⁴³Dennis J. Mitchell, Mississippi Liberal: A Biography of Frank E. Smith (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 130; Constance Curry, "A Right to Be There," Southern Changes 14, no. 1 (1992): 18–25, http://southernchanges.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/sc14-3_1204/sc14-3_005/; Winson Hudson and Connie Curry, Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 47–73; Marin Noel and Roderick Wright, "Mrs. Murtis Powell: On the Front Lines of Battle," in Minds Stayed on Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle in the Rural South, an Oral History, ed. Youth of the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 110–115.

As a result, school desegregation moved very slowly in Mississippi. In 1969, fifteen years after Brown, the US Supreme Court found that Mississippi had made hardly any strides in undoing "segregated conditions" and ordered every school district in the state "to terminate dual school systems at once." Aided by Citizens' Council chapters, segregation academies sprung up across the state, and Mississippi's public schools desegregated only when and where civil rights lawyers won their day in federal courts.⁴⁴Survey of School Desegregation in the Southern and Border States, 1965–1966 (Washington, DC: United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1966), 33–42, https://www2.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/documents/cr12sch611.pdf; Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 396 US 19 (1969); McMillen, The Citizens' Council, 302; Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All, 169–186.

The strategy group in Louisiana was headed by long-time state senator William M. Rainach, who also spearheaded the creation of Louisiana's Citizens' Councils.⁴⁵Jim Carl, Freedom of Choice: Vouchers in American Education (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), 26–28; "Louisiana," Southern School News, September 3, 1954, 13; Charles A. Reynard, "Legislation Affecting Segregation," Louisiana Law Review 17 (1956–57): 104–114. For a brief time, Rainach later became head of the Louisiana Sovereignty Commission, the primary state apparatus to spy on and harass civil rights activists and supporters. Carl, Freedom of Choice, 37, 46. The Rainach Committee became a coordinating agency as much for action as for legislative strategy. It helped to mount legal roadblocks to school desegregation, orchestrated legal attacks on Black activist organizations, and spurred efforts to remove or block Black voting in close collaboration with the Louisiana Sovereignty Commission. Like many other state agencies across the South, the committee condemned integration as the work of communists.

Following the Rainach Committee's recommendations, the legislature in 1958 authorized public schools to become private education cooperatives and a voucher program for white students to attend non-religious private schools.⁴⁶Carl, Freedom of Choice, 29–32; "Supreme Court Approves Invalidation of Louisiana's Pupil Placement Law," Southern School News, July 1957, 7. In New Orleans, the Catholic schools were uniquely more willing to integrate sooner than the public schools. As early as 1956, the Archbishop publicly declared that segregation was morally wrong. Local NAACP leader Daniel Boyd suggested to national legal director Thurgood Marshall that "the Luzanna legislature will keep ignoring any and all court decisions until a number of them are jailed."⁴⁷Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 247. In 1960, refusing further delays, federal district judge Skelly Wright ordered the desegregation of New Orleans's 9th Ward elementary school. Amid death threats, a six-year-old Black girl, Ruby Bridges, entered the previously all-white school with an escort of federal marshals amid a mob of angry, screaming white men and women. Senator Rainach abandoned his role as strategist in order to appear publicly more attractive as he campaigned to become governor. "Let's use the 'scorched earth policy,'" he proclaimed at a Citizens' Council rally.

Jimmie Davis became the newly elected governor and quickly disbanded Rainach's committee. Following other southern governors, Davis pushed the legislature to revoke all overt segregation laws and pass race-neutral programs for advancing freedom of choice for parents. A new voucher law also made no mention of race; it allowed any Louisiana child eligible to receive a state-funded voucher to attend a non-profit, non-sectarian private school.⁴⁸Carl, Freedom of Choice, 47–48; "State Again Fails To Get Control of Orleans Schools," Southern School News, February 1961, 6.

The race-neutral program began in 1962, operated for four years, and distributed more than fifty-five thousand vouchers. The vast majority of state funds went to the families of white students, although existing records show that about 7 percent of all vouchers supported students from Black families. All voucher-supported private schools were segregated by race—either all-white or all-Black.

After the voucher law was challenged in federal court, four all-Black private schools joined the state government in defending the program. The legislature renamed its voucher commission the "Louisiana Education Commission for Needy Children" with the professed purpose of addressing the problems of juvenile delinquency and school dropouts as well as the special needs of "retarded children" as it declared "that the parent, not the State of Louisiana, shall be the determining force which shall decide on the type of education ultimately received by the child." A federal court panel, however, found the "necessary effect of the Louisiana tuition grants [was] to establish . . . a system of segregated schools for white children, in violation of the equal protection clause."⁴⁹Carl, Freedom of Choice, 48–53; "Louisiana Legislators Go Home; Teachers Miss Pay," Southern School News, January 1961, 1, 8–11; Poindexter, 275 F. Supp. 833.

Thomas J. Pearsall, a North Carolina attorney, businessman, and former Speaker of the House, chaired the North Carolina strategy committee responsible for finding a response to Brown. The Pearsall Committee originally had three African Americans among twenty members. Its first report proposed only a pupil assignment act mirroring the basics of Alabama's law. It empowered local school officials to assign students according to factors such as community relations, student ability, school capacity, and geographic location—without any mention of race.⁵⁰John E. Batchelor, Race and Education in North Carolina: From Segregation to Desegregation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 32–42; Carlson, "With All Deliberate Speed," 55–59.

Hardline segregationists such as Jesse Helms, later US senator, dismissed the report, arguing that the state had to choose between "integrated public schools and free choice private schools." North Carolina attorney general Beverly Lake, also later a US senator, made the same argument urging the closure of public schools and the provision of vouchers for white children to attend totally segregated private schools.⁵¹Batchelor, Race and Education, 36–40.

In a second report in April 1956, the now all-white Pearsall Committee declared that it would "preserve a segregated system" like the one in the past and suggested ways to move from a "segregated-by-law system" to a segregated-by-choice system. The report reminded local school officials that, due to the US Supreme Court, there can be "no racial segregation by law," but nothing prohibited them from making "assignment according to natural racial preference and the administrative determination of what is best for the child." It recommended vouchers wherever "a child cannot be conveniently assigned to a non-mixed public school," regardless of the child's race, so long as the child's parent did not want a desegregated school. The committee insisted that while the Supreme Court had struck down laws "compelling the separation of the races in public schools," no court could compel "the mixing of the races."

Over the next decade, most North Carolina schools slowly admitted a token number of Black students in previously all-white schools, although many small, rural school districts in eastern North Carolina resisted until a court order required the admission of a token number of Black children in previously all-white schools. The Pearsall Plan began to crumble when North Carolina civil rights attorney Julius Chambers persuaded a federal three-judge panel in 1966 that "the payment of tuition grants is clearly state action, and unquestionably impermissible." A year earlier, Chambers's home had been bombed twice and his car firebombed once as a result of his willingness to openly challenge school segregation. Following his own advice to others—"Keep fighting"—Chambers convinced the federal court that the "state may not circumvent the Constitution by giving financial encouragement to individuals to follow a course which defeats desegregation."⁵²Batchelor, Race and Education, 76–110; Carlson, "With All Deliberate Speed," 72; Douglas Martin, "Julius Chambers, a Fighter for Civil Rights, Dies at 76," New York Times, August 6, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/us/julius-chambers-a-fighter-for-civil-rights-dies-at-76.html; "Hawkins v. North Carolina State Board of Education," Race Relations Law Reporter 11 (1966): 745, 747.

In Virginia, there were two strategy commissions. The first was chaired by businessman and state senator Garland Gray. In November 1955, it recommended the three basic methods of resistance first outlined by Alabama's Boutwell Committee: 1) investing local school officials with broad discretion to assign public school students on the basis of apparently non-racial factors such as availability of facilities and transportation, health, and aptitude of the child; 2) authorizing vouchers and other payments to private schools; and 3) permitting parents, without regard to race, to receive state-funded vouchers to attend private schools if their children were assigned to desegregated schools.

The Gray Commission's proposals implied that it would preserve only virtual segregation, not total segregation—an approach that many Virginia politicians defiantly opposed.⁵³Joseph J. Thorndike, "'The Sometimes Sordid Level of Race and Segregation': James J. Kilpatrick and the Virginia Campaign against Brown," in The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia, eds. Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 70. Bowing to the hardline segregationists, state leaders rejected the Gray Commission's recommendation in favor of massive resistance. The legislature declared desegregation a "clear and present danger" that required closing public schools when necessary. The new law also discarded the Gray Commission's recommendation to give local school boards the authority to make pupil assignments on terms without expressly mentioning race. The state board of education was specifically authorized to prevent assigning white and Black students in the same school.⁵⁴Carl W. Tobias, "Public School Desegregation in Virginia During the Post-Brown Decade," William & Mary Law Review 37 (1996): 1269–1271.

Lindsay Almond became Virginia's new governor in 1957 after a campaign in which he supported the hardline approach. "I'd rather lose my right arm," he proclaimed, "than to see one nigra child enter the white schools of Virginia." But, once in office, Governor Almond was persuaded by business leaders and others to establish a second commission, named after its chair, state senator Mosby Perrow, a prosperous lawyer and farmer. The Perrow Commission's report echoed the Gray Commission's "twin principles of local determination and freedom of choice." It also recommended adopting the strategies of the earlier Gray Commission and Alabama's Boutwell Committee: abandon any mention of race; allow local, flexible pupil placement on factors without explicit mention of race; create vouchers or so-called "scholarships."

The Perrow report did not specify exact terms for proposed legislation in each area since its members were not certain at that moment if a "three school plan," first envisioned in Alabama five years earlier, would be successfully defended in the courts. It did recommend a new uniform testing program—but testing only for the public schools, not for the private schools supported by vouchers.⁵⁵Commission on Public Education, "Report of the Commission to the Governor of Virginia" (Richmond, 1959). This report is also referred to as the Perrow Report in reference to the chairman of the Commission, Mosby G. Perrow Jr.

Not all local jurisdictions followed the Perrow report. Some, such as Prince Edward County, maintained absolute segregation by closing the county's public schools and providing county tax credit scholarships to supplement state vouchers for white children to attend private schools. In 1964, however, Justice Hugo Black issued the Supreme Court opinion outlawing the die-hard segregationists' schemes. The Court ordered the public schools reopened on a desegregated basis and held that both tax credit and direct vouchers were unconstitutional.⁵⁶"Report of the Commission to the Governor of Virginia," 21–25; "Virginia: State Commission Draws Up New Legislative Proposals," Southern School News, April 1959, 16; George M. Cochran, "Virginia Facing Reality: The 1959 Perrow Commission," Augusta Historical Bulletin 42 (2006), http://mlkcommission.dls.virginia.gov/va_school_closings/pdfs/Cochrane%20Augusta%20Historical%20Bulletin.pdf; Griffin v. School Board of Prince Edward County, 377 U.S. 218 (1964) at 233.

Senator Marion Gressette, chair of the South Carolina Segregation School Committee—first created by Governor Jimmy Byrnes and the state legislature in 1951—led resistance to court-ordered desegregation for more than twenty years. The Gressette Committee believed the best defense against the federal courts was to move "with caution and with a minimum of publicity" and to report publicly as little as possible.⁵⁷John W. White, "Managed Compliance: White Resistance and Desegregation in South Carolina, 1950–1970" (PhD diss., University of Florida, 2006), 152.

Before Brown, Governor Byrnes initiated an aggressive statewide building program of segregated schools for Black children to bolster the legal argument that "separate but equal" was equal and constitutional, but the passage of a state constitutional amendment two years before Brown also permitted South Carolina to close its public schools—a clear message to the Black population to leave segregation as it had been.

After Brown, Byrnes suspended the Black school construction program, but restarted it once persuaded by the Gressette Committee that the program remained a useful incentive for Black parents to keep their children in segregated, all-Black schools instead of seeking admission to all-white public schools.⁵⁸Stephen Harold Lowe, "'The Magnificent Fight': Civil Rights Litigation in South Carolina Federal Courts, 1940–1970" (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1999), 193–201; White, "Managed Compliance," 43–61; "South Carolina," Southern School News, September 3, 1954, 12.

Following the Gressette Committee's recommendations, the legislature also passed a pupil assignment bill giving local school boards the authority to make all decisions about attendance based on a family's geographic location and a child's scholastic aptitude (e.g., "each child shall be considered individually") without mention of race. Gressette understood that this color-blind standard in pupil placement could be a barrier to widespread school desegregation because of residential segregation. As the staff director of the Gressette Committee privately observed, local school boards could also decide, even where housing segregation did not preserve separate schools, that "there are few Negroes educationally qualified to go to schools with similarly aged white children."⁵⁹White, "Managed Compliance," 151–153. "Academic standards" without any reference to race or skin color also were used to assure that African American teachers did not receive equal pay with white teachers, despite a federal court order to equalize teachers' salaries. Also see R. Scott Baker, "Testing Equality: The National Teacher Examination and the NAACP's Legal Campaign to Equalize Teachers' Salaries in the South 1936–63," History of Education Quarterly 35, no. 1 (1995): 49–64 and R. Scott Baker, "The Paradoxes of Desegregation: Race, Class, and Education, 1935–1975," American Journal of Education 109, no. 3 (May 2001): 320–343. The Gressette Committee also attempted to convince the NAACP lawyers that geography, not the state government, was responsible for school segregation. See Maxie Myron Cox Jr., "1963—the Year of Decision: Desegregation in South Carolina" (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 1996), 166.

The president of the South Carolina Farm Bureau echoed the analysis made earlier by Alabama corporate attorney Forney Johnston when he observed: "If Negroes are to have the right of free choice in attending separate or mixed schools if they wish, then even the Supreme Court cannot deny to white people that same free choice of sending their children to separate or mixed schools."⁶⁰"South Carolina," Southern School News, January 6, 1955, 14.

The state's acceptance of token desegregation in order to keep schools virtually segregated did not satisfy South Carolina's hardliners, but the Gressette Committee's approach prevailed even as escalating racial violence and state-sponsored intimidation against Black and white activists, especially the NAACP, continued.⁶¹White, "Managed Compliance," 166–265. Over time, and without mentioning race, the South Carolina legislature repealed compulsory attendance in public schools, pushed decision-making about school enrollment and school closing to local districts, permitted white students living in racially diverse areas to transfer to a nearby virtually segregated school district, and established tax exemptions for children attending private schools.⁶²"South Carolina," Southern School News, February 3, 1955, 3; "South Carolina," Southern School News, March 3, 1955, 14; "South Carolina," Southern School News, July 1955, 4. Even bills proposing confrontational tactics, such as closing public schools, often did not mention race. For example, a bill in 1955 proposed to close any public school where a student was admitted by court order. See "South Carolina," Southern School News, May 4, 1955, 6. In 1960, on advice of the Gressette Committee, the legislature removed the phrase "for racially segregated schools only" from its appropriations bill. See Cox Jr., "1963—the Year of Decision," 15.

On January 28, 1963, following a federal court order, Harvey Gantt became the first African American since Reconstruction to enroll in a state university in South Carolina when he was admitted to Clemson without incident. Gantt had attended college in Iowa but decided: "I was homesick for the South, I was a child of the South, and that's where I wanted to go."⁶³"Clemson College Admits Negro in State's First Desegregation," Southern School News, February 1963, 1; Interview with Harvey B. Gantt by William R. Ferris, September 28, 2015, C-0367, Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/sohp/id/27218/rec/2.

The next day, South Carolina's new governor, Donald Russell, announced that the state would provide parents with vouchers or "scholarship grants" to send their children to non-sectarian private schools. Russell did not mention race. He argued that vouchers would require public schools to compete with private ones for students and "this competition would stimulate progress in public education." The Gressette Committee reported that vouchers would "offer to all our citizens the broadest possible freedom of choice."⁶⁴"Clemson College Admits Negro on Order of Appellate Court," Southern School News, February 1963, 8–9.

In May 1968, after hearing arguments on the voucher program from Matthew Perry and Ernest Finney Jr. (two African American attorneys who later became judges), a panel of three federal judges declared the "purpose, motive and effect of the Act is to unconstitutionally circumvent the requirement . . . that the State of South Carolina not discriminate on the basis of race or color in its public educational system."⁶⁵White, "Managed Compliance," 390–391; Brown v. South Carolina State Board of Education, 296 F. Supp. 199 (1968).

In Georgia in 1950, more than two hundred African American students and parents filed a lawsuit claiming unequal education on account of race and seeking admission to all-white schools in Atlanta. Governor Eugene Talmadge warned, "Our rifles are ready" to resist any court desegregation order. Roy Harris, an influential political operative and head of the Citizens' Council, called for the closure of the state's public schools and the creation of a tax-funded private school system.⁶⁶O'Brien, "Private School Vouchers and the Reality of Racial Politics," 79–92.

Over the next few years, the General Assembly passed laws cutting off funding to any public school that a federal court ordered to desegregate. It also passed laws increasing school funding for segregated Black schools and, after Brown was argued in 1953, additional laws enabled white voters to approve a constitutional amendment to permit vouchers for private schooling. Georgia's attorney general, Eugene Cook, assured white Georgians that any plan to "subsidize the child rather than the school" was lawful.⁶⁷O'Brien, 105–108; "Georgia Attorney General Says Supreme Court Will Mix Schools," Chicago Defender, October 31, 1953, 5; Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 1956, vol. 1, 10–11, 13–15. These laws followed the passage of a 1955 law mandating that in Georgia "no State or local funds shall be in any manner appropriated or expended for public school purposes except for schools in which the white and colored races are separately educated." See Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 1955, vol. 1, 174–176.

In 1958, Ernest Vandiver became governor after promising white voters: "Neither my child nor your child will ever attend an integrated school during my administration. No, not one!" Afterwards, the legislature enacted tuition tax credits for families whose children attended private schools, barred using local property taxes to finance desegregated public schools, and empowered the governor to close either school districts or individual public schools as needed.⁶⁸Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 1959, vol. 1, 7, 15, 157; "Georgia: Teachers Endorse Separate-But-Equal; Decision Awaited In State Test Case," Southern School News, April 1959, 7. During this period, Atlanta's NAACP attorney Donald Hollowell, who advanced many of the court challenges to Georgia's school segregation, stated that he would not predict the outcome of any court case, but added that he fully expected the color line to fall.⁶⁹"Motion to Dismiss Is Overruled," Atlanta Daily World, December 16, 1958.

Facing a federal court order for the token desegregation of four Atlanta public schools, Governor Vandiver considered accepting virtual segregation, earning the outrage of political kingmaker Roy Harris, who declared: "If one little Negro is entitled to go to Henry Grady High School in Atlanta, then all Negroes are entitled to go to some high school with whites."⁷⁰O'Brien, "Private School Vouchers and the Reality of Racial Politics," 174. Vandiver tried having it both ways: he recommended bills to continue absolute segregation while creating a Committee on the Schools, later called the Sibley Commission, to explore best options.

