"Principals Gloomy Over Private Schools."
White flight from public education
After the Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, many school districts across the South adopted freedom of choice desegregation plans. These plans allowed all of a district’s students to choose which school in the district they wanted to attend—regardless of whether they were assigned to that school or whether the school was traditionally zoned for white or Black students. Not surprisingly, freedom of choice plans encouraged very little integration.
Then, when the Supreme Court ruled these freedom of choice plans unconstitutional in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County on May 27, 1968, white southerners who had hoped to avoid the integration issue were faced with the reality of imminent desegregation. As such, many white families abandoned public schools for private academies.
On November 24, 1969, Dr. Franklin Shumake, president of the Georgia Education Association, told a reporter for The Atlanta Constitution that he had detected a new “nose-against-the-wall” attitude from school leaders. One principal reported that his superintendent told him, “I’m going to integrate, but it might be the last thing I’ll do.” And another principal warned, “there is good money” supporting the private school movement that had gotten underway in his county.
Most of the public school principals the Constitution’s reporters talked to agreed that the status of the new private schools didn’t matter: not the quality of their teachers; not their curricular resources; not the state of their facilities. The only thing that mattered was how white their student populations would be. As one school leader put it, “They [the whites] just don’t want to be going down to what was a Negro school.” While the public schools integrated, many white families pulled their kids out and put them in the new private classrooms.
These new private schools—schools we now refer to today as segregation academies—opened up (sometimes literally) overnight. According to the Constitution’s report, even though quality was problem:
The State Education department, the GEA, and the organization of well-established private schools in the state all support legislation to set standards for private schools. But political opposition is stiff. Such legislation has failed in the past, and many observers give it little chance for the future.
Once the inevitability of public school desegregation took hold across the South, the southern segregationists who had pushed back against any and all integration initiatives found a new form of massive resistance: un-regulation of and support for the new private schools.
A vote to regulate these private schools was a vote for integration. But it was also a vote against what segregationists believed to be true Americanism. Governor Lester Maddox, talking at the grand opening of one of these new private academies, Valdosta Christian Schools, put it this way:
It is wonderful to be with God’s people—people who love the American way of life and who believe that education should include discipline, integrity, and character building.
So, the white abandonment of public schools in the South wasn’t just ignored; it was encouraged.
More to come soon…
Primary Sources
Bowler, Mike. “Principals Gloomy Over Private Schools.” The Atlanta Constitution, November 24, 1969.
Maddox, Lester. (1969, September 7). Text of remarks prepared for delivery by Governor Lester Maddox to the Valdosta Christian Schools, Valdosta, GA, on Sunday, September 7, 1969, at 1:30p.m. RCB 9282: GOVERNOR – EXECUTIVE DEPT. – GOVERNOR’S SPEECH TRANSCRIPTS – 1969, August thru 1970, March – Gov. Lester Maddox: Speech Texts, Georgia Archives, Atlanta, GA.