A History of Private Schools and Race in the American South..

WHY ARE MAGA SUPPORTS SO DUMB? LET'S LOOK AT THEIR EDUCATION - AND WHERE THEY GOT IT...

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."

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 often indicated that their schools were not meant to be havens from desegregation, which was buttressed by the reputation Catholic schools had in offering free or reduced tuition to children of color in order to afford them a parochial education. 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.

The Religious Right is flexing its powerful muscles these days; in the last few months alone they have gained the right to prayers at school, forced public funding for religious institutions, and repealed a half-century-old right to choice for women. The tradition of separation of church and state espoused by our founding fathers seems to be in deep jeopardy. How have we arrived at this predicament?

Eugenicists behind the U.S.’s forced sterilizations during the last century also wanted a border wall. https://conspiranon.blogspot.com/2024/08/mr-trump-century-ago-america-built.html

One of the most durable myths in recent history is the fiction that the Religious Right galvanized as a political movement in response to the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Evangelicals, however, considered abortion a Catholic issue throughout the 1970s. Most evangelicals were silent when the Roe decision was handed down, and those who did comment actually applauded the ruling. The real origins of the Religious Right may surprise you. Prof. Randall Balmer, a world-renown authority on the subject explores the American Evangelical movement from the First Great Awakening till their last, and most ominous, reincarnation in the late 70s. Balmer discusses why the nature of their new rise to power should give all of us pause on what could be next.

University of Alabama Historian John Giggie said these kinds of private academies existed before desegregation occurred. He said in the beginning, the academies were either elite preparatory schools or religiously oriented. Their purpose changed during the civil rights movement.

“The segregation academy movement picked up steam and became explicitly about refusing to allow Black and white children to go to school together,” Giggie said.

First, it’s worth noting that the evangelical canopy has always been a broad and unwieldy one. Broad enough to include Anabaptists and Campbellites, Wesleyans and Presbyterians, Pentecostals and Lutherans—we should be leery of speaking of it in monolithic terms. But it does seem that in its most traditional forms, regardless of geography, evangelicals were often those not only skeptically removed from the civil rights movement, but directly opposed to it. There were notable exceptions, of course. And, as noted by historians such as David Swartz and Brantley Gasaway, there has always been a stream within the broader evangelical river that has prioritized social action and justice.

But it does seem self-evident that, in the main, white evangelicals—particularly those in the South—were deeply invested in efforts to either uphold Jim Crow or to try to slow down its dismantling.

2024: The daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., Bernice King, has responded to former President Donald Trump's claims of drawing a crowd during his Jan. 6, 2021, speech in Washington similar to the one of her father's renowned 'I have a dream' speech.

The House Select Committee that investigated the events of Jan. 6 estimated that Trump drew 53,000 people to the National Mall, the same area where crowds gathered to hear King in 1963. However, according to the National Park Service, which manages the mall, about 250,000 people were present for King's speech, stretching from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument.

A History of Private Schools and Race in the American South.

Private schools may have a long, honorable tradition in America that goes back to colonial times, but that tradition ended—at least in the American South—in the last half of the 20th century when they were used as safe havens for Southern Whites to escape the effects of the impending and ongoing desegregation mandates. This exodus from public schools began in the 1940s, when private school enrollment in the 15 states of the South rose by more than 125,000 students—roughly 43 percent—in response to U.S. Supreme Court decisions outlawing segregation in graduate and professional schools in the South. While the decisions only concerned institutions of higher education, it signaled to watchful Southern leaders that desegregation might soon spread to their public elementary and secondary schools, compelling them to react in ways to defend their way of life.

Private schools in the South were established, expanded, and supported to preserve the Southern tradition of racial segregation in the face of the federal courts’ dismantling of “separate but equal.” White students left public schools in droves to both traditional and newly formed private schools. From 1950 to 1965, private school enrollment grew at unprecedented rates all over the nation, with the South having the largest growth.

By 1958, the South’s private school enrollment had exploded, increasing by more than 250,000 students over an eight-year period, and boasting almost one million students in 1965. 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. For example, in 1961, Georgia passed a bill to provide tax-funded scholarships and grants for students to attend any non-sectarian private school, doling out roughly $218,000 ($3.6 million in terms of relative income value in 2013) to finance the scholarships of more than 1,500 students in 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.

Eventually these enactments supporting private schools were invalidated by federal courts or abandoned by Southern states that faced likely court challenges because the bills were seen as indirect, covert efforts to evade or disrupt public school desegregation and “significantly encourage and involve the State in private discriminations.” But many still found ways to extract public dollars for private schools.

From the mid-1960s to 1980, as public schools in the Deep South began to slowly desegregate through federal court orders, private school enrollment increased by more than 200,000 students across the region—with about two-thirds of that growth occurring in six states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

During this time, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) vacillated in its allowance of tax deductions for private schools. In the early 1960s, facing growing backlash from civil rights organizations, the IRS temporarily suspended applications of avowed “segregation academies” for federal tax exemptions, a tax status permitting taxpayers in Southern states to reduce their federal taxable income when contributing to racially exclusionary private schools. But in 1967, it announced tax deductions for contributions to any segregated academy. This led to a Mississippi-based lawsuit against the IRS in 1969 in which federal courts issued a preliminary injunction denying exemption to private schools that were segregated by race. Following this court order, the IRS adopted a non-discrimination policy applying to private schools in 1970, though it took eight years to be implemented.

As the IRS trudged along with implementation of non-discrimination policies and went back-and-forth in a series of proposed administrative procedures and Congressional hearings, private school enrollment in the South continued to grow. What was once the South’s 11 percent share of the nation’s private school enrollment had reached 24 percent in 1980. The 11 Southern states of the old Confederacy enrolled between 675,000 and 750,000 White students in the early 1980s, and it is estimated that 65 to 75 percent of these students attended schools in which 90 percent or more of the student body was White.

Eventually, the IRS instituted its new policies but faced backlash from religious private schools in the South. This fight culminated in a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the application of the IRS ruling to religious schools in a case involving Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist Christian school in South Carolina.

As a result of the new IRS rules and the Bob Jones University case, all private schools in the South began publishing regular statements of non-discrimination in admission, and most began admitting at least a small number of Black students and other students of color. This marked what should have been the end of state-funded segregation in private schools and the beginning of a new era of integration. This was not the case.

Christians are more racist than non-Christians in America, according to research by the American author Robert P Jones. In his book "White Too Long", he suggests that Christians have been complicit in sustaining white supremacy through flawed theology. Expanding on his theme in a Religion Media Centre zoom briefing, he said white mainstream Protestants and Catholics are only marginally less racist than evangelicals and all need to take up “truth telling”. He believes that 2020 is the year of reckoning for US Christian white supremacy and this generation has the opportunity to weed it out of the faith.

https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1324&context=nulr_online

https://southerneducation.org/publications/history-of-private-schools-and-race-in-the-american-south/

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/evangelical-history/a-conversation-with-four-historians-on-the-response-of-white-evangelicals-to-the-civil-rights-movement/