Atlanta businessman and corporate attorney John Sibley led the new commission in holding public hearings across the state. Afterwards the Commission recommended that public schools remain open and, in effect, that the state manage a slow process of token desegregation: "Those who insist upon total segregation must face the fact that it cannot be maintained in public schools by state law." The report's plan was designed "to effectuate voluntary association." Recommended strategies included freedom of parental choice, local decisions for pupil placements and pupil transfers, and tuition grants to private schools—the pillars of Alabama's earlier Boutwell plan.⁷¹O'Brien, 171–181; Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 1960, vol. 1, 1187; Jeff Roche, Restructured Resistance: The Sibley Commission and the Politics of Desegregation in Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 163–172; "Here's Text of Majority Report by Sibley Committee," Atlanta Constitution, April 29, 1960; "Text of Minority Report," Atlanta Constitution, April 29, 1960; Paul Delaney, "Judge Hooper to Study Sibley Report Monday," Atlanta Daily World, May 8, 1960.

In January 1961, shortly after two thousand angry whites surrounded the dormitory of Charlayne Hunter, one of two Black students admitted to the University of Georgia in Athens,⁷²Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 87–89. Governor Vandiver announced he would follow the Sibley report. He proposed to repeal race-specific laws of massive resistance and promised every Georgia child "his God-given right to freedom of association" through a new amendment securing "the constitutional rights of school children to attend private schools of their choice in lieu of public schools" through public financing.⁷³O'Brien, "Private School Vouchers and the Reality of Racial Politics," 189–191, 199–201; "Gov. Ernest Vandiver Asks 4-Point Child Protection Defense Package," Atlanta Daily World, January 19, 1961; "U.S. Judge Rejects Contentions of Georgia Officials," Southern School News, February 1961, 8; Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 1961, vol. 1, 35.

In August 1961, two Black students desegregated Atlanta's Grady High School without incident. Atlanta's peaceful acceptance of token integration at Grady and the city's other all-white high schools became, in the words of the New York Times, a "new and shining example of what can be accomplished" in the South. President John Kennedy said afterwards: "I strongly urge all communities which face this difficult transition to look closely at what Atlanta has done."⁷⁴Kruse, White Flight, 150–156. That one day in 1961 burnished the city's growing international reputation as the "City Too Busy to Hate," while, in fact, it set in motion a process of pupil assignments that preserved virtual segregation across the entire school system.⁷⁵Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 104–105.

In 1962, Georgia financed vouchers for more than fifteen hundred students in private schools. In addition, the legislature aided white teachers in leaving public for private schools by allowing them to remain in the state retirement system. None of the new laws specifically mentioned "race" or racial segregation. In the aftermath of its "shining example," the Atlanta school board routinely denied requests by scores of Black parents to transfer their children to all-white schools. Attorney Donald Hollowell assured the public "we will appeal," but courtroom challenges could not catch up with the school board's delaying tactics. By December 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. publicly condemned "something strange and appalling"—not a single Black child was attending Atlanta's all-white elementary schools and only 153 of more than 14,000 Black high school students attended classes with whites.⁷⁶Bruce Galphin, "40 Negro Students File Appeals for Transfers," Atlanta Constitution, June 14, 1961; Bruce Galphin, "38 Negroes, White Girl Lose Transfer Appeals," Atlanta Constitution, July 7, 1961; Tomoko Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 307.

With each passing year throughout the 1960s, legal strategies and tools of resistance to Brown became less important in Atlanta and other metropolitan areas as white flight to suburban counties increased—illuminating another highly effective option for preserving the "freedom of white people to choose not to go to school with negroes." Georgia's voucher program petered out after a couple of years—once it became obvious that the program would not survive review by the courts and after the discovery that many of the program's beneficiaries were already attending private schools.⁷⁷Kruse, White Flight, 9–17, 161–177, 234–235; John H. Britton, "Fear of Increase in Taxes Is Blamed for Bond Measure Defeat: Negro Votes Favored Most Bond Proposals," Atlanta Daily World, August 4, 1962; "$206,640 Granted Students to Attend Jim Crow Schools," Atlanta Daily World, October 17, 1962.

The Limits of Lawsuits: Toppling Voucher Programs but Not Segregated Schools

By 1965, most voucher programs, which had been enacted only in southern states, had been declared unconstitutional or were under serious attack, no matter whether the programs involved indirect expenditures such as tax credits or were shrouded in non-racial language. Each law financing private schools was soon invalidated by a federal court (or abandoned in the case of Georgia before it could be struck down) because the efforts were perceived to evade or disrupt public school desegregation and to "significantly encourage and involve the State in private discriminations."⁷⁸See these federal cases: Coffey v. State Educational Finance Commission, 296 F. Supp. 1389 (S.D. Miss. 1969); Griffin v. State Board of Education, 296 F. Supp. 1178 (E.D. Va. 1969); Poindexter v. Louisiana Financial Assistance Commission, 296 F. Supp. 686 (E.D. La. 1968); Brown v. South Carolina State Board of Education, 296 F. Supp. 199 (D.S.C. 1968), aff'd, 393 U.S. 222 (1968); Poindexter v. Louisiana Financial Assistance Commission, 275 F. Supp. 833 (E.D. La. 1968), aff'd, 389 U.S. 571 (1968); Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, 267 F. Supp. 458 (M.D. Ala. 1967); Hawkins v. North Carolina State Board of Education, 11 Race Relations Law Reporter 745 (W.D.N.C. 1966); Griffin v. State Board of Education, 239 F. Supp. 560 (E.D. Va. 1965); Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, 231 F. Supp. 743 (E.D. Ala. 1964); Pettaway v. County School Board, 230 F. Supp. 480 (E.D. Va. 1964), aff'd, 339 F. 2d 486 (2d Cir. 1964); Hall v. St. Helena Parish School Board, 231 F. Supp. 649 (E.D. La. 1961), aff'd, 368 U.S. 515 (1962); Aaron v. McKinley, 173 F. Supp. 944 (E.D. Ark. 1959), aff'd sub nom, Faubus v. Arron, 361 U.S. 197 (1959).

A vital component in states' strategies to preserve segregation, vouchers operated differently depending on state politics, federal court decisions, and the values and judgments of the strategy committees. Exchanging ideas and information, these committees functioned separately, shaped and reshaped by the dynamics of a state's political and business leadership and without a coordinated sectional effort.

In their final reports, most strategy committees adopted methods and means that evaded any exact definition of what preserving school segregation meant as an expression of racial subordination. Like Georgia Governor "No, Not One" Vandiver, states adapted to the reality that absolute or total segregation could not be preserved in the face of federal enforcement of Brown. Sooner or later, white leaders such as Tom P. Brady, the Mississippi politician credited with the idea of forming the Citizens' Council, were willing to accept virtual segregation. Others, including Alabama corporate attorney Forney Johnston, knew at the time of Brown that virtual segregation with its token exceptions could preserve white supremacy so long as conservative white leaders kept control of schools, politics, and the economy.⁷⁹Tom P. Brady, "Segregation and the South," October 4, 1957, Citizens' Council Collection, Archives and Special Collections, University of Mississippi Libraries; McMillen, The Citizens' Council, 265–266; Thomas P. Brady, interview by Orley B. Caudill, March 4, 1972, Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage, University of Southern Mississippi Libraries. In 1962, Arnold Rose, who assisted Gunnar Myrdal, wrote a postscript in the 1962 edition of An American Dilemma (New York: McGraw Hill, xxxv–xxxvii) where he discussed how the initial monolithic response to Brown by southern whites changed and adapted to fit the times.

Starting in the mid-1960s, civil rights lawyers were able to use new national anti-discrimination laws to challenge a wider range of white supremacist laws and practices. The civil rights movement moved away from the courtroom as the primary venue for creating change. Before Brown, the NAACP and other civil rights lawyers led the way by using the words of the Constitution to take down the wall of segregation, beginning in the schoolhouses, one student at a time. Privately, NAACP chief attorney Thurgood Marshall laid out the legal approach: "Those white crackers are going to get tired of having Negro lawyers beating 'em every day in court."⁸⁰Harry S. Ashmore, Hearts and Minds: The Anatomy of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: McGraw Hill, 1982), 214. Publicly, it was the hallmark of attorneys such as Donald Hollowell, known in Georgia as "Mr. Civil Rights," to remain reserved and dignified—what Hollowell later remembered with a wink as "courtly"—using only federal filings to argue with white society about segregation, even as white state officials brazenly belittled, condemned, and harassed them.⁸¹Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent, 336; Donald Hollowell, conversation with the author, May 1978. This strategy confronted white stereotypes and rendered Brown as the law of the land, but alone it proved too slow and inadequate to halt relentless white efforts to stop change or to keep pace with growing Black demands.

The emergence of the student movement and direct action as strategies for challenging private and public segregation was in part a reaction to the slow, back-and-forth pace of litigation. In some places, even "the twin avenues of civil rights protest—legal and direct action—did not have a catalytic effect" in advancing desegregation. By the middle of the 1960s, school desegregation was no longer the civil rights spearhead. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed about his own town: "In the absence of legal, political, economic, and moral pressure, not even a city as enlightened as Atlanta is likely to grant the Negro his constitutional rights."⁸²Brown-Nagin, 307–309.

Most of the South's white leaders were discovering that a more fluid definition of segregation was their most effective defense. Increasingly, they realized the efficacy of moving away from "No, not one" or a stand in the schoolhouse door toward strategies that could do almost as much as absolute segregation. As early as 1956, the founder of the Citizens' Council had suggested that members should redefine their way of life as far more than complete separation of the races: "Segregation represents the freedom to choose one's associates, Americanism, state sovereignty, and the survival of the white race."⁸³Robert B. Patterson, 2^nd Annual Report (Greenwood, MS: Association of Citizens' Councils of Mississippi, August 1956), 2.

As for the public schools, it did not matter that all the tools for preserving segregation could not withstand the scrutiny of the federal courts or that the civil rights leaders were employing new strategies. A decade after Brown, the architects and advocates of private school vouchers had discovered the means to permit only a symbolic semblance of desegregation. If only by trial and error in some states, "southern anti-integration efforts during the post-Brown era were more often characterized by creativity and flexibility than by obstinacy and intransigence."⁸⁴Driver, "Supremacies and the Southern Manifesto," 1093. While discussing the ideas and strategies voiced by southern federal officials, Driver illuminates the components of segregationists' plans of resistance that "play a role today in maintaining the paucity of meaningful integration in the nation's public schools." See pages 1094, 1097–1099.

By the end of the 1965 school year, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia—the seven states that had adopted voucher programs—maintained the South's lowest rates of school desegregation. That year, fewer than 2 percent of all Black students in each of the seven states were attending public schools with white students.⁸⁵Statistical Summary: School Segregation–Desegregation in the Southern and Border States (Nashville, TN: Southern Education Reporting Service, 1966–67), 43.

Milton Friedman and "Government Schools"

In 1955, almost a year after Albert Boutwell released the Alabama legislative report proposing private school vouchers as a key element in his committee's plan of "freedom of choice," libertarian economist Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago published "The Role of Government in Education."⁸⁶Milton Friedman, "The Role of Government in Education," in Economics and the Public Interest, ed. Robert A. Solo (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 123–144. Friedman was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976 for his work on monetary policy. It introduced academicians to an economic rationale for school vouchers. Friedman believed parents would get the best education for their children when private schools competed for enrollment. Advancing a theory he and others would repeat over decades, Friedman argued that "competitive private enterprise is likely to be far more efficient in meeting consumer demands than nationalized enterprises" in education.⁸⁷Friedman, "The Role of Government in Education," 129.

Friedman's advocacy for a system of government-financed vouchers to replace "government schools," as he called them, was grounded in his free market beliefs. However, in a page-long footnote he acknowledged that essentially the same proposal "has recently been suggested in several states as a means of evading the Supreme Court ruling against segregation"—a development Friedman said came to his attention after he had largely completed his essay. The economist assured readers that he deplored segregation and racial prejudice, but he also opposed forced "non-segregation" no less than forced segregation. (Friedman also opposed a federal fair employment commission that would prohibit racial discrimination in private employment and, later, the 1964 Civil Rights Act's prohibition against racial discrimination by private businesses.⁸⁸Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 111–115; "Friedman Cautions Against Rights Bill," Harvard Crimson, May 5, 1964.)

Friedman acknowledged that vouchers would allow a system where there could be "exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools. Parents can choose which to send their children to." He was at best agnostic about ending segregation in schools. He noted that the government could decide to make public funds available to private schools only if they were segregated schools, as some southern states proposed in 1955, or only if they were non-segregated schools. His proposal for vouchers was "not therefore inconsistent with either forced segregation or forced nonsegregation."⁸⁹Friedman, "The Role of Government in Education," 131, fn. 2.

Had he cared enough to inquire about southern segregation, Friedman would have discovered that many white supremacists had already adopted the same outlook and conceptual framework to make vouchers instrumental in maintaining segregated schools. A year earlier, in response to Brown, Mississippi politician Tom P. Brady gave a speech (later expanded into a book) that became an informal manifesto for the Citizens' Council and other southern segregationists. In Black Monday, Brady wrote:

The public school is a socialized or politically monopolized institution, and suffers from weakness inherent in all monopolies. The only thing that prevents the public school from decaying completely is the fact that it is not a complete monopoly. Local control of the school gives the taxpayer and parent some say in its management. . . . Nothing will do more to better education in America than the breaking of the public school trust. . . .

This is not a proposal to abolish public schools. It is a proposal to put them into competition with free enterprise schools, so they can prove their worth. And this can be done by the remission to parents of the taxes they are compelled to pay to support politically-controlled schools, in an amount comparable to what they pay for private schooling. The method of effecting this remission—whether by deduction from income taxes or allowances from local levies—is a technical matter; if the principle established that a parent has the right to buy the educational service he deems best for his child, the fiscal problem of tax remission could be solved.⁹⁰Tom P. Brady, Black Monday (Winona, MS: Association of Citizens' Councils, 1954), 56; Brady, interview.

Similarly, the Alabama "freedom of choice" plan—the first segregation strategy report, published a year before Friedman's essay—was built on the foundational philosophy that when "members of a race are thereby deprived of access to a school attended by the other race, the result is attributable not to compulsion by the state but to the inconsistent choices of free citizens." As Alabama's Forney Johnston explained, under his segregation plan "the state is obliged to give effect to the desire of parents without compulsion against either side" or, as Milton Friedman wrote, without "either forced segregation or forced nonsegregation."

Johnston foresaw that his Alabama plan would lead to the same place Friedman envisioned—moving from a dual school system to a three-school system with "exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools." And Johnston was confident that, so long as white parents had access to vouchers for private schools and segregationist leaders established and implemented pupil placement, his plan would preserve segregation in some form for most white students in his state.⁹¹Johnston, "Schools, the Supreme Court, and the States' Power," 3–10.

Friedman's analysis not only echoed segregationist plans but helped to revive a new non-racial defense of segregation. Within four years of the publication of Friedman's essay, a large number of southern segregationists were advancing the theory of individual freedom as the leading rationale for vouchers and school choice. Perhaps the most prolific, active disciple of this libertarian approach was Virginia newspaperman Leon Dure, who converted Friedman's advocacies into a constitutional argument for freedom of association.

As tactics of massive resistance began to fail in Virginia, Dure urged state leaders in 1958 to adopt school vouchers and his principles of freedom of choice or freedom of association as the most effective means for limiting desegregation. The plan offered every child "of whatever color, of whatever means" a voucher (called a "scholarship"). Echoing Johnston and Friedman, Dure argued that "the South accepts the right of all people to associate, but it insists on the right of all people not to associate." On these terms, Dure wrote, "the southern white case is not compulsory segregation; it also is individual liberty," which he believed was protected in federal and state constitutions' guarantees of the right to assemble. Oliver Hill, the Virginia NAACP's leading attorney who had brought one of the original cases involved in Brown, told Dure that his proposal would do little more than mask racial discrimination.⁹²James H. Hershman and the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, "Leon S. Dure (1907–1993)," Encyclopedia Virginia, last modified October 6, 2016, https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Dure_Leon_S_1907-1993; Leon Dure, "Virginia's New Freedom," The Georgia Review 18, no. 1 (Spring 1964): 4; Leon Dure, "The New Southern Response: Anatomy of Two New Freedoms," The Georgia Review 15, no. 4 (Winter 1961): 401–409, 412; James H. Hershman Jr., "Massive Resistance Meets Its Match: The Emergence of a Pro-Public School Majority," in The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia, eds. Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 128. Dure seemed especially delighted that the US Supreme Court had recognized the "right of association" in a case where the Court prevented the Alabama attorney general's assault against the NAACP. See NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Patterson, 357 U.S. 449 (1958). Dure was also influenced by the writings of Virgil Blum, a political scientist at Marquette University who advocated for school vouchers for private schools, including parochial schools, on a philosophy of free-markets and freedom of religion. See Carl, Freedom of Choice, 91–92.

When Virginia's Perrow Commission issued its report, reversing the openly defiant tone and recommendations of earlier governors and legislatures, it embraced tactics of local control and freedom of association. As one politician wrote to Dure, there was now complete "agreement that the Freedom of Choice plan is . . . not based on segregation or integration but that any child in Virginia may obtain a tuition grant"—an equal opportunity to all children to freely disassociate.⁹³Hershman Jr., "Massive Resistance Meets Its Match," 127–130; C.F. Hicks to Leon Dure, June 22, 1961, Leon Dure Papers, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.

Dure also helped to convince white leaders in Georgia to reverse their approach for preserving segregated schools. Dure's frequent correspondence with John Sibley and others helped Governor Vandiver's administration understand how embracing "freedom of association" held the best promise for justifying and preserving virtually segregated schools. The exact language of the new state constitutional amendment approved by the white voters of Georgia stated: "Freedom from compulsory association at all levels of public education shall be preserved inviolate." During the same period, Louisiana's white leaders also attempted to rescue their strategies to resist desegregation through a similar approach.⁹⁴Hershman Jr., "Massive Resistance Meets Its Match," 127–128, including fn. 52; Carl, Freedom of Choice, 91–92. The Georgia amendment became Section VIII of Article VIII of the Georgia Constitution and remained in the constitution until removed twenty years later as a "vestige of the past," although many in the early 1980s had no notion of what the provision represented. See Committee to Revise Article VIII, "Transcripts of Meetings," 22 May 1980, State of Georgia Select Committee on Constitutional Revision, 1977–1981, vol. I, 9.

Just as Friedman adopted the term "mixed schools," the segregationists' favorite scare phrase for desegregated schools, die-hard segregationists adopted Friedman's language. In 1964, the Mississippi administrator of the Citizens' Council, William Simmons, abandoned his earlier primary defense of segregated schools as a matter of constitutional "state rights" and began condemning the monopoly of "government schools." In the Council's newsletter, echoing both Brady and Friedman, Simmons wrote that that public schools "can no longer be considered public—they have become government school systems." Afterwards, the White Citizens' Council focused primarily in Mississippi on developing a private school system of choice, as their leaders condemned government schools as "socialism in its purest form."⁹⁵Michael W. Fuquay, "Civil Rights and the Private School Movement in Mississippi, 1964–1971," History of Education Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 163–164, 178–179. Parroting Friedman, right wing radio and media personalities such as Neal Boortz and Sean Hannity have hammered for years at "government schools." Neal Boortz, "Government Idiocy in Action at Schools," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 8, 2009, https://www.ajc.com/news/opinion/neal-boortz-government-idiocy-action-schools/mQCmFIfvMZ36Nwc2t2YoDI/; "Sean Hannity Attacks Social Security and Public Schools as Ineffective Programs Exploiting People's Fears," Media Matters for America, January 3, 2019, https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2019/01/03/sean-hannity-attacks-social-security-and-public-schools-ineffective-programs-exploiting-peoples/222411.

