In South Carolina, where I live, rural towns often remain highly segregated along racial lines, especially those with large black communities. You often hear people describe the railroad tracks that run through these towns and how white people live on one side of the tracks and black people on the other. This is true. But I often saw another dividing line, a more impenetrable one. It shuttles between schools: private and public.
While reporting in many of these small towns, I saw that black children typically attended local public schools while white children attended private schools. Many of these private schools are known as “segregation academies” because they were open to white children while federal courts forced southern areas to desegregate. Hundreds of these academies are still in operation, and they continue to divide their communities.
If children do not go to school together, they have little contact with peers of a different race. Their parents don’t meet at the bus stop, at PTA meetings, or on the sidelines of football games. Communities may remain nearly as divided as they were before the US Supreme Court ruled state-mandated school segregation unconstitutional 70 years ago.
I spent most of 2024 digging into the “academies of segregation” with my colleague, ProPublica investigative reporter Molly Simon. Early on, we decided to compile a master list of segregated academies that were still in operation and planned to use that as the basis for our reports.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to identify these academies, or even to understand local school segregation more broadly, without knowing the racial composition of each private school over time. And private schools are not always ready to share this information. Neither should they. But while compiling our list of segregated academies, we came across something incredibly useful – a 30-year stack of data kept by the US Department of Education that lays out the history of racial segregation, school by school, across the country. It shows the racial breakdown of most private schools every other year since the early 1990s.
Except for a few educational researchers, the average person does not know that this data exists. Much of it is also not stored in an accessible format. Parents will need a high level of data literacy to use it to better understand educational trends or to make their own school decisions.
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ProPublica decided to create a Demographic database of private schoolswhich we launched this week, which anyone can use anywhere to search for a school and view the data for the years we’ve relied on for our reporting.
The story behind this new tool began with our need to understand how many segregated academies were still operating—and where. We wanted to focus only on those who continue to create segregating forces in their communities, not those whose student organizations have come to mirror their local regions.
We turned to the National Center for Education Statistics, which has demographic data on students in most of the country’s private schools. website. (Schools voluntarily reported their information to the center.) That was helpful, but it only provided a racial breakdown of children at each school from the 2021-22 school year, the most recent data available.
We wanted to go back in time to see how the demographics of these schools have changed — or not — over the years.
It turns out that this NCES data comes from something called A survey of the private school universethe data set we addressed. He was hiding practically in plain sight.
While the latest survey results are readily available on the NCES website, the rest are in formats that require experts to clean up and organize into something user-friendly. Fortunately, we have such specialists. Our colleagues Sergio Hernandez and Nate Lash began digging into old datasets, turning them into a searchable format. They then compared the demographics of each private school to the demographics of the public school district in which it is located.
This led us to illuminating stories about the effects of segregated academies in communities that weren’t on anyone’s radar, especially mine. In fact, this data can tell the stories of the many places across the country where private schools educate the nation’s millions of children.
I used the database to direct me to the segregated academies that were most divisive in local communities. This led me first to a county in the rural shadow of Selma, Alabama, one of the most pivotal points on the map of the civil rights movement.
That community was 45 minutes south in Wilcox County, where I found people sharply divided along racial lines, as they had been since plantation operators brought enslaved laborers to the region to grow cotton. For now Wilcox Academy was 98% white, the local county public schools were 98% black. Local residents have been splitting their meager resources to run two dwindling school systems, one private and one public – to the detriment of nearly everyone there.
The history of Wilcox County formed the basis the first story in our Segregation Academy series.
Our database also referred me the last story in our series, this one is based in Mississippi Amite Countywhere we found segregated academies that had some of the most profound divisive effects. One of them never reported enrolling more than one black student at a time. The second just hit an all-time high of 3.5% black in a county where nearly 40% of residents are black.
Perhaps the most telling detail didn’t come from the data or our master list. I found this at a Friday night football game. One night when I was in Amit, the public high school was playing a home game – and so was the nearby academy. While the public high school was playing with the stands full of black families, I interviewed a black man who graduated from the public high school and coached its football team.
As recess approached, he and I decided to head to a private school, a segregated academy just beyond the woods. During all the years of living and working in this community, he never set foot on the campus. Almost everyone there—people from this very small community—was white. But he recognized only a few of them.
As we walked to the stands, he described feeling like millions of eyes were on him. No one was unfriendly. But this threshold seemed far more impenetrable than any railroad I had ever encountered.
