Good Morning POU! Today let’s talk about Segregation Academies.
Segregation academies are private schools in the Southern United States that were founded in the mid-20th century by white parents to avoid having their children attend desegregated public schools. They were founded between 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, and 1976, when the court ruled similarly about private schools.
While many of these schools still exist – most with low percentages of minority students even today – they may not legally discriminate against students or prospective students based on any considerations of religion, race or ethnicity that serve to exclude non-white students. The laws that permitted their racially-discriminatory operation, including government subsidies and tax exemption, were invalidated by U.S. Supreme Court decisions. After Runyon v. McCrary (1976), all of these private schools were forced to accept African-American students. As a result, segregation academies changed their admission policies, ceased operations, or merged with other private schools.
An advertisement for Stonewall Jackson Academy in Florence, South Carolina.
Most of these schools remain overwhelmingly white institutions, both because of their founding ethos and because tuition fees are a barrier to entry. In communities where many or most white students are sent to these private schools, the percentages of African-American students in tuition-free public schools are correspondingly elevated. For example, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 2010, 92% of the students at Lee Academy were white, while 92% of the students at Clarksdale High School were black. The effects of this de facto racial segregation are compounded by the unequal quality of education produced in communities where whites served by former segregation academies seek to minimize tax levies for public schools.
The first segregation academies were created by white parents in the late 1950s in response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which required public school boards to eliminate segregation “with all deliberate speed” (Brown II). At the time, segregation under Jim Crow laws was still widely enforced in the South, where most adult blacks were still disfranchised and excluded from politics. The Brown ruling did not apply to private schools, so founding new academies gave white parents a way to continue to educate their children separately from blacks. In Virginia, the “massive resistance” campaign led Prince Edward County to close its public schools from 1959 to 1964; the only education in the county was a segregation academy, funded by state “tuition grants.”
From 1950 to 1958, the South’s private school enrollment increased by more than 250,000 students; by 1965, nearly one million Southern students attended private schools. “This growth was catalyzed by Southern state legislatures, who enacted as many as 450 laws and resolutions between 1954 and 1964 attempting to block, postpone, limit, or evade the desegregation of public schools, many of which expressly authorized the systematic transfer of public assets and monies to private schools…While none of the new laws specifically mentioned ‘race’ or racial segregation, each had the effect of obstructing Black students from attending all-White public schools.”
Inverness High School (later Central Delta Academy). Originally the white school in Inverness, this campus later became the Central Delta Academy.
The underwriting of private schools undermined public schools. “What is notable is that taxpayer dollars financed these all-white schools at the cost of simultaneously creating poorly funded all-black public-school systems in the South. To put it simply, as the financial drain of taxpayer dollars from whites attending segregation academies decimated school systems educating black children, black communities, students and teachers paid a terribly high price to ensure that whites were educated with other whites,” segregation researcher Noliwe Rooks wrote in 2018.
A 1972 report on school desegregation noted that segregation academies could usually be identified by the word “Christian” or “church” in the school’s name. The report observed that while individual Protestant churches were often deeply involved in the establishment of segregation academies, Catholic dioceses usually indicated that their schools were not meant to be havens from desegregation. Many segregation academies claimed they were established to provide a “Christian education”, but the sociologist Jennifer Dyer has argued that such claims were simply a “guise” for the schools’ actual objective of allowing parents to avoid enrolling their children in racially integrated public schools.
Reasons why whites pulled their children out of public schools have been debated: whites insisted that “quality fueled their exodus”, and blacks said “white parents refused to allow their children to be schooled alongside blacks”. Scholars estimate that, across the nation, at least half a million white students were withdrawn from public schools between 1964 and 1975 to avoid mandatory desegregation. In the 21st century, Archie Douglas, the headmaster of Montgomery Academy (founded as a segregation academy), said that he is sure “that those who resented the Civil Rights Movement or sought to get away from it took refuge in the academy”. As of 2014, the student body of The Montgomery Academy was 10% percent non-white.
IRS involvement and definitions
In 1969, parents of Mississippi black children brought suit to revoke tax-exemption status for non-profit segregation academies (Green v. Connally). They won a temporary injunction in the D.C. Circuit in early 1970 and the suit in June 1971. The United States government appealed to the Supreme Court, where the lower court’s decision was summarily affirmed in Coit v. Green (1971). Meanwhile, on July 10, 1970, the Internal Revenue Service announced it could “no longer legally justify allowing tax-exempt status to private schools which practice racial discrimination.” For a school to get or keep its tax-exempt status, it would have to publish a policy of non-discrimination and not practice overt discrimination. Many schools simply refused to comply. In the 1980s, Southern Republican Members of Congress such as Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond began to pressure the Reagan administration to halt revocation of tax-exempt status from segregation academies. In 1982, during congressional debate on the Voting Rights Act Amendments of 1982, the administration considered support for such a policy, leading to what one of its aides called “our worst public-relations and political disaster yet.”
A decade later, similarly aggrieved appellees argued once again in Allen v. Wright (1983) that the standards were too low. The appellees had asserted that “there are more than 3,500 racially segregated private academies operating in the country having a total enrollment of more than 750,000 children.” The court considered whether the parents had standing to sue, and concluded not, because they did not allege that they or their children had applied to, been discouraged from applying to, or been denied admission to any private school or schools. Specifically, it ruled that citizens do not have standing to sue a federal government agency based on the influence that the agency’s determinations might have on third parties (such as private schools). The judges noted the parents were in the posture of disappointed observers of the governmental process. The IRS would continue to enforce the regulations it had promulgated in 1970. Any school that was not tax-exempt in this period was likely a segregation academy, the standard for non-discrimination being low. After 1983, any school named in a judgement or IRS document in this period absolutely was. Many schools did not regain tax-exempt status until the 1990s.