Friedman never joined forces with segregationists, but he remained indifferent about how his libertarian economic arguments aided their strategies. Over several decades he continued to promote the concepts and framework that segregationists in the late 1950s and early 1960s believed were their best chance and best arguments. Long after southerners abandoned their segregationist rhetoric, Friedman's advocacy shaped how future scholars, advocates, and the general public would see vouchers and "freedom of choice" as acts of consumerism rather than segregationist tactics. "For whites moving into the new suburbs," writes historian James Hardman Jr., the term "carried the popular consumer phrase 'choice,' and gave the impression that simple economic choice, not morally questionable racial prejudice, was behind the segregation in their communities."⁹⁶James Hardman Jr., "Virginia on the Cusp of Change," in Historians in Service of a Better South, eds. Robert J. Norrell and Andrew H. Myers (Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books, 2017), 80. It was a redefinition of choice that most of the South's private schools, even those started as "segregation academies," came to embrace and propagate as they persisted and expanded in the decades that followed.

Challenging Tax Benefits of Segregated Private Schools

Civil rights organizations recognized during the 1960s the danger that governmental support posed in helping to build segregated systems of private schools even after the courts had dismantled voucher programs. These groups pushed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to deny tax-exempt applications of "segregation academies." This federal tax status enabled whites to reduce their taxable income when contributing to racially exclusionary private schools. But, in 1967, the IRS announced that it would grant tax deductions for contributions to any southern private school, even self-avowed segregation academies, because "the school is private and does not have such degree of involvement with the political subdivision as has been determined by the courts to constitute State action for constitutional purposes."⁹⁷Green v. Kennedy, 309 F. Supp. 1127 (1970) at 1130.

The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law sued the IRS in 1969 and obtained a court order requiring it to "affirmatively determine" that a private school in Mississippi is not "operated on a racially segregated basis as an alternative to white students seeking to avoid desegregated public schools." The three-judge federal court found that the "tax benefits under the Internal Revenue Code mean a substantial and significant support by the Government to the segregated private school pattern."⁹⁸Green, 309 F. Supp. 1127 (1970) aff'd sub nom, Cannon v. Green, 398 U.S. 956 (1970); Eileen Shanahan, "Schools in South May Avoid Taxes," New York Times, August 3, 1967; Eileen Shanahan, "Private Schools That Bar Blacks to Lose Tax Aid," New York Times, July 11, 1970. After its ruling was affirmed without opinion by the US Supreme Court, the court issued a permanent injunction restricting the IRS from granting a tax exemption to any and all Mississippi private schools that applied for the tax benefit.⁹⁹Green v. Connally, 330 F. Supp. 1150 (1971), aff'd sub nom, Coit v. Green, 404 U.S. 997 (1971).

Afterwards, the IRS revoked the tax exemptions of more than one hundred private schools and scrutinized applications for tax exemption from others; however, it took eight years before the agency proposed specific administrative regulations to implement the non-discrimination policy adopted in 1970. During this time, the IRS faced a backlash from private schools and their supporters, including southern members of Congress, and, in this political environment, went back and forth with proposed administrative procedures and congressional hearings. When the Nixon administration issued final guidelines, the Lawyers Committee, the US Civil Rights Commission, and others criticized the IRS's rules, procedures, and enforcement as inadequate.¹⁰⁰"Proposed Rules on Tax Exemptions for Private Schools Eased by IRS," New York Times, February 10, 1979; IRS Tax Exemptions and Segregated Private Schools: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 97th Cong., 2d Sess. 39 (1982); also see Tax-Exempt Status of Private Schools: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives, 99th Cong., 2d Sess. 39 (1985).

Despite the regulation's shortcomings, a significant number of religious private schools in the South objected to the new IRS rules on the grounds of religious freedom, claiming that the government could not oversee their operations under any circumstances, even if they engaged in practices of segregation and racial discrimination. In 1983, the US Supreme Court disagreed and upheld the application of the IRS rules on religious schools in a case involving Bob Jones University in South Carolina. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote that "the Government has a fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education—discrimination that prevailed, with official approval, for the first 165 years of this Nation's constitutional history. That governmental interest substantially outweighs whatever burden denial of tax benefits places on petitioners' exercise of their religious beliefs."¹⁰¹Julia Malone, "Those Tax Breaks for Segregated Schools Stir Storm," Christian Science Monitor, January 14, 1982; Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983); Strat Douthat, "Some All-White Academies Struggle," Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 18, 1986.

After Bob Jones, the IRS required tax-exempt private schools to demonstrate non-discriminatory policies and operations. But the requirements proved minimal—involving little more than adoption of a policy statement by the school's founders or board, publication of the policy (in brochures and catalogues), and some way of demonstrating that the school had abandoned total, absolute segregation.¹⁰²Terry Berkovsky, Andrew Megosh, Debra Cowen, and David Daume, "Private School Update," 2000 EO CPE Text, Internal Revenue Service, 2000, www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopicn00.pdf. The IRS rules suggest that a school must evidence that "it currently enrolls a meaningful number of racial minority students, or that its promotional activities and recruiting efforts are reasonably designed to inform students of all racial segments in the general communities within the area of the availability of the school." But, as a matter of practice, citing language in the Bob Jones case that denial of tax exemptions should be made "only where there is no doubt that the organization's activities violate fundamental public policy," the IRS and the US Tax Court has denied tax status only when a school maintains total segregation. See Calhoun Academy v. Commissioner, 94 T.C. 284 (1990).

Private schools in the South began to publish non-discrimination statements and many began a slow process of admitting a token number of Black or other students of color. It was a replay of the most effective tactics that segregationists had deployed in the public schools several years earlier. This change did little more than end all-white segregation in order to sustain virtual segregation. The practices satisfied the IRS requirement and allowed subsequent federal administrations to claim that private schools had shown "clear and specific factual evidence" of non-discrimination.

The private school movement grew rapidly. After the 1969 Supreme Court ruling that "every school district is to terminate dual school systems at once" in Mississippi,¹⁰³"Private Schools on Rise in the South," New York Amsterdam News, November 8, 1969; Kitty Terjen, "The Segregation Academy Movement," in The South and Her Children: School Desegregation, 1970–1971, ed. Robert E. Anderson Jr. (Atlanta, GA: Southern Regional Council, 1971), 69–71; "Civil Rights: Segregation: Federal Income Tax Exemptions and Deductions: The Validity of Tax Benefits to Private Segregated Schools," Michigan Law Review 68, no. 7 (June 1970): 1410–1414; Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 396 U.S. 19 (1969). white parents responded. From 1965 to 1980, private school enrollment increased by more than 200,000 students across the South—with about two-thirds of that growth occurring in the states that had created voucher programs.¹⁰⁴Steve Suitts, Race and Ethnicity in a New Era of Public Funding of Private Schools: Private School Enrollment in the South and the Nation (Atlanta, GA: Southern Education Foundation, 2015), 7–8.

There were no government surveys reporting race or ethnicity for private school enrollment at the start of the 1980s, but the Southern Regional Council, which monitored the movement after Brown, estimated that virtually segregated private schools in the eleven states of the former Confederacy enrolled between 675,000 and 750,000 white students. When computed with overall enrollment data for those states, these estimates suggest that somewhere between 65 and 75 percent of the private school's white students were virtually segregated by the early 1980s.¹⁰⁵Hearings on IRS Tax Exemptions and Segregated Private Schools, Before the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Committee of the Judiciary, 97th Cong. (1982), 69; Digest of Education Statistics, 1981 (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, 1981).

Overall, the southern states' white flight from public schools in the wake of desegregation from 1940 through 1980 helped to quadruple the number of students attending segregated private schools. As Jason Morgan Ward aptly observed, "[T]he end of the Jim Crow era rendered segregation, like white supremacy before it, a doomed battle cry. But it was not a dead proposition."¹⁰⁶Jason Morgan Ward, Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 183.

The "Post-Racialist" Standards Movement

Most of the South's private schools that started during massive resistance survived without vouchers—but with federal tax exemptions. Many increased their enrollments and resources as they embraced the old-line segregationists' non-racial language and reasoning. This transformation of stated purpose from preserving segregation to meeting children's needs for a quality education through choice involved an initial phase when headmasters and other promoters of private schools struggled to abandon their original meaning and adopt a new, non-racial script about motives and purposes.

Dr. T. E. Wannamaker, for example, founder of the South Carolina Independent School Association, explained in 1966 the reasons for his organization and schools: "We're here because we have convictions and we're going to stay. It's not token integration we're concerned about, but the effects mass integration will have on our schools in the future." Earlier, Wannamaker had described himself as "an old-time conservative. I believe it's heredity first and environment second. Many (Negroes) are little more than field hands." In 1970, he became the first leader of the Southern Independent School Association.¹⁰⁷Terjen, "The Segregation Academy Movement," 76; Margaret Rose Gladney, "I'll Take My Stand: The Southern Segregation Academy Movement" (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 1974), 80. An Alabama private school advocate told a journalist in 1969, "We really didn't do it on account of segregation. We done it for a better education."¹⁰⁸Kitty Griffith, "New 'Segregation Academies' Flourish in the South," South Today, October 1969, 1.

By the 1970s, as many public schools in the South were being desegregated for the first time, promoters of private schools were developing a more consistent line of reasoning: the schools may have begun over the "racial question," but were now operating to provide "quality education." "I've been fighting to take the race question out of the Independent Schools," a member of the Louisiana Private School Association said in 1973. "I've run a segregated school for 33 years. . . . I want nice people in my school. We're trying to sell quality education."¹⁰⁹Gladney, "I'll Take My Stand," 80.

The headmaster of Prince Edward Academy (which five years earlier had been denied the continued benefit of vouchers and tax credits due to racial discrimination) told a researcher: "This school came into being because we love our children and want the best education in a controlled environment." A leader of Louisiana's private schools expanded this new language of transition: "I think people would be able to accept integration if it did not mean lowering of academic and moral standards. But they know it means it; therefore, they resort to private schools." And the head of the Alabama Independent School Association told researcher Rose Gladney in 1972: "Our primary interest is educating people basically of like learning capacities. We adopt a school system to meet their needs. . . . The real historical importance of the movement is not one of segregation or integration. It's academically important."

It was left to a student in one of the private schools that Gladney visited to be explicit about the white supremacist message he heard from administrators, promoters, and perhaps family: "Niggers are dumb; can't learn. And when you have a majority of low standard in a school, they will pull all the rest down. It is not really a race issue, just a matter of lowering standards."¹¹⁰Gladney, 99–126.

Many private schools operated by churches also began to justify their existence through the imperative of religious education. "Religion is an integral part of the Independent School movement," said the director of the Louisiana Independent School Association. "We're developing a pseudo-parochial system where there's a fixed religion we feel we want."¹¹¹Gladney, 134–136. These often became Christian schools that turned "in every particular around Bible teachings and interpretations."¹¹²David Nevin and Robert E. Bills, The Schools that Fear Built: Segregationist Academies in the South (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1976), 61.

Whatever the non-racial rationale—economic freedom, better education, religious instruction—the vast majority of the South's private schools were established when it became clear locally that federal law would require some form of desegregation. By the start of the 1980s, the character of most of these private schools was set. "These are schools for whites," wrote the authors of The Schools that Fear Built in 1976. "The common thread that runs through them all, Christian, secular, or otherwise, is that they provide white ground to which Blacks are admitted only on the school's terms if at all."¹¹³Nevin and Bills, 11.

For God and Private Schools

Following the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, private schools throughout the nation received federal support and endorsement as never before. The Reagan administration justified proposed federal assistance to private schools as a means for advancing high quality education along with diversity and pluralism. The administration waffled on whether to support Bob Jones University's claim that religion gave it the right to discriminate on the basis of race even while receiving tax exemption. "I was under the impression," Reagan said, "that the problem of segregated schools had been settled, that we have desegregation."¹¹⁴Catherine A. Lugg, "For God and Country: Conservative Ideology and Federal School Policy during the First Term of President Ronald Reagan" (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1995), 105–111, 121.

In 1981, Reagan's secretary of education testified in support of tax credit vouchers for private schools as "an expansion of educational opportunities for all Americans." In 1983, Reagan became the first president to send Congress legislation for federal tax credits to finance private schools. The proposed "Educational Opportunity and Equity Act," the administration argued, would benefit a wide range of students, including low-income children of color, and more broadly would "promote diversity in education and the freedom of individuals to take advantage of it, and to nurture the pluralism in American society which this diversity fosters." School segregation was a thing of the past, said Reagan, and private schools were the engines of diversity.¹¹⁵Lugg, "For God and Country," 132; Julia Malone, "Drive Begins for Tuition Tax Credit: Reagan Education Secretary Argues for Private School Help," Christian Science Monitor, June 8, 1981; Julia Malone, "Bid to Allow Tax Credits for Private-School Tuition Awaits Next Session of Congress," Christian Science Monitor, November 16, 1983; David E. Rosenbaum, "Tuition Credit Seen in Reagan Plan," New York Times, May 27, 1985.

Reagan linked his tax credit bill with an imperative to return religion to schools. "I don't think God should ever have been expelled from the classroom," he declared at a news conference in which he defended his support of private schools, including religious schools. The president's remarks echoed a long line of southern segregationists who had justified the growth of private schools on religious grounds, especially after 1961 when the US Supreme Court outlawed a New York statute that required public school students to recite an official Christian prayer.¹¹⁶Lugg, 126–127; Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962).

White churches started private academies in the wake of court-ordered desegregation, with religion and segregation often intermingling in the schools' stated purpose. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, many white clergy supported closing the public schools, their churches provided white-only space, and their curricula were built around church teachings. "Our people—supporters of the Independent schools—are convinced God is behind us," asserted the head of the Louisiana segregated private schools in the early 1970s. "If you don't include that aspect, you're missing a good part of the motivation behind this movement. People believe wholeheartedly that God doesn't want us to mix."¹¹⁷Gladney, "I'll Take My Stand," 134.

Looking across the South in 1974, Rose Gladney, a young scholar whose family had been actively involved in setting up a segregation academy in Homer, Louisiana, saw how most adults involved in private schools had merged racial segregation, quality education, and religion into one rationale. "The teachings of the academies," Gladney sadly observed, "hope to ensure that there will be people who think there is a need because they will have been taught, for at least another generation, that love of God, love of their white skins, and love of quality education cannot be separated."¹¹⁸Goodman, Sanctuaries for Tradition, 9–12; Gladney, 137.

President Reagan transformed a "love of white skin" into a color-blind doctrinal belief that individual freedom of choice in schooling created diversity and opportunity for all in an era without segregation. Reagan became the nation's primary voice for why and how government should support private schools, and, as a former actor and California governor, his own past and national leadership obscured the original role and rationales of southern white supremacists from public memory.

In 1984, in re-nominating Reagan, the Republican Party's education platform included support for the right to pray in public schools, opposition to busing for desegregation, passage of tuition tax credits for private schools, and redirecting billions of federal funds dedicated to assist low-income students in public schools into vouchers for private schools. It was the first time a national political party endorsed school vouchers. In his State of the Union address fourteen months later, President Reagan declared: "We must continue the advance by supporting discipline in our schools, vouchers that give parents freedom of choice; and we must give back to our children their lost right to acknowledge God in their classrooms."¹¹⁹Lugg, "For God and Country," 212–213; "Republican Party Platform of 1984," The American Presidency Project, accessed March 8, 2019, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1984; Ronald Reagan, the annual State of the Union address (speech, Washington, DC, February 4, 1986), The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-before-joint-session-congress-the-state-the-union. The first time a national political party's platform endorsed tax credits for private schools was in 1972 at the Republican National Convention. It was the first time a US president expressly advocated for school vouchers before a joint session of Congress. Without attribution, the views and tools of southern segregationists had become the official position of the national Republican Party and the Reagan presidency.

No to "Racial-Mixing," Yes to Vouchers

At the end of the Reagan administration, almost thirty-five years after Brown, enrollment in the South's private schools continued to grow in absence of any significant new government financial support.¹²⁰The next federal legislation providing new tax benefits to private schools was the Coverdell Education Account created in 1997 during the Clinton administration. It permits annual contributions up to $500 to earn tax-free funds to cover expenses in college or in elementary and secondary private schools. The accounts have restrictions on income and uses for K-12 private school tuition. Ironically, First Lady Hillary Clinton's first job out of law school involved investigating discriminatory practices of southern private schools. See Amy Chozick, "How Hillary Clinton Went Undercover to Examine Race in Education," New York Times, December 27, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/12/28/us/politics/how-hillary-clinton-went-undercover-to-examine-race-in-education.html. Some schools created in defiance of desegregation struggled and failed, but most survived by embracing other stated purposes for their existence and by maintaining their tax-exempt status—a benefit that required most to enroll just enough children of color to avoid total segregation while preserving a culture of "schools for whites."¹²¹See, for example, John Egerton, "Hammond Academy: A Rebel Yell, Fading," in Shades of Gray: Dispatches from the Modern South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 237–248.

Since the 1960s, white flight from urban public systems such as Atlanta's had maintained and extended segregated patterns in private tax-exempt schools and in suburban public schools. On both sides of the Mason–Dixon line, many white middle-class parents had escaped the mandates of school desegregation by moving into suburban neighborhoods where residential patterns of racial isolation and economics provided virtually segregated public schools. This suburban constituency helped to sustain Nixon and Reagan policies in blocking inter-district desegregation plans.¹²²See Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 295–324.

Earlier segregationists had foreseen the importance of district lines. In 1955, Forney Johnston, one of the architects of the Alabama three-school "freedom of choice" plan, identified "ordinary and customary geographical districting" as a primary tool for defeating Brown. His strategies cast a very long shadow. Examining school data from 1988 to 1990, a national study concluded "that white families are fleeing public schools with large concentrations of poor minority schoolchildren. In addition, the clearest flight appears to be away from poor black schoolchildren."¹²³Robert W. Fairlie and Alexandra M. Resch, "Is There 'White Flight' into Private Schools? Evidence from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey," Review of Economics and Statistics 84 (2002): 21–33.

The patterns persisted. Based on data from 1998, scholars Sean Reardon and Jon Yun found that the "South ha[d] the greatest segregation between the public and private sector of any region—white and Asian private school enrollment rates are more than three times greater than Black rates in the South, and more than double Latino rates."¹²⁴Sean F. Reardon and John T. Yun, Private School Racial Enrollments and Segregation (Cambridge, MA: The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, 2002), 22, https://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/private-school-racial-enrollments-and-segregation/Private_Schools.pdf. They also concluded that "the strongest predictor of white private enrollment is the proportion of Black students in the area."¹²⁵Reardon and Yun, Private School Racial Enrollments and Segregation, 22.

Drawing upon the 2000 Census, Duke University scholar Charles Clotfelter found that private schools were continuing to foster racial separation and isolation in K–12 education in the South, especially in non-metropolitan areas: "Combined with the general stability or growth of private enrollments in the South since 1970, these findings suggest that private schools were playing much the same role in non-metropolitan counties of the South in 1999–2000 as they were shortly after desegregation."¹²⁶Charles T. Clotfelter, "Private Schools, Segregation, and the Southern States," Peabody Journal of Education 79, no. 2 (2004): 74–97.

