EDSE 500 Focus Paper Reflection: White Academies

This assignment for Ms. Monroe's EDSE 500 class is to read and comment upon a "focus paper" from last summer's class. Curious about the white private schools I knew already to be common in the Delta, I chose to read Elizabeth Savage's paper, called "The Preservation of Segregation: The Philosophical Necessity of White Academies in Mississippi." Actually I read more than one paper from the group about Mississippi's historic and continuing efforts to resist racial integration in its schools, but I felt this one gave the best historical overview on the subject.

http://www.olemiss.edu/programs/mtc/focus_05.htm

Clearly Mississippi has a long and tortured past when it comes to race relations. We all knew that coming in. What boggles my mind is how successfully and for how many decades Mississippi, despite very contrary mainstream opinion in the rest of the nation, has been able to dodge integration in a very substantial way. To this day, apparently a very large percentage (how many exactly?) of white students attend schools that are either all-but-exclusively white or at least majority white, while a corresponding percentage of black students attend school that are exclusively black. This happens even in areas where money is tight and blacks and white are geographically separated by a physical space no larger than a line of railroad tracks. Of course this is largely facilitated by the existence of white private schools called "academies." What I did not know is that many school districts serving almost exclusively black students are often controlled by white superintendents and/or school boards who allegedly are more invested in keeping costs down and maintaining the status quo than they really care about the (black) students' best interests.

The school district where I am going, in Cleveland, is a fascinating exception unfortunately not mentioned in this particular paper. In Cleveland School District, a dual public school system still exists. Even though the town is fairly small (pop. 15k), there are two high schools, two middle schools, and two elementaries. The East Side, where I will be teaching, is all black. The other side of town, just a skip and a hop away on the other side of the highway, is 60% white. All the university professors and USDA researchers of course send their kids to Cleveland High School on the white side of town. Again it simply boggles my mind that in the year 2006 in the United States of America, this kind of segregation is legally still allowed to exist. By what mechanisms is this duality perpetuated? One of my predecessors suspects that the outgoing superintendent is leaving primarily because he had advocated unification. I suppose it is all about local politics. Still it seems like one good lawsuit could really crumble the whole stack of cards--but of course that would require someone with a lot of courage and standing to make a case and a good lawyer interested in the publicity--not to mention it would probably result in nothing more than the foundation of another white academy.

Still, I learned a lot from this paper. The Legal Education Advisory Committee, which succeeded in passing 40 pro-segregation statutes in 1954 alone, the FBI thug-like State Sovereignty Commission, and the present-day Council of Conservative Citizens with honorary members like Senator Trent Lott, were all news to me. Eye-opening. Basically the efforts to resist integration are extremely deep-rooted and as outside pressure against segregation has increased, conservative (i.e. racist) Mississippians have simply become more ingenious in maintaining the status quo of racial separation. This has been going on for decades, and it continues surprisingly well unto this day. The very existence of white academies leads one to question where exactly the "progress" Dr. Mullins mentioned several days ago is coming from or leading. Without true and honest integration--until each and every citizen feels their own family invested in the quality of each and every school--how much progress can really be made?

Reflecting on this paper reminds me of the movie we watched in class the other day, "A Tale of Two Schools." A white school district administrator from the Mississippi Delta school featured in the film at one point commented how they did not want to get taken over by the state. She said something to the effect of, "That happened to us last year, and we NEVER want that to happen again." Suddenly, I wonder if she genuinely wanted to see the kids succeed or if she simply hated the outside meddling.

On the way back to Oxford this evening, Zed told an anecdote about a neighbor on his street. As he was moving in, the neighbor commented how relieved he was that no more "niggers" were moving there. Zed said that since then he has become friends with that neighbor and claims the guy is actually a pretty nice "character." I pointed out that plenty of nice, friendly (to us) people are also racists.