Segregation Academies and White Flight from Public Schools
Why segregation academies sprung up across the South in the late 1960s
1969 was a climatic year for public education in Georgia.
On August 1, the U.S. Justice Department filed a blanket lawsuit against the State Board of Education seeking to force immediate desegregation of all Georgia public schools. Of the state’s 192 public school systems, 159 still operated in a segregated fashion. And, according to the suit, only 15 percent of the state’s Black student population attended schools with whites.
The state’s political leadership responded with defiance.
Governor Lester Maddox, who viewed federal intervention into the integration issue as a violation of state’s rights, responded to the court action by stating that his administration would continue to fight the federal government. “I call upon the attorney general to use all the legal and financial resources at the command of this state,” the governor said. “I hope we will be successful because I think it criminal for the Justice Department and officials of HEW [Health, Education, and Welfare] who are in violation of the U.S. Constitution to demand that we disobey the Constitution or face jail.”
Even though Governor Maddox remained committed to massive resistance, he faced a changed legal landscape that would force Georgia to finally confront full-scale public school desegregation.
In October 1969, when the Supreme Court ordered the immediate desegregation of all public schools in the South, the writing was on the wall. Commenting on the racial anxiety white Southerners felt about continued Black advancement in civil rights, Governor Maddox pointed out that “children in school in parts of the country where there is a greater percentage of Negroes would suffer more than in parts of the country where there are relatively few blacks.” So, many white families pulled their kids from public schools and put them in new private academies.
Why White Families Left the Public Schools
Why would children in the South suffer more than children in other parts of the country? And what drove these white families to jump from integrating public schools to private academies?
The answer was not complicated. It was one word: race.
Buck Maddox (another Maddox), head of Greenfield Academy in Weston, GA, argued that Black students would not be able to keep pace with the white students in their schools. Integration, he argued, would create “an impossible learning situation.” Here’s how he described the thinking behind the segregation academies movement:
The new movement is based on a philosophy that is now beginning to be a racist philosophy, that achievement levels of black and white students start the same in the first grade and that as the children mature a gap develops and widens.
Buck Maddox believed the racist trope that Black kids couldn’t handle academics and school as well as white ones. Maddox’s worldview reflected a long-standing racist assumption held by many white segregationist: that racial inequality in education resulted from Black intellectual inferiority rather than structural effects of segregated schooling.
For many white families, this belief justified abandoning the public schools. As one public school superintendent warned:
There’s already been some talk about a private school here by some and I imagine they’ll revive the idea after the Supreme Court’s latest decision. I can foresee the day when I’ll be running a predominately black school system while the whites go to private schools.
So, once it became clear that integration could no longer be avoided, many white families began to look at leaving the public schools.
They Sprung Up Everywhere
On November 9, 1969, The Atlanta Constitution published a front page exposé by education editor Junie Brown titled “They Spring Up Everywhere.” The piece was about the private schools we now refer to as segregation academies.
Brown began this way:
In their panic over integration, many Georgia parents are attempting to turn the calendar back to 1900. With what they see as a black tidal wave lashing at the public schools, many white parents are compromising education for the right to remain segregated.
Many white Georgians had been fleeing the public schools since the 1954 Brown decision. But the 1969 Supreme Court order, along with the blanket federal suit against the state Board of Education, meant the road of resistance was coming to an end.
These new segregation academies were built in short order. Across the state, white communities organized fundraisers, purchased land, and opened whites-only private schools to keep segregation in tact.
Gubernatorial Support for White Flight from Public Schools
Segregation academies benefited from state-level political support.
Governor Maddox, using the bully pulpit of the governorship, made clear his support of this white abandonment of public schools. He donated $100 (about $776.00 in 2022) to build a private academy in Coffee County in Southwest Georgia. And, according to a member of the Washington-Johnson Community School in Harrison in Middle Georgia, Maddox attended a groundbreaking fundraiser where he bought several $100 cakes to support their new school.
Speaking at the school a year later (on August 16, 1970), Gov. Maddox described the Washington-Johnson Community School’s white families this way:
I thank God for patriotic Americans like you. People with your kind of dedication and willingness to flight for your beliefs are the sort of men and women who have made America the land of liberty and greatness it is today.
Gov. Maddox also commended these white families for exercising their “freedom of choice” by refusing to send their kids to integrated schools. He said:
You won’t throw away your freedom of choice for a handful of federal sliver. And you won’t sit idly by while greedy politicians, hungry for more votes and more dollars, sell out your country to the communists, the socialists, and those who play into the hands of our enemies.
The youngsters who attend the Washington-Johnson Community School are fortunate, my friends… they are taught not just the academics of education, but also what it means to be an American, and what they as citizens can do to defend and strengthen their heritage.
With the statement “defend and strengthen their heritage,” Gov. Maddox was, of course, referencing whiteness and white supremacy. He was arguing that segregation was a key part of Americanism. By framing white flight from public schools as an act of patriotism and an expression of liberty, Maddox used the authority of the governor’s office to legitimize the creation of whites-only private schools.
What Segregation Academies Were
To many white families, segregation academies were a way to maintain control over their children’s education in the face of federal action on civil rights. Race was the central issue for why these private academies were being built. And it was the reason why white families were choosing to send their kids to them.
“Everybody knows the reason,” John Mitchell of Lamar County in Central Georgia said when asked why his family had started the Holy Bible School. “I don’t have to tell you.”
Segregation academies marked a shift in the institutional landscape of southern education. As federal courts forced public schools to integrate, thousands of white families migrated into these new private institutions so they could preserve racial hierarchy, white educational authority, and the segregation they had long enjoyed under Jim Crow.
The public school system did not disappear. But, in many communities, its white students did.
Why This History Still Matter
Segregation academies were a white backlash against Black civil rights and federal intervention into the southern states social arrangements. But they were more than that.
Segregation academies represented a migration of white educational authority and control from one institutional space to another. This pattern—resisting democratic change by shifting political power across institutions while, at the same time, avoiding the democratic accountability that comes with that change—has appeared repeatedly in the history of American education.
Schooling has often been a site of political conflict. Understanding the rise of segregation academies in the South in the late 1960s helps explain how educational inequality can persist even in the face legal justice.
More to come soon.
References
Bailey, Phil. “Choice Plan Preferred.” Atlanta Constitution. November 3, 1969.
Brown, Junie. “The Spring Up Everywhere.” Atlanta Constitution. November 9, 1969.
Hurst, Margaret. “U.S. Suit Demands State Desegregate All Public Schools. Atlanta Constitution. August 2, 1969.
Text of Remarks Prepared for Delivery by Governor Lester Maddox at the Washington-Johnson Community School, Harrison, GA, on Wednesday, August 26, 1970, at 7:30p.m., RCB 9283: GOVERNOR – EXECUTIVE DEPT. – GOVERNOR’S SPEECH TRANSCRIPTS – 1970, April thru October – Gov. Lester Maddox: Speech Texts, Georgia Archives, Atlanta, GA.