During this time, Milwaukee and Cleveland became limited, urban experiments in voucher programs in northern states, as some white liberals suggested that vouchers might offer a way to break up what they came to believe were intractable problems faced by low-income public schoolchildren. It was also the era when state governments began establishing programs to finance attendance in private schools, especially through tax credit vouchers. This new initiative reached into every part of the nation, but mostly the South, including all of the states where segregationists had established vouchers.¹²⁷Harry Brighthouse, "Egalitarian Liberals and School Choice," Politics & Society 24, no. 4 (1996): 457–486; James S. Coleman, "Some Points on Choice in Education," Sociology of Education 65, no. 4 (1992): 260–262. For a clear, deep understanding of this recent emergence of tax credits to finance enrollment at private schools, see Kevin G. Welner, NeoVouchers: The Emergence of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Schooling (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

The US Supreme Court began to bless these developments. As early as 1973, Justice William Rehnquist became the first member of the Court to issue a dissent from a school desegregation case relying on the precedent of Brown. In a case concerning school segregation in Denver, he condemned the Court's opinion for requiring a school district to advance desegregation—employing the old scare word, "racial mixing"—where there were "neutrally drawn boundary lines" that sustained segregation.¹²⁸Keyes v. School Dist. No. 1, Denver, 413 US 189 (1973), 258; Justin Driver, The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind (New York: Pantheon, 2018), 278–283. As Driver notes, Justice Rehnquist as a Supreme Court law clerk had argued while Brown was being considered that the Court should not overrule Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), which had sanctioned state-sponsored segregation. Barely a year after the Bob Jones decision held that religious private schools could not hold a tax exemption and discriminate on the basis of race, the Supreme Court slammed shut the courthouse door on those seeking to challenge the IRS's weak enforcement. Parents of twenty-five Black public school children sued the IRS, charging that its standards and procedures were inadequate to fulfill its obligation to deny tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory private schools. In 1984, the US Supreme Court held that the parents had no standing to bring such a suit.¹²⁹Allen v. Wright, 468 US 737 (1984).

With the appointment of other justices across more than three decades, the Court increasingly refused to require school districts to use any method of desegregation that proved effective in dismantling the dynamics of separation. By 2007, the Court had turned Brown on its head as a precedent for backing public school districts' voluntary efforts to desegregate. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Brown commanded school districts to avoid using race as a consideration, even for the purpose of recognizing and diminishing public school segregation. "When it comes to using race to assign children to schools," Roberts wrote without doubt or irony, "history will be heard."¹³⁰Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, 551 US 701 (2007), 2744; Driver, The Schoolhouse Gate, 293–308.

As the Court stymied effective strategies for desegregating public schools, Justice Anthony Kennedy led it in unleashing private schools from constitutional restraints for receiving taxpayer funds. Arizona's program of tax credit vouchers allowed individuals and corporations to give tax dollars to private schools instead of paying them to the state—a scheme similar to those the Court had outlawed in prior cases, including in Prince Edward County, Virginia, in the 1960s. Kennedy, in a majority opinion, held that tax credit vouchers did not involve public funds or any state action that the Bill of Rights would prohibit. "While the State, at the outset, affords the opportunity to create and contribute," Kennedy wrote, "the tax credit system is implemented by private action and with no state intervention."¹³¹Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, 131 U.S. 1436 (2011) at 1448. Justice Kennedy's opinion considered whether the First Amendment's clause requiring separation of church and state, by way of application to the states through the 14^th Amendment, prohibited providing state tax credit vouchers to religious schools.

With few federal restraints, legislatures have expanded these programs or established new forms of vouchers, such as educational savings accounts that deposit state and local per-pupil expenditures into a personal account for a child's parents to use toward private schooling or to supplement home-schooling.

Patterns of virtual segregation have stayed remarkably high in private schools. As recently as 2012, 43 percent of the nation's private school students attended virtually all-white schools—schools where white students comprise 90 percent or more of the enrollment. That year, half of the fifty states had a majority of private school students attending virtually segregated schools.¹³²Suitts, Race and Ethnicity in a New Era of Public Funding of Private Schools, 36–39.

Despite white flight, virtual segregation for white students was far more substantial in private schools than in public schools, especially in the South. In 2012, 63 percent of white students in South Carolina's private schools were virtually segregated compared with only 5 percent of white students in South Carolina's public schools. Private schools were almost twelve times more likely to enroll white students in virtually segregated schools in 2012 than were the state's public schools.

In Mississippi, white students attending private schools were almost four times more likely to be in virtually segregated schools than public school students. More than seven out of ten white students in Mississippi's private schools attended schools where 90 percent or more of the enrollment was white. In the state's public schools, the rate was 15 percent. In Louisiana, 52 percent of the white students in private schools were virtually segregated in 2012, but only 14 percent for white public school students.

This new era of vouchers emerged as public schools across the nation experienced a substantial increase in the numbers of low-income students and students of color. Completing a trend that began in the 1980s, low-income students (those eligible for free or reduced lunch) became a majority of the South's public schoolchildren in 2006; in 2009, the South's public schools also had a majority of students of color. By 2013, more than 50 percent of the nation's public schoolchildren were from low-income families and almost half were children of color.¹³³Steve Suitts, A New Majority: Low Income Students in the South's Public Schools (Atlanta, GA: Southern Education Foundation, 2007), https://www.southerneducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/A-New-Majority-Report-Final.pdf; Steve Suitts, A New Diverse Majority: Students of Color in the South's Public Schools (Atlanta, GA: Southern Education Foundation, 2010), https://www.southerneducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/A-New-Diverse-Majority-2010.pdf; Steve Suitts, A New Majority: Low Income Students Now a Majority in the Nation's Public Schools (Atlanta, GA: Southern Education Foundation, 2015), https://www.southerneducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/New-Majority-Update-Bulletin.pdf; Shaila Dewan, "Southern Schools Mark Two Majorities," New York Times, January 6, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/us/07south.html; Lyndsey Layton, "Majority of US Public School Students Are in Poverty," Washington Post, January 16, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/majority-of-us-public-school-students-are-in-poverty/2015/01/15/df7171d0-9ce9-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html.

Changing patterns, most evident in the nation's cities, spread to the suburbs. In 2011, 40 percent of public schoolchildren in the nation's suburban districts were low-income; the rates were 45 percent or higher in suburbs in the West and the South. During the 2000s, the number of suburban poor exceeded the number in the nation's cities for the first time. Similarly, with a huge increase in Hispanic children, suburban school districts began educating a student population in which students of color comprised more than 40 percent. At the same time, African Americans moved into suburban counties surrounding central cities (such as Atlanta) in record numbers.¹³⁴Suitts, A New Majority: Low Income Students in the South and Nation (Atlanta, GA: Southern Education Foundation, 2013), 5–6, 15, https://www.southerneducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/New-Majority-2013.pdf; Elizabeth Kneebone, "The Changing Geography of US Poverty," The Brookings Institution, February 15, 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/the-changing-geography-of-us-poverty/; Richard Fry, "Sharp Growth in Suburban Minority Enrollment Yields Modest Gains in School Diversity" (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, March 31, 2009), http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/03/31/sharp-growth-in-suburban-minority-enrollmentbryields-modest-gains-in-school-diversity/; Karen Pooley, "Segregation's New Geography: The Atlanta Metro Region, Race, and the Declining Prospects for Upward Mobility," Southern Spaces, April 15, 2015, https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2015/segregations-new-geography-atlanta-metro-region-race-and-declining-prospects-upward-mobility.

This new diversity in suburban school-age populations did not result in major increases in integrated schools. Instead, old habits resurfaced that involved shifting residential segregation, white flight into exurbs, localities attempting to secede from majority-Black public school districts, and the states' rebirth of vouchers for private schools. Legislatures failed to increase public school funding to meet the huge challenges of educating a majority of schoolchildren who are low-income and non-white, especially in the South and West where most voucher programs have emerged.¹³⁵Don Boyd and Lucy Dadayan, "State and Local Governments Reshape Their Finances," The Book of the States 2016 (Lexington, KY: The Council of State Governments, 2016), http://knowledgecenter.csg.org/kc/system/files/Boyd%20Dadayan%202016.pdf; Nikole Hannah-Jones, "The Resegregation of Jefferson County," New York Times, September 6, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/magazine/the-resegregation-of-jefferson-county.html; Suitts, A New Majority: Low Income Students in the South and Nation, 8–13.

New Token Students of Choice

Overall trends have obscured a small, inclusive change in the color line for admission to private schools amid a more pronounced, underlying pattern of racial exclusion. Frequently, white private schools have chosen Asian or Pacific Island children to break their completely segregated enrollment in order to reach a token level of diversity for an IRS tax exemption. These students have family ancestries from countries including China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, India, the Philippines, and various islands of the Pacific. In 2012, Asian American students comprised 5.8 percent of the nation's private school enrollment—a number slightly above the percentage of the Asian school-age population. Only white students and students with Asian ancestries were in private schools in numbers that exceeded or generally matched their representation in the school-age population. In forty-two states, the percentage of Asian students in private schools exceeded the state's percentage of school-age Asian children.¹³⁶Suitts, Race and Ethnicity in a New Era of Public Funding of Private Schools, 17, 27–29. Reardon and Yun also found that Asian students were over-represented in private schools in 1998. One other group of school-age children nationally matched their representation in private schools in 2012: students who self-identified as "of two or more races."

This development stands in sharp contrast to the history of discrimination that Asians have experienced, especially in California and the South, and makes Asian students stand out among students of color attending private schools. The explanation for this shift seems grounded in at least three factors: since the late 1980s, Asian households have had the nation's highest median income (more than $11,500 above non-Hispanic white household income in 2012); since at least the 1990s, Asian students have had the nation's highest scores on standardized tests; and more than three generations after World War II, some whites may find the lighter skin color of Asian Americans more acceptable according to racist hierarchies.¹³⁷See Joyce Kuo, "Excluded, Segregated and Forgotten: A Historical View of the Discrimination of Chinese Americans in Public Schools," Asian American Law Journal 5 (1998): 181–212, https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1044&context=aalj; Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2012, Current Population Reports (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2013), 5, https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p60-245.pdf; Lauren Musu-Gillette, Cristobal de Brey, Joel McFarland, William Hussar, William Sonnenberg, and Sidney Wilkinson-Flicker, Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups 2017 (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2017), 46–52, https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2017/2017051.pdf; Herbert J. Gans, "'Whitening' and the Changing American Racial Hierarchy," Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 9, no. 2 (2012): 267–279.

Asian children usually comprise a small minority of a private school's enrollment. Their presence often serves to increase a school's performance on college entrance exams—enabling schools to promote evidence of quality education while avoiding an all-white enrollment that could jeopardize their tax exemption. Asian Americans' admission, however, does not change the reality of most private schools as "schools for whites."¹³⁸Suitts, Race and Ethnicity in a New Era of Public Funding of Private Schools, 28. The two states with the largest percentage of Asian and Pacific Islander school-age children, Hawaii and Alaska, have an under-representation of these children in private schools—in fact, the largest gaps among the 50 states in 2012.

Increased token admission of Asian children obscures the fact that the patterns of virtual segregation and exclusion in private schools are considerably larger for under-represented racial and ethnic groups: African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans. In 2012, two-thirds of white students in US private schools attended virtually "exclusionary schools"—schools where African American, Hispanic, and Native American children comprised 10 percent or less of total enrollment. In thirty of the fifty states, 70 percent or more of all white students attending private schools were in such schools.¹³⁹Suitts, Race and Ethnicity in a New Era of Public Funding of Private Schools, 40–42, 64–65. Hispanics and Native Americans have their own linked histories of discrimination in education. See Victoria-María MacDonald, "Demanding their Rights: The Latino Struggle for Educational Access and Equity," in American Latinos and the Making of the United States: A Theme Study, National Park Service, 2013, https://www.nps.gov/articles/latinothemeeducation.htm; Richard R. Valencia, "The Mexican American Struggle for Equal Educational Opportunity in Mendez v. Westminster: Helping to Pave the Way for Brown v. Board of Education," Teachers College Record 107, no. 3 (March 2005): 389–423; David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); Theda Perdue, "The Legacy of Indian Removal," Journal of Southern History 78, no. 1 (February 2012): 3–36.

This "exclusionary" pattern is not unique to private schools. Some public schools also have extremely low rates of enrollment of African American, Hispanic, and Native American children. But, private schools in forty-seven of the fifty states have far higher rates of this kind of "exclusionary" enrollment than do public schools. In twenty-six of these states, the rates of "exclusionary" schooling in private schools were more than 25 percentage points higher than rates in public schools. The largest differences were in southern states. For example, 84 percent of white students in South Carolina private schools attended schools where African American, Hispanic, and Native American students together comprised only 10 percent or less of the private school enrollment. But only 11 percent of the white students attending public schools in South Carolina were in similarly "exclusionary" schools.

Each southern state that adopted voucher schemes in the era of massive resistance to Brown, except for Virginia, appears on the top ten list for exclusionary schooling, and Virginia was not far away. Like Virginia, Arkansas (where vouchers were tried temporarily in Little Rock) also had a gap of 34 percentage points. All southern states, except West Virginia, had a gap of 20 percentage points or larger. In West Virginia, the gap was 10 percentage points.

With the re-emergence of vouchers, the overwhelming majority of white students attending the nation's private schools continue to attend "schools for whites." The geographies where segregationists invented and implemented vouchers to resist Brown remain the places with greatest patterns of "exclusionary" private schools—assuring their white students that they do not attend school with any more than a token number of under-represented students of color. In 2012, the percentage of white students attending "exclusionary" private schools in the South exceeded the percentage in similar public schools in the South by 37 percentage points. This gap was double that of the rest of the nation.

Lingering Facets of Jim Crow Segregation

States that adopted the first voucher plans in the 1950s and 1960s were forced by federal courts to abandon the laws and practices of complete separation of the races in schools and other public places. Yet Jim Crow laws were far from the only manifestations of segregation. The "better citizens" (as upper-class white supremacists were often called) were willing to accept token desegregation because of their belief that white supremacy and racial superiority did not place each and every white person always above "a negro of intelligence and good character."¹⁴⁰Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 107; Thomas J. Woofter, Southern Race Progress (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1957), 133–137. In the Jim Crow era, many southern industrialists believed in white supremacy but did not always find absolute segregation an economic advantage for their companies. See Suitts, Hugo Black of Alabama, 246–250, for a précis of this condition in Birmingham.

The practice of permitting virtual segregation or token desegregation was widespread before and during Jim Crow. Often, the all-white Democratic primary was not all-white. "In county after county," V. O. Key Jr. wrote in Southern Politics in State and Nation, "a few Negroes have voted for many years in Democratic primaries conducted under white-primary rules." The practice of holding virtually segregated primaries was particularly common where African Americans comprised a small proportion of the population.¹⁴¹Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, 620. Of course, attempting to vote in a southern state's Democratic primary was dangerous or deadly for African Americans. Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 119–121; Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (New York: Bantam Books, 1978), 285–294; also, listen to Hank Klibanoff, Buried Truths, 2018, podcast, https://www.wabe.org/shows/buried-truths.

Similarly, southern justice was segregated, and "after 1900, essentially no Blacks sat on southern juries." But, as civil rights and civil liberties attorney Charles ("Chuck") Morgan noted in the 1960s, "[T]he names of a token number of Negroes are often included on jury rolls." These token Blacks—hand-picked by white jury commissioners from the few African Americans deemed acceptable—seldom served since they could be struck by prosecutors or defense lawyers.¹⁴²Michael J. Klarman, Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 14; Charles Morgan Jr., "Segregated Justice," in Southern Justice, ed. Leon Friedman (New York: Random House, 1965), 159–161.

In their analysis of the South's segregationist leaders during massive resistance, historians Matthew Lassiter and James Hershman characterize segregationists as either caste-based or class-based. The caste-based defended complete segregation or exclusion on the belief that "all black people were inherently inferior to all white people." Understanding that absolute segregation was unnecessary to maintain a rule of white supremacy, the class-based segregationist (sometimes described as "moderate segregationists") conceded that "perhaps a few black people could be accepted into white institutions."¹⁴³Hershman, "Massive Resistance Meets Its Match," 105.

The ambitions of politicians such as George Wallace and Ernest Vandiver muddled the division between caste and class, but the contrasting definitions illustrate that segregation was not defined as only a total, absolute exclusion of all African Americans or other people of color from the spaces—including schools—occupied by whites. Southern laws were often written that way, but reality was different. Affluent leaders of the most successful strategies for defeating desegregation demonstrated a class-based acceptance of virtual segregation and worked to preserve it. They anticipated the long-term possibility of ending absolute segregation and empowering leaders of local schools to justify virtual segregation through non-racial language, traditional school attendance boundaries, and neutral-sounding educational admissions standards, although it is doubtful that many realized how powerful class-based terms would resonate in suburban desegregation politics decades later.¹⁴⁴Hershman, 104–106; Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 13–14, 26­–29, 322–323.

The layered dimensions of segregation and exclusion are also illuminated by school segregation laws outside the South—in states that practiced de jure segregation well into the twentieth century—including the law invalidated by the Brown decision in Topeka, Kansas.¹⁴⁵Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 98 F. Supp. 797 (1951).

All the attention drawn to the South's massive resistance eclipsed notice of how the Kansas school segregation law differed by excluding Black children from all white schools only in cities with a population over 15,000. The Kansas statute allowed boards of education in larger municipalities to decide if they should establish absolute segregation in those places where the number of African American children might exceed virtual or token segregation in a public school. In all other areas of Kansas with small Black populations, demographic patterns assured an acceptable level of virtual segregation.

Kansas population data illustrates how the law preserved virtual segregation in most of the state and absolute segregation where there was more than a token number of Black children. From 1890 through 1950, Kansas's Black population never reached 4 percent of the state's total, with the vast majority of Black Kansans living in and around a few cities. In 1950, there were 73,158 African Americans among more than 1.9 million Kansans. Almost three-fourths of the state's Black population resided in five counties where the state's largest cities were empowered to enact total segregation. All but one did. Elsewhere in Kansas in 1950, twenty thousand African Americans were spread among 1.3 million whites across one hundred counties, ensuring the maintenance of virtual segregation without the force of law.¹⁴⁶Murray, State Laws on Race and Color, 161; Institute for Social and Environmental Studies, Kansas Statistical Abstract 1976 (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1977), 5–9, 23, http://ipsr.ku.edu/ksdata/ksah/KSA12.pdf. There was a failed legislative effort in 1921 to change the nineteenth-century Kansas law to allow towns as small as two thousand to establish absolute segregation in schools. Thom Rosenblum, "The Segregation of Topeka's Public School System, 1879–1951," National Park Service, last modified April 10, 2015, https://www.nps.gov/brvb/learn/historyculture/topekasegregation.htm.

In 1951, when Linda Brown's father sued to desegregate her school system, Topeka (pop. 80,000) required absolute segregation in neighborhood elementary schools, undoing the virtual segregation that demographic trends assured to most white parents elsewhere in Kansas. In other words, Kansas's law had the same intent as southern laws—to maintain some form of segregation in all cases—although it did not establish absolute segregation as the default. That was implemented only when virtual segregation could not be maintained in practice.

Arizona also had a school segregation law—in some public high schools—triggered whenever twenty-five or more "pupils of African race" registered. In these situations, 15 percent of the voters in the school district could initiate a referendum to require the local school board to "segregate the pupils of the African race from pupils of the Caucasian race." In other words, the presence of twenty-five Black students in a high school could set in motion a process for absolute segregation.

In adjoining New Mexico, the law permitted the separation of "pupils of African descent" into separate classrooms in the same buildings if the school boards decided "it was for the best advantage of the school." The state allowed a local school board to decide what number of students might endanger virtual segregation, although it did permit the local jurisdiction to avoid the cost of building a separate school to implement absolute segregation.

Wyoming law gave school boards and superintendents power to enforce absolute segregation whenever there were fifteen or more "colored children" within a district. Since the large majority of Wyoming's schools were small, the numerical calculation of what number might threaten virtual segregation was also quite small. Until 1949, local jurisdictions in Indiana could decide to institute absolute segregation under a law used almost exclusively in larger cities where the percentage of Black population jeopardized virtual segregation.¹⁴⁷Murray, 35–36; 290–291, 144; Mary Melcher, "'This Is Not Right': Rural Arizona Women Challenge Segregation and Ethnic Division, 1925–1950," Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 20, no. 2 (1999): 198–199. Arizona did require all elementary schools to segregate by race. Melcher suggests that Arizona required school segregation due to the large number of former southerners serving in the legislature. See Murray, 524; Reid E. Jackson, "The Development and Character of Permissive and Partly Segregated Schools," Journal of Negro Education 16, no. 3 (Summer 1947): 302–305.

These laws were different from those in the South because they assumed a different starting point. Before Brown, non-southern states started with virtual segregation and went to the absolute form when necessary, while southern states started with absolute segregation and went to virtual segregation when required by Brown. Wherever, school segregation was a multifarious exclusion without an exact shape or defining measure. As practiced, segregation always revolved around what a white-controlled legislature, white constituency, or white-controlled institution considered minimally acceptable. Contemporary private school patterns and practices—that state and federal governments have come to tolerate and often support with public funds—appear for what they are: legacies of class-based southern segregation used to evade Brown and multi-dimensional segregation of non-southern states before Brown.

Desegregation's Future

During the heyday of the first era of school vouchers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. decried that "token integration is little more than token democracy, which ends up with many new evasive schemes and it ends up with new discrimination, covered up with such niceties of complexity."¹⁴⁸Martin Luther King Jr., "Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience," New South, December 1961. King's words have proven prophetic, although he could not have foreseen how dramatically the icons and language of the movement he led would be used, even by his own lineage, to develop and advance the tools and strategies that segregationists of his day thought could defeat the promise of Brown.

Today's advocates of school vouchers are not the first to attempt to graft the words and imagery of King and the civil rights movement onto their reactionary cause. As early as 1988, Rev. Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority declared to a gathering of all-white, conservative male ministers in Atlanta that "Martin Luther King is everybody's American hero."¹⁴⁹Lorri Denise Booker, "250 Protest Anti-Abortion Conference—2 Arrested; 600 Pack Omni to Hear Falwell," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 9, 1988; "Homogenized Heroes," SRC Home Record, Southern Regional Council, First & Second Quarters, 1989, 5. Ralph Reed, director of the Christian Coalition, continued to try to align King as the role model for conservative evangelical activists, many of whom supported public funding for private religious schools. Carter, The Politics of Rage, 466. But the school choice and voucher movement is remarkable in replicating so closely the primary strategies and tactics of southern segregationists while claiming the righteous mantle of the people and movement who fought against those segregationists.

One reason school choice proponents have appropriated civil rights rhetoric may relate to the fact that there is little evidence that vouchers improve the education of low-income children or children of color.¹⁵⁰See Robert C. Pianta and Arya Ansan, "Does Attendance in Private Schools Predict Student Outcomes at Age 15? Evidence From a Longitudinal Study," Educational Researcher 47, no. 7 (2018), https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/XfYmtC25VddcCfbA3xiV/full; Mark Dynarski, On Negative Effects of Vouchers (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2016), https://www.brookings.edu/research/on-negative-effects-of-vouchers/; Mark Dynarski and Austin Nichols, More Findings about School Vouchers and Test Scores, and They Are Still Negative (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2017), https://www.brookings.edu/research/more-findings-about-school-vouchers-and-test-scores-and-they-are-still-negative/; Martin Carnoy, School Vouchers Are Not a Proven Strategy for Improving Student Achievement (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2017), https://www.epi.org/publication/school-vouchers-are-not-a-proven-strategy-for-improving-student-achievement/; Halley Potter, Do Private School Vouchers Pose a Threat to Integration? (Washington, DC: The Century Foundation, 2017), https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/production.tcf.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/22102646/do-private-school-vouchers-pose-a-threat-to-integration.pdf; Kevin Carey, "Dismal Voucher Results Surprise Researchers as DeVos Era Begins," New York Times, February 23, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/upshot/dismal-results-from-vouchers-surprise-researchers-as-devos-era-begins.html. Voucher advocates' strongest arguments invoke social justice as well as freedom in order to legitimate school choice as more than a consumerist mindset and to obscure the factual results.¹⁵¹Samuel E. Abrams, Education and the Commercial Mindset (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 303–307.

A larger part of the explanation surely lies in forgetting what little was known and understood about segregationists such as Alabama's Forney Johnston and Albert Boutwell, Georgia's John Sibley, North Carolina's Thomas Pearsall, and Virginia's Garland Gray. In current memory, George Wallace remains the image of the diehard segregationist—standing defiantly to assure not one Black child in any white school. The images, language, and cruel tactics of Wallace and Birmingham's "Bull" Connor remain vivid in the lingering American mind, but not the strategic, behind-the-scenes work of South Carolina's Marion Gressette.

Yet, the southern states' first plan for defeating court-ordered desegregation, the one that Johnston and Boutwell devised in 1954 in Alabama, is exactly what today's advocates and supporters of vouchers seek to implement: no compulsory "race-mixing" in schools and no mention of any intent to discriminate. What could be more American than the freedom of parents to choose their children's school—private or public—with public financial support?

The Boutwell plan also aimed to remove from the state constitution and statutes any right of education for a child and any obligation to fund education. Instead, a state was to "foster education of its citizens in a manner and extent consistent with its available resources, and the willingness and ability of the individual student [emphasis added]."¹⁵²Report of Alabama Interim Legislative Committee on Segregation in the Public Schools, 11. The plan authorized white school officials to decide "the eligibility, admission, and allocation of pupils, including the power to refuse admission to individuals or groups whose deficiencies in scholastic aptitude would compel undue lowering of school standards."¹⁵³Report of Alabama Interim Legislative Committee on Segregation in the Public Schools, 7–8. The state was to provide vouchers and tax funds to private schools to increase school choice options.

The primary components of segregationist plans developed in the 1950s and 1960s by southern states are today the main objectives of policymakers and advocates leading the movement for school choice and vouchers.¹⁵⁴For video overviews of the struggles against efforts to use vouchers to privatize public education, see videos at "Vouchers and Tax Credit Scholarships in the US," Southern Education Foundation, 2015, https://www.southerneducation.org/publications/vouchersandtaxcreditscholarships/; "Advancing Public Education in the South," Southern Education Foundation, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBo4HwZ_8v8. No less remarkable, the segregation that Forney Johnston envisioned in his tripartite school system was also foreseen by economist Milton Friedman, who considered it an acceptable consequence of his goal of managing the country's education systems through market forces.

The nation's lack of memory has done far more than encourage the acceptance as racially neutral the economic and social arguments of voucher advocates, who blithely use the language of civil rights to advance the tools of segregationists. The nation has lost an understanding of class-based segregation as a general but not absolute condition for preserving racial superiority. This country also has failed to remember that school segregation laws outside the South embodied the same bifurcated notion of absolute and virtual segregation, although applied to different locales and demographies. More disturbing is the current wide acceptance of segregation as a part of an American way of schooling that merits public funding.

At the same time, the legal meaning and force of racial discrimination in civil rights enforcement and tax policy has shrunk to such an extent that courts, the public, and policy makers often recognize discrimination in private schools only if a person or institution sounds like an old-style segregationist who says "No, not one." Even some of the nation's most prominent public scholars have failed to grasp how, despite past court rulings, the strategies of virtual segregation continue today as prevailing practice among religious and non-religious private schools with tax exemptions.¹⁵⁵For example, Jill Lepore writes that, because of the Supreme Court decision in Coit v. Green in 1971, "private religious schools no longer provided a refuge for whites opposed to integration." See Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), 663. There is no basis in fact for such a conclusion.

The US Supreme Court has declared as law of the land that private schools cannot enjoy the benefits of exemptions from federal income tax, much less receive tax credits and direct government funding, while engaging in racial discrimination, even when motivated by claims of religious freedom. But, the federal government's current standards and practices of enforcement accept as valid and true on its face any private school's public pledge of non-discrimination in admission practices and operations, so long as the school has no formal or written policies to the contrary and does not maintain absolute, complete "No, not one" segregation. And parents of public school children cannot go to federal court to challenge the lack of robust, effective enforcement.

This faux policy of anti-discrimination has permitted a majority of private schools across the nation to maintain what strategic southern segregationists sought to achieve after Brown—virtual segregation and exclusion of children of color. Recall that two-thirds of white students attending the nation's private P–12 schools are in institutions where African American, Hispanic, and Native American children constitute 10 percent or less of the student body. These white schools are exercising "school choice" to decide which and how many children of color to admit—in token numbers and on terms, values, and motives inherited from strategic segregationists who, as Julian Bond noted, "dared not say out loud" their true goals.¹⁵⁶See Julian Bond, "Civil Rights in the Popular Culture," Southern Changes 14, no. 2 (1992): 4, http://southernchanges.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/sc14-2_1204/sc14-2_002/.

More than half of the nation's states have adopted some form of vouchers to support private schools, portending that virtual segregation and exclusion will be sustained over time. And the federal government is moving closer than ever to establishing a program of direct or tax credit vouchers to support private schools on whatever terms are acceptable to the states. Nor is there serious consideration of revising the standards and practices that have already permitted many states to erect the scaffolding of a private–public school system first put forward by Alabama segregationists in 1954.

By failing to grasp the history of the struggles and tactics against southern school desegregation, the nation has come to recognize segregation and racial superiority only in those private schools that are absolutely all-white. The looming danger lies in legitimizing and advancing a system of segregation and exclusion in education that is not called by its name. Even if most Americans find repugnant the absolute separation of the races that George Wallace defiantly championed as destiny in 1963, his words have transformed into a prophesy about schools across the nation that rings true by the most accurate, historical definition of the term: "segregation now . . . segregation tomorrow  . . . segregation forever."

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Southern Spaces staff members Stephanie Bryan, Madison Elkins, Amelia Golcheski, Camille Goldmon, Hannah Griggs, Rachel Kolb, Ra'Niqua Lee, and Sophia Leonard for their work on this piece.  Thanks as well to Jon N. Hale for his suggestions. A special appreciation to Megan Slemons, GIS specialist with the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, for assistance with maps and tables; and to Allen Tullos, my dear friend and senior editor of Southern Spaces.

About the Author

An adjunct with Emory University's Institute for the Liberal Arts, Steve Suitts is the author of Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution. Earlier in his career, Suitts served as the executive director of the Southern Regional Council, vice president of the Southern Education Foundation, and executive producer and writer of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," a thirteen-hour public radio series that received a Peabody Award for its history of the civil rights movement in five Deep South cities.

Open Educational Resource (OER) is the name given by proponents of open access to educational material—including course content, assignments, syllabi, and more—freely available to copy and distribute. Increasing the availability of high-quality educational content through OERs is part of a broader movement of open access that disseminates research and critical analysis, reduces barriers to the discovery of scholarship, and enhances education and research initiatives.¹"Benefits of Open Access Journals," Public Library of Science, accessed November 17, 2017, https://www.plos.org/open-access/.

A spirit of accessibility and collaboration underpins the creation of OERs. Southern Spaces joins several resources available online for instructors and students interested in incorporating OERs into their teaching and learning, or creating and disseminating their own classroom materials. Open Washington has created a self-paced online workshop that "cover[s] the fundamental aspects of OER including open licensing and public domain" and "provid[es] practical guidance in locating and applying openly available resources."²"How to Use Open Educational Resources," Open Washington, last modified March 3, 2016, http://www.openwa.org/module-1/. The website features OER collections that include videos, images, course materials, and textbooks. Other popular OER repositories include OER Commons, an online public library of OERs, and MIT OpenCourseWare, a "web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content."³"About OCW," MIT OpenCourseWare, accessed November 17, 2017, https://ocw.mit.edu/about/. We hope our own OERs will be useful to Southern Spaces readers as they create syllabi, study guides, and assignments for courses, as well as engage in research projects and conversations about real and imagined spaces.

The Educational Resources section of our website—navigable by clicking "Browse" on the Southern Spaces navigation bar, selecting "Educational Resource" in the menu that appears at the left, then clicking "More"—currently features eight curated educational resources, with more collections forthcoming as the journal continues to innovate in critical regional studies, digital scholarship, and open access publishing.

Educational resources currently available include:

• African American Art and Aesthetic Experiences
• Environments and Ecologies
• Indigenous Souths
• Queer Souths
• Reading and Writing Souths
• Religion
• Social Memory and Memorialization
• Southern Screens

Southern Spaces will update our educational resources as we publish new scholarship, and we will continue to expand the range of subjects our educational materials cover. Upcoming resources will feature collections on music and sound cultures and the Atlanta Metro and Appalachian regions. To offer suggestions for future educational resources, please contact us with ideas and recommendations here.

Using Southern Spaces Open Educational Resources

Southern Spaces seeks to make scholarship accessible and available to a wide audience of researchers and teachers, students in and out of classrooms, library patrons, and general readers. Accordingly, we have created these educational resources for use at multiple educational levels and in various learning situations.

Southern Spaces educational resources are especially suited for discussions of the history of the shifting idea of the American South as well as the emergence of distinct southern regions with their political, social, economic, and cultural expressions. Our long-form interpretive and critical pieces result from extended scholarly engagement with a topic, frequently breaking new ground in critical regional studies, African American, Native, and American Studies, women's and gender studies, public health, and digital humanities. The publications collected in the "Indigenous Souths" educational resource—for example, Sarah H. Hill's expansive studies of Native Removal in Rome and Ellijay, Georgia—stand at the forefront of scholarship on the historical, political, and social dimensions of Cherokee Removal. Similarly, the "Social Memory and Memorialization" educational resource collects innovative Southern Spaces scholarship on such topics as the history of slave labor in the construction of American universities and the Smithsonian; a review of artist Kara Walker's "Blood Sugar" installation; and a video presentation about how Confederate monuments participate in historical erasure.

Our educational resources also emphasize interdisciplinary approaches in the study of southern regions and their global connections. "Reading and Writing Souths," for instance, adapts spatial theory and cultural geography to the study of written expression and literature. Our scholarship on canonical author Flannery O'Connor embodies this approach. Students can examine a photo essay of Andalusia (the farm near Milledgeville, Georgia, where O'Connor spent the last thirteen years of her life), an article that traces the landscapes and characters of her life as they emerge in her letters, a discussion of her importance to novelist Alice Walker in a reconsideration of the "Southern Renaissance," and a visit by poet Sean Hill to the segregated cemetery where she is buried. These sources explore Andalusia and Milledgeville as lived spaces alongside the imagined geographies that O'Connor created. A 2014 blog post, too, presents the many afterlives of the author as they emerge in "Scale Highly Eccentric: A Zine of Portraits of Flannery O'Connor."

We encourage the use of Southern Spaces educational resources in composition and writing classrooms. Our curated collections feature publications that approach a similar theme or subject across multiple genres, creating ways to examine constraints and opportunities unique to each. Studying the rhetorical situation of writing about memory and place collected in "Social Memory and Memorialization," for example, uncovers compelling differences in audience, purpose, tone, style, register, claims, structures, and arguments across the genres we publish. What does poetry offer for Natasha Trethewey's meditations on geography and place compared to a recorded interview or public address? Similarly, studying reviews of films, monographs, photography and art installations, and digital projects create opportunities for teaching the types of analyses, evidence, and organization that scholars use to make critical assessments. The "Southern Screens" and "African American Art and Aesthetic Experiences" educational resources offer robust collections of reviews well-suited for studying composition.

Southern Spaces educational resources also create possibilities for investigating intersections between images and texts. As a digital journal, Southern Spaces delivers audio, video, images, text, and data to facilitate new ways of presenting and interpreting content. "African American Art and Aesthetic Experiences" organizes examples of how visual materials—photographs of homes in Atlanta's Collier Heights neighborhood, the epic quilts of Gwendolyn Ann Magee, or portraits of Low Country Traveler car club members—convey moving narratives and incisive scholarship, as well as examples of how students might integrate media into their own multimodal projects.

Southern Spaces considers the creation and distribution of our educational resources an important part of our mission to make valuable knowledge and insightful critique openly and freely available. We hope these materials generate constructive opportunities for Southern Spaces readers to enhance teaching, learning, and research while reducing costs and barriers.

About the Author

Sophia Leonard is the assistant managing editor of Southern Spaces and a PhD student in English at Emory University. 

Review

Toby L. Parcel and Andrew J. Taylor's The End of Consensus is a thoroughly researched, multidimensional look at popular support for student assignment policies in the Wake County, North Carolina, Public School System (WCPSS). The district, which educates nearly 150,000 children in 171 schools, is one of the nation's largest. (Private schools only educate about one-tenth of the county's school-aged children.) WCPSS is a rare example of a large school district that is racially and economically diverse and is "alone among large districts across the nation in persisting with a diversity policy as a central feature" (106). Student assignments—either parent-initiated ones (applying to district magnet schools) or district-mandated ones (requiring attendance at a school to balance student populations along racial or economic lines)—form the heart of this policy. The authors, both professors at North Carolina State University, describe the evolution of this policy, noting how dramatic population shifts within the county, increasingly strained school district resources and buildings, and the national politicization of school-related issues appeared to end residents' long-standing support for it. This led to a dramatic school-board shake-up in 2009, when Republican candidates unseated four Democratic incumbents.

Student diversity assignment strategies have been a mainstay in Wake County since 1976, when WCPSS was formed through the merger of a district serving Raleigh and another serving suburban Wake County (14–17). Legislation passed by the North Carolina General Assembly and approved by both school boards made the merger possible. The contentious debates that initially surrounded unification—centering on how to redistribute resources and students in the new district—would ultimately fade as public officials, business leaders, and area residents "generally supported the board's policies" and approved the schools' performance through the 1980s and into 1990s (22). However, as the county's surging population growth in the 1990s and early 2000s increasingly strained district resources, schools' performances declined and political conversations became more polarized. Recurring disagreements reprised those of the 1970s and, writes Parcel and Taylor, "are central to the story of Wake County's dramatic fracturing in 2009" (18). A Republican majority elected to the school board immediately "set to work dismantling and replacing the socioeconomic diversity mandate" behind school reassignments (83).

The End of Consensus explores the rekindling of this public school debate. Parcel and Taylor interviewed current and former members of the school board, business leaders, and local activists, surveyed over seventeen-hundred Wake County residents, and reviewed news accounts and census data to determine the degree to which school board policies, overall school performance, and "ostensibly unrelated" issues such as population growth and the Great Recession "brought about a change in public attitudes on school assignments" and a challenge to the incumbent school board members and the existing consensus (xiv).

While the district did experience more public discussion around policies designed to keep Wake County schools economically and racially diverse, it remains an open question whether the 2009 election marked the end of widespread support for the district's goal of keeping schools balanced and representative of the district as a whole. This is largely because it is nearly impossible to untangle this apparently growing unease—and the adjustments to student assignment approaches that inflamed the debate—from the dramatic population shifts occurring in Wake County at this time. Between the 1980 Census and the 2009 American Community Survey, the county's population increased from just over 300,000 to nearly 900,000. Three-quarters of this growth occurred between 1990 and 2009. Approximately 275,000 people were added to the county in the 2000s. This "massive influx of people" primarily went into the county's western suburbs, areas that had historically been and had remained largely white. New residents "placed tremendous strains on [school] facilities" (29, 20). This required building new schools at an astonishing rate. Even with 44 elementary schools, fifteen middle schools, and twelve high schools constructed between 1991 and 2010, the board failed to keep pace (51). As land prices rose, so did the cost of each new school.

By the mid-1990s, the district's operating and capital needs exceeded what Wake's county commissioners—"charged by state law to provide schools with much of their funding" (23)—and residents were willing to give. After approving earlier (less costly) bond issuances in 1993 and 1996, Wake residents rejected bond funding for school construction and renovation in 1999 (24). Because the district's physical facilities failed to keep up with the burgeoning student population, more students had to travel further—sometimes ten miles or more (11).

As new schools opened, the school board reassigned students—particularly those living in areas experiencing the most population growth—to maintain the district's racial and economic diversity goals (52). Such reassignments "created a pervasive sense of uncertainty and instability about schooling" and proved "extremely controversial" especially among the county's newest residents, who were least familiar with the district's diversity policy and who would also be called upon to cast ballots for school board members in 2009 (25).

In addition to reassigning students to different schools, the school board also sought to accommodate its growing student body and ensure schools' diversity by increasing its use of year-round schooling (26). This all but mandatory schedule now facing parents in the county's suburbs—again, parents newer to Wake County and less likely than long-term residents to be familiar with a year-round schooling model—was met with "significant resistance": "All these folks had moved here since 1999 [and] did not understand why we had year-round schools" (resident, quoted on page 69). Parents in affected areas did not like the two options the board provided to their children: "to either send their children to a year-round school [closer to home] or have them go to a traditional one, often with an unattractive starting time and long commute" (68). Neither conformed to the model of public education that these parents (typically white, higher-income, and more conservative than those living elsewhere in the county) tended to prefer: neighborhood schools (33, 45).

Frequent reassignments and year-round schooling (results of the diversity commitment) were the policies most at odds with the neighborhood school model and most disliked by Wake County's newest residents (42, 47). As the numbers and voices of newer residents surpassed those of long-time residents, the diversity policy long understood as "fair and beneficial to children of all backgrounds" became "increasingly criticized for undermining performance, forcing long bus rides on children, and limiting parental and community involvement in school" (49).

As the debate shifted to the ballot box in 2009, Parcel and Taylor point out that "the heightened partisanship and polarization that was taking place in national, state, and county politics" coincided with the controversy over Wake's school policies: "Events in Wake County developed as the public's trust in governmental and political institutions across the United States was declining markedly" (80). A significant portion of what appeared to be the faltering consensus on school diversity, then, may instead be more a function of the Great Recession having increased parents' anxieties about their children's education and future rather than a statement on specific actions or policies of the school board (79).

This occurred, too, alongside Wake County's own political revolution (27). The county had consistently backed Democratic gubernatorial and presidential candidates in preceding years, but between the early 1990s and the end of the decade, Wake County was "washed over by a Republican tide that had swept much of the South" (28). By the 2009 elections, "Wake County Republicans were organized, funded, and motivated enough to take on what they perceived as a liberal [school] board and its harmful policies" (31). New associations such as Assignment by Choice (ABC), Take Wake Schools Back, Wake Cares, and Wake Schools Community Alliance formed in the 1990s to resist the school assignment policy (37). In years past, conservative school board candidates had "only tangentially" taken on the district's diversity policy (37). Suburban mayors joined parents in the push to reduce the number of annual reassignments. By 2009 "numerous officeholders in suburban Wake municipalities were involved in a broad lobbying effort to reduce the movement of their residents' children between schools" (54).

Ultimately, in the 2009 election that is the subject of The End of Consensus, all four of the contested school board seats represented "somewhat conservative-friendly territory" (77). Although, in each case, the incumbents were "associated with the status quo and the Democrats" (77) while the challengers opposed existing school board policies, in each case, too, the larger forces of in-migration (of high-income, white, conservative-leaning individuals), political polarization (on the national stage) and political mobilization were most intense and threatened these incumbents.

At the same time, the school board's new Republican majority was elected by less than 12% of eligible voters, a low turnout (although slightly higher than in prior years) and far from a groundswell of support for a regime change (82). It is not surprising that the new board's efforts to dismantle and replace the district's socioeconomic diversity mandate were quickly rescinded (83, 87). In the 2011 election, residents in the districts that did not vote in 2009 voted out the Republican majority. Partisan disputes continued, but signs of the old consensus returned: voters approved an $810 million construction bond in 2013 (the local Republican Party was one of only a few groups that opposed it, suggesting that its clout in the county had declined) and the new Democratic majority had returned some elements of the district's policy (112).

"There is no doubt," write Parcel and Taylor, "that 2009 marked a significant change in Wake County public schools politics" (89, emphasis added). Yet these political changes, in the end, were not accompanied by a comparable change in Wake County public school policies. At its core, The End of Consensus tells of a countywide school district that, as it boomed, had an increasingly hard time presenting itself as a "single community" around which all residents could rally and with which all residents identified (121). Residents instead sought out smaller "communities" in neighborhood-level schools. Such is the inherent challenge of desegregation's heterogeneity: as students and households from an array of racial and economic backgrounds are brought together, fewer may identify with the diverse whole. As Wake County's decades of consensus confirm, this is not an insurmountable challenge, but it highlights the key task of managing perceptions.

Even with its ups and downs, the Wake County Public School System deserves to be lauded for ongoing efforts to provide a diverse population of students with access to quality education and to each other. According to the Common Core of Data released by the US Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, only 5% of American public school students get to attend a district such as Wake's: one that is diverse and yet with a below-average portion of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch. Instead, roughly three-out-of-five (63%) white public school students attend schools in largely white and low-poverty districts, while a similar share (57%) of minority public school students attend schools in largely non-white and higher-poverty districts. Neither of these districts can prepare students to succeed in a diverse world or provide students with access to opportunity and upward mobility as well as Wake County's economically and racially diverse schools can.

About the Author

Karen Beck Pooley is a senior associate at czb LLC, a neighborhood planning firm, and teaches in the Department of Political Science and the South Side Initiative at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Pooley received a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania's Department of City and Regional Planning in 2007. Her research focuses on neighborhood revitalization strategies, techniques for measuring housing market conditions, and the evolution of federal, state, and local housing policy.

Presentation and Review

Civil rights narratives often empower and embolden, promoting faith in possibilities, hope for rectifying inequities. More sober assessments show that, though we've come a long way—thanks to mighty black struggle and interracial coalition—there's still far to go. Honoring local achievements while warning of persistent injustice, Jim Grimsley's bold memoir of a racist white upbringing forecloses sentimentality with resolute honesty, charting slow, hard-earned change and the author's ongoing efforts to unlearn the lessons of childhood. Integration's chief foe, he suggests, is the hardwired racism of "good people" (72)—a phrase you'll never hear in the same way again.

In 1966, Jimmy Grimsley, thirty other white students, and three new African American classmates Rhonda, Ursula, and Violet forged a "tepid and partial desegregation" (40) of their sixth grade classroom in rural Jones County, North Carolina, where public schools officially desegregated under a begrudging gradualist "Freedom of Choice" plan. Describing himself as "a good little racist" (18), Jimmy was the first to hurl an epithet at chubby Violet. When she spoke back with poise and pride, giving as good as she got, Grimsley began the most important educational journey of his life: unlearning entrenched habits of race and gender. "Skin color and difference" (ix), as he labels them, were linked to the body, its desires, sexual norms, and deviances. Grappling with his own sense of difference, Jimmy was more willing than most to question dominant structures of white authority and racial inequality.

Quizzical, effeminate, a hemophiliac forbidden boys' rough play, Jimmy remembers thriving after his working-class family moved into the town of Pollocksville where he could walk to the library and read widely. He absorbed novels and teen magazines, and caught glimpses of new classmates Rhonda and Ursula's Ebony and Jet. He credits the media, including television, with introducing him to dominant racist, as well as emergent anti-racist, representations: Bill Cosby's role in I Spy and Nichelle Nichols's in Star Trek. Remembering his sixth-grade self, Grimsley appears perplexed, since "adults rarely explained" (8) the unprecedented circumstances of judicial desegregation, speaking only in "coded, guarded" (10) language.

Photograph of a young Jim Grimsley, age 11, Jones County, North Carolina, 1966. Courtesy of Algonquin Books.

The transformations from sixth to seventh grade, from lackadaisical Mr. Vaughn's class to the precise Mrs. Ferguson, from foe to friend of black classmates, helped expose southern white culture's feigned warmth, courtesy, and piety. While hindsight affords Grimsley insight into the significance of his middle school years, at the time—about most matters of importance—Jimmy "had no idea" (6) and had never imagined the stark realities that delineated his racial experience.

Just when I, as a reader, suspect Grimsley is overstating his youthful naiveté—characterizations of "the Southerner" clanging, only occasionally qualified by "white"—he unearths racism's roots with brute force. In the chapter "The Learning," Grimsley shows how bias, seemingly timeless and naturalized in nursery rhymes, in fact, emanates from adults' repetitive aggressive assertions of supremacy. If racist verses structure childhood games—sung on playgrounds, chanted outside churches—a vast repertoire of nigger jokes reveals how entrenched and persistent white anxieties remain, situating prejudice in the here and now. This repertoire documents a cruel and pernicious counterpart to the long, affirmative tradition of African American trickster tales. With grace, Grimsley retells not a single joke, nary a punch line. He nonetheless explains their gruesome logic, pinpointing their myriad implications. In short, his father's and friends' jokes are variations on the theme of inferiority, castigating blacks as lazy, ugly, smelly, dirty, sloppy, unruly, faulty, sorry. Seemingly told in jest, they united whites around racist ideology. "When we laughed at the joke[s], we accepted the premise" (79).

Though Grimsley remembers hearing these jokes in many places—"at a country store or a service station, places where men talked to other men" (79)—he recalls local churches as teaching the worst lessons. There, racist discourse flowed between adults, between Sunday School and worship services, as well as mid-week meetings, at both the Baptist and Methodist churches he attended. Grimsley's chapter "Divinely White" spotlights the broad influence of Jim Crow Christianity's supremacist symbolism. He repeats no clichés about the most segregated hour of the week—that was a given. Instead, he writes that "the stratification . . . went beyond this" (93), beyond the small-town hierarchies ranging from Pentecostal to Episcopalian. "The Christian Bible" he adds, "depicted God's son as a white-wooled lamb, God's adversary as a prince of . . . darkness, salvation as a cleansing that leads to shining whiteness. God, Christ, and all the angels wore white. Death and sin were robed in black" (94). Regardless of what was preached from the pulpit—about Ham, about biblical justifications of slavery—Grimsley remembers the so-called good book making the racist points, over and over, with crude color-coded metaphors.

Location of Jones County in North Carolina (top) and location of Pollocksville in Jones County, North Carolina (bottom). Maps by Southern Spaces, 2015.

Faithfully reporting his county's dismal history of Native expulsion and African slavery, sexual assaults on black women and lynchings of black men, Grimsley implicitly denounces violence, hatred, and ignorance. More so, How I Shed My Skin carefully and candidly calibrates levels of fear and knowing among his fellow white southerners. As he demonstrates, whites with disabilities in Jones County, including his father, rejected chin-up resilience and vented their rage at African Americans. At the other end of a narrow spectrum, Grimsley has no truck with milquetoast liberalism. As he testifies, "nearly every white person I have spoken to about this time [said] 'We were not allowed to use the word "nigger" in my family.' One should remember," Grimsley instructs, "that most Southern mothers also proscribed such words as shit, fuck, and cunt, often to no effect whatsoever" (87–88). The power of How I Shed My Skin lies in its ability to illuminate the many inequalities ingrained beneath a veneer of pervasive politeness.

In addition to racism, Grimsley connects the dots of sexism, homophobia, and other categories of difference, notably class. As in many southern jurisdictions unable to afford one good school system, much less two, when Jones County consolidated its black and white facilities, white parents birthed a segregation academy. A new sort of dual system emerged. Grimsley, his siblings, and other poor whites remained in the public schools. There, his aesthete's sensibilities rarely connoted queerness, and he was seldom bullied. In the majority-black high school, tracked into the majority-white college-prep curriculum, Grimsley observes integration in some spaces: the football field, the stands, post-game dances, and the smoking patio. He notices and worries about classmates involved in discreet biracial romances. While he expects violent reprisals for color-line transgressions, none materialize. His white friend Mercy, who dated black student body president Andy, simply abandons her drunken father's home and moves in with other relatives. Determined to get out, all three students survive high school and end up at Chapel Hill. After graduating from the University of North Carolina, Grimsley migrates to the queer mecca of New Orleans.

By memoir's end, Violet (one of the three students who integrated Grimsley's middle school, the one who spoke back to him with such confidence) has conspicuously dropped out of the narrative, even as Grimsley documents a tentative multiracial circle of friends. At Jones Senior High, black students stage walkouts after a white teacher spouts racist slurs and a black teacher's job is threatened. But against elder white prophesies, desegregation doesn't incite an apocalypse. Students adjust, and the conflicts between insensitive white teacher-administrators and their black charges are managed, although not resolved.

In How I Shed My Skin's conclusion, Grimsley is one of only two white graduates to attend his fortieth high school class reunion. There, a black preacher first tells a joke at his expense then makes an anti-Semitic comment—southern religiosity (whether black or white) again unmasked. Still, the author sounds a hopeful note, crediting Violet with opening his mind in middle school.

I find most compelling Grimsley's recollections of song and dance. Dances were a rare site of integration in motion, on the ground, at the gym, after ballgames: a democracy on the dance floor. Though his "church taught that dancing was of the devil," he enjoyed "moving to music" (193). Grimsley "never danced with a boy in high school, or dated" one (198), "but when I was dancing I understood that I was one of many, not so different, not apart from the rest" (199). Only in these utopian moments does this highly individualistic autobiography gesture toward Mab Segrest's powerful collectivist Memoir of a Race Traitor from 1999.

In contrast to the dance floor, the gospel chorus remained color-coded. Inherited from the all-black high school, the chorus had no white members after consolidation. In a shrewd, subtle critique of Hollywood happy endings that play to audience expectations, Grimsley notes that, as a novelist or screenwriter, he might have invented a scene in which he sings alongside Violet, "proving that the separation between the races could one day be conquered" (225), systemic racism overcome by one-to-one biracial friendships. Instead, Grimsley as memoirist is frank as ever, realistic and sorrowful, acknowledging the slow pace of change and the maudlin appeal of instant reconciliation. His meditation on genre morphs into a stunning dialectic on the individual and collective, the loner-outsider desiring connection: "I would like to have lived in the world where I could have sung in that chorus, where what mattered would have been only the way my voice blended with the others, and the sound we made. I think I could have added to the music" (227).

Refusing easy redemption songs, Jim Grimsley yearns for communion. While his sexuality sets him apart—venturing to New Orleans and beyond, rarely to return—his yearning evidences a desire to be a part, to take part, his hopes steadfast in collective, common humanity. With piercing, instructive honesty, How I Shed My Skin revisits a painful time and place—different, yet not so different from the here and now—to show how racism's unexamined habits take deep and early hold. 

About the Authors

John Howard is professor of American Studies at King’s College London. He is the author of Concentration Camps on the Home Front: Japanese Americans in the House of Jim Crow (2008) and Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (1999), both from the University of Chicago Press.

Jim Grimsley is professor of practice in English and Creative Writing at Emory University. He is the author of four previous novels, among them Winter Birds, which won the 1995 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and received a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation; Dream Boy, winner of the American Library Association GLBT Award for Literature (the Stonewall Prize) My Drowning, a Lila-Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award winner; and Comfort and Joy.

Introduction

Virginia Ward's yearbook photo, Pebblebrook High School, 1970.

Virginia Ward is not a small woman, but the fineness of her hands and the way her gray curls sweep around her ears make her seem so. She is missing her left front tooth and when she laughs, she leans backward and then forward again, as if in a rocking chair. She grew up in Mableton in Cobb County, Georgia, "over 'cross the [Chattahoochee] River" from Atlanta. In the fall of 1966, Ward desegregated Pebblebrook High School. In the first few frightening days, she remained sure other black students would arrive, but the months passed and "no one came."¹Interview with Virginia Ward, March 13, 2009. All quotations from Virginia Ward that follow are drawn from this interview, and will not be further noted. Ward endured two years as Pebblebrook's only black student. She was not written up in the local paper, nor feted by her community for her accomplishments. When she graduated in 1970, her friends and congregation were amazed: "Virginia," she remembers them saying after they watched her assemble in cap and gown with her white classmates, "you really was the only one!"

This story is about Virginia Ward's courageous desegregation of her local high school, but it is also about the implications of neglecting class and poverty in histories of school desegregation. The role of poverty in Ward's account acts as a reminder of the struggles of black integrators who were not upper-middle class or the chosen children of their communities, students who experienced their class as equally marginalizing as their race. As legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw suggests, socially constructed categories, i.e. "black" and "white," will always be with us; the problem is rather that "the descriptive content of those categories and the narratives on which they are based have privileged some experiences and excluded others."²Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence against Women of Color," in Critical Race Theory: Key Writings that Formed the Movement (New York: The New Press, 1995), 376. Crenshaw describes the importance of "intersectionality" to the experiences of black women, specifically, but her insights can be applied to class and race in narratives of school desegregation: when identity is configured "as an either/or proposition . . . the identity of a poor person [of color is relegated] to a location that resists telling." In many narratives of school desegregation, "poor black student" is a "position that resists telling;" in contrast, there has been careful attention to the class position of whites who resisted desegregation.³The class politics of white resistance have received thorough treatment in recent scholarship on desegregation. In her history of desegregation in New Orleans, Liva Baker describes the white mothers, called the "cheerleaders," as carrying signs that read "If your [sic] poor, mix. If your [sic] rich, forget it. Some law!" The first ward to desegregate was the "politically powerless, materially disadvantaged Ninth Ward." Liva Baker, Second Battle of New Orleans: The Hundred Year Struggle to Integrate the Schools (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 398. Similarly, in Atlanta, lower-income white parents protested that because they could not move away or choose private education like the "silk stocking crowd," they would be disproportionately affected by desegregation. Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 139. In Charlotte, the CPA (Concerned Parents Association) was composed of "well-heeled whites;" these "upwardly mobile parents" mobilized to prevent their children from being bused away from their well-resourced neighborhood schools. Matthew Lassister, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics on the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 139-140. Because there are, likely, thousands of "first children" yet to be heard,⁴When Brown was decided there were 4,000 segregated school districts in the south; three years later 712 of them were desegregating, sending 300,000 black students to integrate schools. This suggests that the numbers of "first children" across the South, who integrated schools alone or in small cohorts, is in the thousands. Robert L Hayman and Leland Ware, eds, Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009), 4. Ward's story is only one among many that deserve a hearing, but it is also true that Ward's "difference made a difference" that is not often acknowledged in the public memory of desegregation.⁵Crenshaw, 376.

Pre-Brown

Map showing the location of Mableton, Georgia, 2012.

Virginia Ward's people were "Indians from Black Hawk Hill," and they had owned property in Mableton for many years. Ward, the third youngest of fourteen, was raised on her father's land. Her mother worked at the Wailea Cotton Mill and her father sold his homegrown produce and picked up odd jobs. "We had to be," she said laughing, "the poorest peoples in the world." But there was always milk and butter from the cow and eggs from the hens, and the bounty of a garden "just about as big as some people's homes." Fourteen children was a formidable labor force, and her father would brook no laziness. She recalled having a harder row to hoe, quite literally, than her friends: "We were taught . . . to work work work. . . . My daddy didn't believe in welfare." Although the demands at home were significant, Ward's parents insisted that she and her siblings earn their high school diplomas. She began at Washington Street Elementary, which all her friends attended. She remembered: "We all had to go to Washington Street. We had one bus driver—Lucius. He picked up everybody in Mableton and Austell. Cause we all went to one school. That's how we got to know all the blacks that's in Mableton cause all of us had to ride the same bus."

Ward's memory of Lucius and the single school bus speaks to the nostalgia that is often intertwined with desegregation for students and parents of the pre-Brown era.⁶"Brown era" refers to the years bookended by Brown I in 1954 and Milliken v Bradley in 1974, the case that prohibited the use of cross-district busing in instances of de facto segregation and marked the turn away from the dramatic (and largely effective) desegregation remedies of the previous decade. Among the many legacies of Brown is the loss of black schools and their black leadership to the integration of existing white institutions which were reputedly better staffed and resourced. But some black community members, teachers and students remember that the interdependence and familial care fostered by these all-black institutions was, for them, far more valuable than the ineffable "good" of integrated schools. In her home community in Mableton, Ward's difference didn't register so starkly, her background was not isolating; her teachers knew her and her abilities. The sacrifices of students like Ward and the loss of all-black institutions are a critical part of understanding the contemporary politics of desegregation in black communities. As scholars such as Barbara Shircliffe have shown, black communities have undertaken their own reconstructions of desegregation history—in some cases quite literally.⁷Barbara Shircliffe, The Best of that World: Historically Black High Schools and the Crisis of Desegregation in a Southern Metropolis (New York: Hampton Press, 2006). Shircliffe describes a Tampa, Florida, community that successfully petitioned for a new high school named after the local all-black school that desegregation had "taken." The restoring of their cherished school was a victory especially for the students who had been bused unwillingly to integrating white schools in the Tampa area. The new "old" high school stood not for segregation or its attendant evils but for a resistance to the erasure of the past and the resilience of community.

"Break[ing] That School In"

Virginia began high school at South Cobb High, a formerly all-white high school which was already desegregating.⁸Until the county schools began to desegregate, black students had only one high school to attend, Lemon Street High, in downtown Marietta, the county seat. Cobb County adopted "Freedom of Choice" in 1965, but the county's high schools did not desegregate all at once. South Cobb High, for example, began provisionally desegregating before Pebblebrook High School, and as it was in neighboring Austell, Virginia spent her ninth grade year there before transferring to Pebblebrook, her district school. In her ninth-grade year, there were "four or five other blacks," as she remembered, attending South Cobb. But in 1966, Virginia enrolled at Pebblebrook High School, officially her district high school, which had not yet begun to desegregate. She imagined a similar ratio of white to black students as at South Cobb—not a happy thought, but a vaguely comforting one. "But when I got to Pebblebrook," she remembered, "I was like, okay, maybe the first day, no blacks, second day, no blacks." The days and weeks passed and "no one came." When it became clear she would be the sole black student for the remainder of that year, she resisted the urge to request that her parents transfer her because "it was mandatory. I had to go." Virginia's belief that she "had to go"—she could have legally gained admission elsewhere in the county—is suggestive of her parents' expectations and demands and perhaps, too, her own sense of duty. ("Someone had to do it!" she said later.) When Ward began her senior year at Pebblebrook, she was finally joined by another black student from her community, a girl who entered the eleventh grade.

Of the people at Pebblebrook, Ward offered with equanimity that "some were good" and "some were bad." She knew, whether by their actions or her own intuition, who was who. She remembered of one teacher, "I knew he was prejudiced . . . I heard him call me 'nigger.'" The evening of the day Virginia overheard the slur, her family gathered for dinner and her father asked her about school. "He was not a talker," she says with a smile, "but he was a good listener." Virginia told him and her siblings what her teacher had called her. She waited for her father's response—some word of wisdom or warning—but none came. The next day, however, he took her to school and left her in the lobby while he had a brief visit with the principal. Later that morning a fellow student taunted, "We're having a meeting because of you." The principal had called an all-school assembly to address the incident. Virginia remembered that he opened the "meeting" by asking her to stand. She recalled his words as she stood up alone in an otherwise quiet auditorium: "If anybody got a problem with integration, it's here. And Virginia is here. And no one is to make her uncomfortable. And if Virginia has a problem she can come to me." It was "so embarrassing" she remembered, her good-natured laughter softening the hard edge of the memory.

Virginia Ward, center, in a Future Business Leaders of America yearbook photo, Pebblebrook High, 1970.

The scene she described must have been one of deeply-felt ambivalence: the principal's requesting that Virginia stand up (as if students did not know or recognize her sole black face among them) was extending an olive leaf with one hand and stoking the fire with the other. By being turned into a spectacle, and the embodiment of integration—"it's here now"—Virginia experienced the antagonisms and antinomies of her daily life writ large. Perhaps the principal had meant to protect Virginia with his gesture. Yet any seasoned principal or teacher ought to know that an edict from an authority figure invites abuse, not sympathy, from fellow students. Virginia's profoundest challenges from her peers came after the principal's injunction. Virginia's father's words to her at the beginning of the school year were prescient: "You're gonna have to break that school in."

Scripture

"Every day," Ward remembered, "he'd sit behind me in class. Every day he call me nigger. Every day, every day." She was recalling the student who dedicated himself to taunting her—quietly and doggedly, repeating his incantation every time the two took their seats. She told her pastor and mentor, Reverend Aaron, who assured her that one can "change people with the Word." So for the weekly essay assignment in that class, Ward began selecting and writing about passages of scripture. She quoted her own determination: "I [will] find a scripture for that one boy who calls me a nigger, every day, every day. I will find one just for him." She laughed while claiming she had summoned "the worst peoples in the Bible" to her cause and read their exploits and cruelties aloud to her class—directing her pseudo-sermons toward the boy in the chair behind hers. After several Mondays, Ward's strategy and weaponry prevailed. Without any kind of disciplinary intervention from teacher or principal, the offender stopped his name-calling. Since her arrival, she said, "every day, all I heard is ‘nigger, nigger nigger.' It was a song for them." But her triumph in the classroom spread, and "after a while," she remembered, "you didn't hear it . . . walking down the hall." Her peers were wary of her, muttering, as she approached, "There she come again, with the scripture, there she come."

Ward wove this story in and out of her narrative, referring back to the transformative power of her scripture essays and her pastor's assurances that "when they hear it, they'll know." Although she was without the resources or support to broadcast her battles and victories, and although she was a struggling student, neither popular nor high-achieving, she powerfully fashioned herself as a teacher of her peers. This role and her pedagogy reappear in later anecdotes about her relationships as an adult, when once again she challenged the racism and classism around her, and the narrowness of the known story.

At the Margins

When asked if she was ever scared during her years at Pebblebrook—of the bathroom or the locker rooms, the dangerous fiefdoms of adolescent girls—she countered that she was "not afraid of people." She offered that because her family was so poor, it was often the feeling of "not having anything" that isolated her. "It looked like the whole world rich," she recalled without rancor. "And going to the white school—you know you are really poor." She affectionately described a woman she called her "school mom." Mrs. Groover, the mother of a classmate who did not know of his mother's kindness to Ward, volunteered to take her to the dentist and doctor, for which her own mother had neither money nor time. "She was the first one who took me to get a hamburger," Ward remembered—a special treat because what could be gotten at home was never extravagantly purchased elsewhere. Mrs. Groover's unsolicited, and in a certain sense anonymous, generosity both mitigated and heightened the particularity of Ward's poverty at Pebblebrook. Yet it was not only being poor and adjusting to a wealthier, white "culture, clothing and language," but also being "slow," as Ward calls herself, that defined the character of her time there.

Virginia Ward, back row right, in a Library Club yearbook photo, Pebblebrook High, 1970. Cynthia Beavers, who began at Pebblebrook in 1969, stands next to Ward.

Perhaps "slow," in Ward's parlance, was in fact dyslexia, or in education expert Ann Smith's terms, "a deficit in [her] education" in elementary and middle school.⁹Interview with Ann Smith by the author, March 10, 2009. Whatever the case, Ward asserted that being black at Pebblebrook had nothing on being "slow." As she said: "that was hard[er] than even just being black and going to school and being called nigger . . . . [And] it's hard going to school when [there are] no programs for slow students . . . . It was a struggle to be in a white school. It's a struggle where you look around and everybody's smart." In an era without tracking and before the maturation of special education programs, Ward attended classes with students who excelled with ease—or so it seemed to her. After weeks of difficulty with her assigned reading, she found a friend in the librarian who ordered her required reading in books-on-tape, and her grades improved dramatically. Determined to endure her final two years and walk away with a diploma, harder-earned than anyone could imagine, Ward remarked of those books on tape, "It was a new world."

When it came time for graduation, no fairy godmothers intervened to purchase a class ring or a visit to the beauty parlor. Ward called the dark hair which framed her young smiling face in her graduation photograph, "a mess." Although Ms. Groover and the school librarian smoothed her path the best they could, Ward locates herself at the margins, socioeconomically, academically, and culturally. She related with some indignation that the members of her church who came to her graduation in 1970 were amazed to see her marching in the all-white procession. That her two years alone at Pebblebrook had gone unnoticed suggests that Ward's position outside the traditional desegregation narratives—her class, her academic troubles and her separation from her black peers—obscured her courageous struggle. Ward's story, in which being poor and being black inextricably reinforce her marginality, points to the way in which the "dream" of desegregation, especially in the South where the reality proceeded apace through the 1970s, would be foiled by other realities: white flight, evolving discourses of colorblindness and property rights, and structural poverty.¹⁰In 1980, as a result of desegregation, only 37% of black students attended mostly black schools, by the year 2000, that number had grown to 69%, quickly approaching the 1968 numbers for Southern black students. Robert L. Hayman and Leland Ware, eds, Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009), 319.

A Shared Past

Through Job Corps, Ward got work almost immediately with the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP. Although she was hired to be a "secretary," her supervisor encouraged her to become an organizer, to travel with other staff members and take on a greater role within the chapter. Ward liked the idea a great deal, but her mother "said no," and Ward knew—although her colleagues at the NAACP pressed hard for her to join them—that there would be no further negotiation. Instead, her mother encouraged Ward to leave the NAACP and apply for a job at the First National Bank (what would become Wachovia). She was hired as a maintenance person in the bank cafeteria. To this, her mother also "said no"—insisting that her daughter was better than that work and should say so. After a month, Ward summoned the courage to pursue a job in bookkeeping where her supervisors extracted hours of unpaid overtime and monitored her personal life and assessed her class status with questions about her mother's job and her friends from "the mill." After twenty-one years at the bank, Ward took Reverend Aaron's advice to start her own business painting and cleaning newly constructed homes and apartments. Although she possessed no relevant skills or capital, Ward set off, undaunted, toward entrepreneurship.

Of that time, Ward testified that she learned "how to hold to business and how to work with people," how to win bids and demand fair pay, how to do a job so well that the customer requests you again. When Ward says, as she did many times, "life is a struggle," she means not that certain incidents were challenging, but rather that its arc is defined by struggle—getting very little, and always expecting even less. Despite her own "illiteracy" and her clients' "prejudice," Virginia ran a business—sometimes two—which supported her and her four adopted children. School, she believes, doesn't ready students for work; it is the world that does that—especially a world that exacts special penalties for "being black and a woman." Never, Ward intoned, "take a job for granted."

Virginia Ward, in Pebblebrook High's BrookSpeak, 2009.

As the sole breadwinner for her family of four children, Ward augmented the income from her cleaning business by taking old and infirm clients into her home for full-time care. Ward was a demanding and yet deeply loving mother figure to even the patients who reminded her of her Pebblebrook peers. Some years ago, a young man brought his elderly aunt to Ward with the warning, "she's kinda prejudiced." Virginia assured him knowingly, "we'll deal with it," adding, "I didn't go into my background." The client had been a school teacher in Nebraska and repeatedly assured Ward that "they better not've put one of y'all in my classroom," vowing, "I wouldn't even live in a neighborhood with you all." Ward remembered thinking, with some relish, "I had her all day . . . [she] was gon' learn from me." After a short while, the two had become the "best of friends," and Virginia often brought her client to church with her, seating her in the pews "with the children." With the children? I had asked, not understanding. "I always made sure she sat with the kids," so that the older woman would come to realize, after so many years, that "children are children . . . they all do the same things . . . they all have to be taught." In telling this, Ward still marveled that her friend and client "got old to learn that," but under Ward's instruction, learn she did.

This tale is poignant not only for the image of an old white woman displaced from her former life, values and environment and deposited in a pew with a handful of unruly black children, although that image conveys well the creativity of Ward's pedagogy. Rather, what gives this story its power is the notion of an open and still-viable channel that connects the schoolteacher's generation of racist white folks to Ward's generation of integrating black students and then, finally, to the generation of young pupils in her church's congregation. Ward's maxim is that no lesson can come too late, and that no one gets too old to learn. For Ward, this gentle prodding of people into the unknown is what makes change possible, even in a deeply unjust society, and is what makes the progress that integration promised real. Lingering, enduring possibility surges through Ward's narrative—and it is this sense of a "revolution," not lost but rather deferred, that helps to re-narrate school desegregation, and encourages her listeners to be as resourceful and open-hearted as Ward in broadening narratives of a shared past.

A Familiar Narrative

Right around the corner from Pebblebrook High, and a few years earlier, a more familiar desegregation narrative unfolded. Daphne Delk was the Virginia Ward of her local high school's desegregation process. Unlike Ward, Delk chose her fate consciously, petitioning her parents and the school board for the opportunity to attend Marietta High School, which even then she felt was her "destiny."¹¹Interview with Daphne Delk by Jessica Drysdale and Jay Lutz, November 7, 2009, Kennesaw State University Oral History Project, Cobb NAACP/Civil Rights Series No. 7. A stellar student, Delk sought what she saw as the greater academic resources and challenges of the all-white high school, and she excelled there, going on to college at Fisk University and into the medical technology field. Though she too ate many lunches alone, Delk's success in making a place for herself was understood to demonstrate Marietta's more progressive racial climate; the spring she graduated, she was voted Girl of the Year by her classmates. Her father, who spent two years at Stanford on the GI bill and her mother, who worked for a prominent white family, were active in and dedicated to their community, and Delk's preparation and support network for her integration of Marietta High were substantial.

These outlines of Delk's biography and experiences are familiar to desegregation history, even if hers is not a household name. Virginia Ward's very different story demonstrates the wide breadth of desegregation experience. Understanding the connection between Ward's story and the implications of class for the legacy of desegregation requires a sense of what "middle class" and "poor" have meant in the decades since Brown. In the wake of the Civil Rights era's major victories, the black middle class of Ward's youth had begun to enjoy the material benefits of higher education and white collar jobs, as "class position began to affect mobility for blacks as it always had for whites."¹²Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 44. Since the sixties, as Thomas Shapiro and others have demonstrated, the black middle class has grown substantially, and, as of the late 1990s, the number of black men in middle class jobs had grown dramatically, accompanied by the shrinking of the wage gap between black and white earners.¹³Thomas Shapiro, The Hidden Costs of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 6. Yet it's also true, and extensively documented, that due to de-industrialization, federal economic policy and entrenched residential segregation, the more fragile lower- middle class has become poorer as their upper-middle income peers prospered.¹⁴Pattillo-McCoy comments that since the 1970s examinations of the black "underclass" have constituted a "research industry" stoked in large part by William Julius Wilson's two seminal works on class and race,The Declining Significance of Race and The Truly Disadvantaged, the latter of which documented the plummeting employment opportunities for black Americans and the widening gap between poor black families and middle class black families. Mary Pattillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 20. So while middle-class black students and their upwardly-mobile parents are crucial to the story of school desegregation, so too are the poor families whose wagons were not firmly hitched to the star of post-Civil Rights mobility.

Raising their children in that moment of promise and peril for poor and working class black Americans, Ward's mother and father saw a potentially white-collar future for their daughter. Even if she didn't get a college degree, they hoped her material comfort and income would exceed their own.¹⁵Pattillo-McCoy points out that obtaining a college degree is a "strict" standard for middle-class membership; a more widely applied rule is that a family earns "two times a poverty-level income," 15. Ward's story of desegregating Pebblebrook High and her life after graduation speak to the economic precariousness of being lower-middle-class and black, a theme that popular narratives of desegregation have seldom expressed. Public education had, in the past, played a crucial role in creating opportunities for structurally marginalized students, but the increasing racial isolation of poor children of color in high-poverty schools today means that children like Ward face even greater odds than she did. According to recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2009, only three percent of black public school students attended "low poverty" schools, and eighteen out of the nation's largest twenty districts were less than 50% white, a number that is sure to shrink, as desegregation scholar Gary Orfield has asserted, as Hispanic student populations increase over the next decade.¹⁶Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee, "Historical Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation and the Need for New Integration Strategies," A Report of the Civil Rights Project, UCLA, August 2007. The NCES estimates the dropout rate for students of color (specifically black and Hispanic students) at almost 40 percent nationally; the same data shows that more than one third of black children live in poverty. Race matters, as Cornel West would say, but so does class, and a full picture of school desegregation today and forty years ago will show both at work in the lives of students and their families. Evelyn Higginbotham's theorization of race as a meta-language speaks to how class and color cannot be decoupled for black communities then or now. She writes that race must be recognized for "its powerful, all-encompassing effect on the construction and representation of other social and power relations, namely, gender, class, and sexuality."¹⁷Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol.17, No. 2, Winter 1992, 252. Although Higginbotham's insight is powerfully true, in the case of desegregation history, the "all-encompassing effect" of race on class has at times obscured the important difference class made for desegregators like Daphne Delk. Middle class backgrounds meant toe-holds for inclusion that Ward and generations of low-income black students after her have not had.

Over the decades since Brown, historians have interpreted the desegregation process across the US South and North through a variety of lenses, but the impact of class and poverty in the lives of desegregators have gone, for the most part, unaddressed. Barbara Shircliffe and Vanessa Siddle Walker have described the nostalgia with which some black communities remember their segregated schools and the dynamic of a large, tight-knit family that these all-black institutions cultivated and sustained.¹⁸Barbara Shircliffe, The Best of That World: Historically Black Schools and the Crisis of Desegregation in a Southern Metropolis (Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2006) and Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1996). R. Scott Baker and Richard Kluger, among others, have traced school desegregation efforts back to court cases of the 1930s and ‘40s, revealing that many courageous children and families preceded those of Little Rock or New Orleans.¹⁹R. Scott Baker, The Paradoxes of Desegregation: African American Struggles for Educational Equity in Charleston South Carolina, 1927-1972 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006) and Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board and Black America's Struggle for Equality (New York: Random House, 1975). The histories of these desegregation sagas and others—the Little Rock Nine, the children of New Orleans and the busing crisis in Boston—have been vividly told by Liva Baker, Karen Anderson and J. Anthony Lukas.²⁰Liva Baker, The Second Battle of New Orleans: The Hundred Year Struggle to Integrate the Schools (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), Karen Anderson, Little Rock: Race and Resistance at Central High School (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2009), J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York: Knopf, 1985). Historians Pete Daniel and Elizabeth Jacoway have persuasively argued that the legacy of Little Rock's Central High is very much with us today, as its actors—black and white students—grapple with the mythology entwined around their adolescent actions.²¹Elizabeth Jacoway, Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis that Shocked the Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2000). The fiftieth anniversary of the Brown decision saw a deluge of literature about the "failure" of Brown and its lost dream of education equity, and a bounty of work about what integration does and should mean now.²²For example, Peter Irons, Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision& (London: Penguin, 2002); Charles T. Clotfelter, After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Jennifer Hochschild and Terry M. Moe, though at different ends of the political spectrum, both demonstrate the marginality of desegregation in the scholarship of education reform and educational equity. Although much of this work implicitly dismisses the importance of racially balanced schools and classrooms, researchers like Gary Orfield continue to crusade for the desegregation of increasingly homogenous urban and suburban schools. Clearly, the life of Brown is a much-examined one.

In the current era of school re-segregation, it is necessary to listen to the testimony of Brown's first children, to explore its rich diversity and to probe the silences in the known narratives. Without attention to the dimensions of class and structural poverty in desegregation history, the decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1—the landmark 2007 case which made student assignment on the basis of race unconstitutional—makes a kind of perverse sense. That is, if race is seen to be the only operative force in the lives of students and in their schools, then one might agree with the infamous declarations of Chief Justice John Roberts, "the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," and Justice Clarence Thomas, "[Today's school desegregation plans] appear to rest upon the idea that any school that is black is inferior, and that blacks cannot succeed without the benefit of the company of whites."²³Roberts's words are drawn from the plurality opinion in Parents v Seattle in 2007. Thomas' comments date back to his concurring opinion in the 1995 case Missouri v Jenkins. The words of Roberts and Thomas reinforce the importance of investigating both race and class in desegregation's history and its contemporary politics, rather than allowing the terms and their context to shadow and obscure each other in public discourse and public memory. As Richard Kahlenberg states, it is not the "black schools" that are inferior, it is the poor schools—very often composed of students of color whose parents do not and historically have not had the choices available to middle- and high-income white parents.²⁴Richard D. Kahlenberg, All Together Now: Creating Middle Class Schools Through Public Choice (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2001). While the school desegregation plans of the Brown era emphasized race-based desegregation to dismantle de jure segregation, contemporary desegregation plans must combat middle- and upper-class white flight spurred by southern desegregation efforts of the late sixties and early seventies and the residential segregation that has always been a feature of northern places like Chicago, Detroit and New York. The contemporary conversation about public education prismatically refracts these historical and cultural forces, and searching the stories of desegregators reveals new slants of light.

John T. Bledsoe, Rally at State Capitol, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1959.

Perhaps the most widely familiar stories of desegregators are the personal memoirs of middle-class and upper-middle class integrators. These memoirs demand attention because they are an accepted shorthand: for generations of TV watchers and news listeners outside the perimeters of the crises, the internationally known story of the Little Rock Nine and the post-graduation fame of Charlayne Hunter-Gault have served as a means to understand how the injustice and abuse that desegregators suffered paid off in individual success and the advancement of "the black community." Allowing just a few chronicles to stand in for a rich spectrum of desegregation experiences produces a form of closure that precludes a nuanced conversation about the merits and shortcomings of historical desegregation.²⁵Although the issue of re-segregation is a pressing one in both the South and the West and has historically been a persistent problem in the urban North, the context for this paper is the de jure school segregation of the South.

In the memoirs of Little Rock and in Hunter-Gault's biography, the authors make the trauma of desegregation coherent so as to present a trajectory that begins with violence and disorder but resolves in triumph—legal or personal and sometimes both. The memoirs obscure the role of class by spending little time describing the crucial groundwork for the students' success laid by their families' class and social connections, their parents' jobs, and their education backgrounds. The Little Rock Nine, especially, emblematize desegregation broadly in public memory, but although the Nine are clearly middle class students, public memory of them and their own shaping of that legacy does not contemplate the difference their middle-class-ness made. By contrast, a history of desegregation that can perhaps better inform present struggles for educational justice will incorporate a diversity of experiences and memories which acknowledges that class powerfully mediated the hardships faced by integrating students.

Three of the Little Rock Nine have written full-length memoirs: Melba Pattillo Beals' Warriors Don't Cry, Carlotta Walls LaNier's A Mighty Long Way and Terrence Roberts' Lessons from Little Rock chronicle the dramatic year (1957) of the integration of Central High. Beals' memoir, published first, has won the most attention and acclaim. She grew up in a comfortably middle-class home with her mother and grandmother, and in particular moments in her text the reader glimpses how Beals perceives her own class position—she calls the soldiers of the Arkansas National Guard "hayseeds" and "tobacco-chewing . . . clods" and sees herself as equipped for higher education and a career in journalism.²⁶Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 168, 171. Similarly, Terrence Roberts' came from middle class parents; his mother was from an "upwardly mobile" Little Rock family and she ran a catering business, and her son was an eager, talented student, nick-named "the brain" and "the professor" by his peers.²⁷Terrence Roberts, Lessons from Little Rock (Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2009), 30. Raised by a college-educated store clerk and a brick-mason, Carlotta Walls LaNier came from a family of resources both cultural and material; like Beals she had travelled outside the Jim Crow South before high school, and like Beals and Roberts, she was academically prepared for Central High and was confident in the classroom. Although the accounts of LaNier, Roberts, and Beals must here stand in for the class position, social connections, and academic preparedness of the Nine, it is a testament to the group's upward mobility and academic preparation that all of the Nine attended and graduated from college.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a prominent news anchor and journalist, speaks of the 1961 integration of the University of Georgia much like her lesser-known peer, Daphne Delk does, in terms of "destiny." During her triumphant senior year at Turner High School in Atlanta—"the school for the Black crème de la crème"—Charlayne Hunter-Gault was editor of the school newspaper, president of the Senior Honor Society and Homecoming Queen.²⁸Charlayne Hunter-Gault, In My Place (New York: FSG, 1992), 87. She was a gem of the "talented tenth," the phrase W.E.B. DuBois coined to describe the class of leaders, "an aristocracy of talent and character," in whose hands DuBois felt the fate of "the masses" lay.²⁹W.E.B. DuBois, "The Talented Tenth," in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of To-Day, (New York, 1903). Hunter-Gault integrated UGA with Hamilton Holmes, a bright young man from a prominent family of black businessmen and doctors who would also go on to become Emory's first black medical student. Heckling mobs and social isolation on campus plagued both Hunter-Gault and Holmes, but Hunter-Gault enjoyed the celebrity her role attracted: she hobnobbed with Lena Horne and Robert F. Kennedy and won recognition in the form of prestigious scholarships and awards.³⁰Hunter-Gault, 205, 211. Hunter-Gault went on to work as a correspondent and reporter for PBS, CNN, NPR, The New Yorker and The New York Times. Her extraordinary accomplishments further complicate her role as a narrator of desegregation. Her memoir, like the others, highlights the challenge of commemorating desegregation in a way that at once honors the young integrators and yet imagines a diverse spectrum of experiences, inclusive of poor students, students who struggled academically, and students whose experiences testify to the enduring systematic problems posed by racism, classism and structural inequality.

Conclusion

Of her first days at Pebblebrook High, Virginia Ward maintained that not all her peers whispered "nigger" as she passed them in the halls. She remembered that some students and teachers "were ready for a change anyway. Some people were ready for a change." Ward's narrative—both a narrative of personal victory and a story of unabated struggle—and those of the many "first children" who have not yet been heard, can serve to deepen our understanding of historical desegregation. Rare is such a patient and ingenious steward of the "beloved community" as Ward, and hearing her voice and that of other desegregators is important to a desegregation history that speaks to our present. Reflecting critically on Brown means accepting that between its visionary promise and its distressing failures lie a host of testimonies and experiences of faith, family, gender and, as this story suggests, class, that must be accorded due attention in assessing Brown's legacy and its future.

Article from Pebblebrook High's BrookSpeak, March 2009.

Scholars Robert Hayman and Leland Ware call the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Parents v Seattle "a betrayal of Brown" which "slam[med] shut" the door on racial diversity. Thankfully, the case was not to be the "final word on desegregation" that they feared.³¹Hayman and Ware, 313. Long before the Seattle ruling, individual districts like those in Manchester, Connecticut; La Crosse, Wisconsin; and the Wake County schools of Raleigh, North Carolina, creatively and tenaciously pursued plans that did not rely on race or ethnicity-based student assignments. Rather, the plans placed emphasis on class, implementing busing plans to achieve socioeconomic integration. Memphis, Tennessee, recently saw the largest suburban-urban district merger to date when the Shelby County schools, a mostly white suburban district, and the Memphis city schools, a low-income "majority minority" district, consolidated. The previously impossible—a blending of two district's profoundly separate students—has become feasible. What Memphis and Shelby County officials and citizens will make of this opportunity is not yet clear, but the Seattle decision does not foreclose the possibility of class-based plans that have the potential to effect racial desegregation as well.

Although Brown-era desegregation finally allowed black students to demonstrate, in more than token numbers, how ably they could compete with their white peers when they received consummate preparation and resources, not all black students were poised to flourish in integrated schools. Some of the struggles Ward's narrative describes are all too familiar to students fifty years later.³²Russell W. Rumberger and Gregory J. Palardy elaborate on previous findings that "socioeconomic segregation matters" in student achievement; they find that in South particularly "the effects of socioeconomic segregation can only be addressed through policies that attempt to redistribute students among schools or improve the quality of [low-SES] schools." "Does Resegregation Matter?: The Impact of Social Composition on Academic Achievement in Southern High Schools," in School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back? (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2005), 145. The challenges faced by contemporary students of color are not solely those of de jure racism to which Brown dealt such a blow, they are also the manifestations of structural poverty. Ward's experiences and those of students like her demonstrate the continuing importance of desegregation in the fight for educational equity but also point to the promise of class-based desegregation strategies for all low-income students. Sociologist Orlando Patterson has shown that the economic gap between rich and poor black Americans is even greater than that between rich and poor whites: class and race must together guide education policy, if high-poverty schools and low-income students are ever to get the justice they deserve. Despite the dramatic growth of the black middle class in the decades since Brown, black students are still more likely to attend high-poverty high schools and half as likely to graduate from college.³³"The Economic Stagnation of the Black Middle Class," A Briefing Before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Washington, DC, July 15, 2005. Accessed at http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/122805_BlackAmericaStagnation.pdf on December 9, 2011. Ward's story of individual courage enriches a memorializing tradition that too often forgets the role of class. It also must stand to remind those dedicated to educational justice, that students like Virginia Ward succeeded, in today's terms, "against the odds." With an ear to the stories of first children and the guidance they offer, we might take heart in the fact that although structural poverty appears entrenched beyond remedy, so once did the injustices of Jim Crow.

Essay

A just-released report from the Southern Education Foundation—"The Worst of Times: Children in Extreme Poverty in the South and Nation"—finds that more than 5.7 million children lived in extreme poverty in the United States in 2008—surviving on less than seven or eight dollars per day. Almost one in every twelve children was in a household with an income below 50 percent of federal poverty line.¹In 2008, the US Census threshold of poverty for a household of four persons was $22,025 or $5,506 per person. This income amounts to $15.09 per day for each of the four persons in the household. A child in extreme poverty lives in a household where the income is less than half that amount—below $7.54 per day for each person. These children belonged to households in every state of the Union, but they were largely concentrated in the fifteen states of the US South. More than 2.4 million extremely poor children—42 percent of the nation's total—lived in the South.

Ten of the eleven states in the nation where at least one in every ten children are in extreme poverty were in the South.² The Southern Education Foundation's South includes fifteen states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Mississippi had the largest proportion—14 percent. Louisiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Alabama followed at 11 to 12 percent. Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Texas had one child in every ten in extreme poverty. New Mexico with 11 percent was the only non-Southern state with the nation's highest rates of extreme child poverty.

The Southern Education Foundation, Percentage of Children in Extreme Poverty, 2008.

The Recession's Effects on Extreme Child Poverty

The recent recession has expanded the number of extremely poor children by an estimated 26 percent—adding as many as 1 ½ million children in extreme poverty since 2008. During the last two years, the western states have had the largest rise of extremely poor children, although every section of the nation has had a substantial increase.

The rise of hardship and extreme poverty for children, especially in the southern and western states, will probably continue beyond the first half of 2010. From June 2009 through March 2010, the number of jobless workers continued to grow in the South and the West. The number of mortgage foreclosures between November 2009 and January 2010 continued to rise in western and southern states. Nine states in the South and four in the West had bank card delinquency rates above the national average during the last three months of 2009. Seven southern states and five western states had delinquency rates for automobile loans of one percent of more—substantially above the national average of .81 percent—in the last quarter of 2009.

During the same period, 10 percent or more of the student loans for higher education were at least sixty days delinquent in most counties in the United States. The overwhelming majority of the overdue student loans were in the South where three out of four counties had delinquency rates of 10 percent or more. In one out of every twelve southern counties, the delinquency rates were 20 percent or higher. These indicators of consumer well-being suggest that the growth of extreme poverty among children will continue into 2011.

Children in Extreme Poverty in US School Districts

This Southern Education Foundation study shows that before suffering the harshest effects of the "Great Recession," more than 1,000 public school districts across every state in the Union—2/5 of the more than 2,700 school districts for which data was available in 2008—had rates of extreme child poverty greater than the national average of 7.9 percent.³This study included data on 2,761 school districts in fifty states with a total enrollment of 31.7 million students (approximately 2/3 of all US public school students) in 2008. Almost all districts in the study had individual enrollment totals of at least 1,800 students. See full report at The Southern Education Foundation's website for additional details and rankings of school districts. The highest rates were concentrated primarily in southern school districts although several non-southern states, especially Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana, had school districts with some of the nation's highest rates of extreme child poverty. Warren City Schools in Ohio topped the list, with fully thirty-five percent of children within its jurisdiction living in extreme poverty. But, twelve of the twenty-five school districts with the highest rates of extreme child poverty were in the South, including five districts in Texas and four in Mississippi. Fifty-six of the one hundred school districts with the highest rates throughout the nation were located in the South. At the same time, every state in the country has school districts with very high rates of extreme child poverty.

At least two out of every five southern school districts in the study had a rate of extreme child poverty of 10 percent or more. In the Northeast, less than one in eight school districts had such a high rate of extreme poverty among children. On the other end of the spectrum, 396 school districts in the nation have less than two out of every one hundred children in extreme poverty in 2008. Only sixteen of these districts were in the Southern states—and eleven of those were in Texas and Virginia. Most of these 396 districts were located in California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Student Demographics in Districts by Rates of Extreme Child Poverty

The school districts with high concentrations of extremely poor children have a disproportionately large enrollment of students of color—primarily African Americans and Hispanics. African American (43.4 percent) and Hispanic (34.4 percent) students make up 78 percent of the total enrollment of the one hundred school districts in the United States with the highest levels of extremely poor children—districts where at least one child out every five lives in extreme poverty. Two-thirds of the more than 8.8 million students enrolled in districts where one out of every ten children is extremely poor were African American and Hispanic.

District Funding Patterns by Rates of Extreme Child Poverty

The nation's school districts with the largest reported percentages of extremely poor children appear to have the least money to educate these children when they enter school. Based on financial data from 2007 (the latest available data), The median school district with lower rates of extreme child poverty (below 5 percent) had $6,152 more for educating each student—76 percent more funding—than the median school district with high rates (10 percent or above).

Federal funding for school districts has had only a minor impact in narrowing this gap. The median district with high extreme poverty rates received an extra $749 in per pupil revenues due to its high percentage of school-age poverty. But, the gap in per pupil spending remained vast—with and without federal revenues

Student Performance by Rates of Extreme Child Poverty

The median school district with a rate of extreme child poverty at or above 10 percent had 63 percent of its students score proficient in state-mandated mathematics examinations in 2008. Districts with less than 5 percent of extreme poverty had a median score of 78 percent—a rate about ¼ better.

Implications and Recommendations for Policy and Practice in Education

"The Worst of Times: Children in Extreme Poverty in the South and Nation" raises serious questions about the impact and validity of current educational policies and practices at every level on children in extreme poverty. These children exist in significant numbers in school districts in every region and state in the country. But, no educational policy at any level today acknowledges America's large population of children in extreme poverty and the extraordinary challenges they face in education.

It is time for a new perspective and framework for the education of America's most vulnerable children. It makes little sense today for the federal government to continue to base national funding for school districts on measures of poverty without also considering extreme poverty. And it makes little sense to count only children between the ages of five and seventeen in calculating poverty and extreme poverty rates for distributing federal funds to school districts. Extremely poor children face life-crippling challenges and problems in education long before the age of five when they enter kindergarten.

In addition, this study's findings on the funding of school districts according to rates of extreme child poverty flatly contradict the nation's cherished commitment to equal opportunity in education.

In these hard times, policymakers and educators can help to assure that the children with the least do not suffer the most as students by adopting an informal practice of an "extreme child poverty impact assessment" that gauges how any major change in policy, practice, or funding in public education might adversely or positively effect the education of children in extreme poverty in their school districts and offered alternatives that could reduce any adverse impact.

In addition, SEF recommends that the White House, the US Department of Education, and other federal policymakers establish a bi-partisan, national commission on the education of children in extreme poverty. This body should underwrite additional research, awaken public understanding and awareness, and identify how the nation's educational policies can assure an equal opportunity to learn for the growing numbers of our poorest children.

Education can be one of the nation's most efficient and effective long-term investments to help young people out of poverty and extreme poverty. The education of extremely poor children also can be one of the best investments for advancing the entire country's future quality of life and high standards of living. Children in extreme poverty represent a fundamental test of America and its enduring values. Their progress in our midst will be the lasting measure of our true worth as a people and as a nation in the worst of times no less than the best.

About the Author

An Alabama native, Steve Suitts is vice president of the Atlanta-based Southern Education Foundation (SEF) and an adjunct faculty member of the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University. Suitts' previous essay for Southern Spaces, "Crisis of the New Majority," reported that as of 2008, low-income students made up a majority of students in the South's public schools. The complete SEF report, The Worst of Times: Children in Extreme Poverty in the South and Nation, released on June 15, 2010, can be found free of charge at http://www.southerneducation.org. Begun in 1867, the Southern Education Foundation is devoted to to improving educational excellence and equity in the South.