On May 14, the last day to file new bills in the Mississippi Legislature, a bold new package of them hit the desks of Mississippi lawmakers. The plans called for a voucher program that would pay for students to attend private schools.
A few weeks later, in mid-June, the governor urged lawmakers to support the $40 million program, promising that it would “bear the good fruit of progress for a hundred years after this generation is gone.” Support to public schools will continue, he assured. But vouchers will “strengthen the overall educational effort” by giving children “the right to choose the educational environment they want.”
It was 1964.
Key proponents of the move included a white segregationist group that formed after the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.
Across the South, courts have already rejected or limited similar voucher plans in Alabama, Louisiana, Virginia and Arkansas. But Mississippi lawmakers went ahead and passed the program anyway. For several years, the state funneled money to white families who wanted their children to attend the new private academies that opened when the first black children arrived in the previously white-only public schools.
Now, 60 years later, ProPublica has found that many of these private schools, known as “academies of segregation,” are still operating in the South — and many are once again benefiting from public dollars. Earlier this week ProPublica reported that only in North Carolina39 of them received tens of millions of money in the form of vouchers. In Mississippi, we identified 20 schools that likely opened as segregated academies and received nearly $10 million over the past six years from the state’s tax credit donation program.
At least eight out of 20 schools opened with an early boost from vouchers in the 1960s.
“The origins of publically funded private schools were rooted in segregated academies,” said Steve Sweets, historian and author of Overturning Brown: The Segregational Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement.
Most of the private schools that receive money from the voucher-style programs that are growing across the country are not segregated academies. But where academies operate, especially in rural areas, they often contribute to racial segregation in schools and, by extension, in entire communities.
Despite the decades, most segregated academies across Mississippi remain overwhelmingly white — far more so than the counties where they operate. federal studies of private schools to show Mississippi is a state of the highest percentage black residents.
Fifteen of the 20 academies benefiting from the tax credit program had an enrollment of at least 85% white in the 2021-2022 school year, according to the latest federal survey of private schools. And among the 20 registrations, five were more than 60 percentage points whiter than their communities. Another 11 were at least 30 percentage points whiter.
In 1964 The White Citizens Council was among those pushing for the voucher plan. The a segregationist group was founded in the Mississippi Delta town of Indianola in the 1950s by Robert “Tut” Patterson, who sought to “save our schools if possible” from integration and “failing that, to create a private school system for our children.”
For Patterson, it was personal. His family, including a young daughter who will start school in the fall, lived on what he called a “plantation” of 35 black families. As he later told an interview: “We took care of them. We practically lived with them. We loved them. We took care of them, but I didn’t want to mix my children with them.”
The state’s voucher program provided $185 to each student to pay for private school tuition—about $1,876 in today’s dollars. Its goal was to give every child “individual freedom to choose a public or private school,” according to the bill’s preamble.
Soon after lawmakers passed the plan, Citizens Councils of America used it monthly magazine to continue tips on “How to open a private school” and “Sample charter”. Private schools have sprung up, particularly in public school districts under court-ordered desegregation or that have submitted voluntary desegregation plans to the federal government, court records show.
In the first four years of the voucher program, the number of newly segregated academies that received public dollars increased from two to 49. Among them, 48 had no black students. One did accept black children—but only black children.
John Gigi, a historian at the University of Alabama, directs the Center for the Study of the South in Summersel and has studied the genesis of these private schools. These days, people often “don’t understand why these segregation academies opened,” he said. “This was one of the most aggressive steps southern governors took after the Brown case. This movement accelerated with the civil rights movement. It spread throughout the region.”
When white families rushed to open academies, vouchers provided crucial seed money. In the 1965/66 school year, vouchers covered more than a third of the total operating costs of at least 17 new academies.
Holmes Central Academy, now Central Holmes Christian School, was one of the first members. The vouchers paid for more than 78% of the tuition bills of the 210 students at the fledgling academy that academic year. School principals have clearly expressed their attitude towards integration in a letter later cited in federal court in which they called “other schools” “intolerable and disgusting”.
In 1968, Mississippi lawmakers increased each voucher to $240. Next January, black families in Mississippi won a federal class action lawsuit against the state challenging the constitutionality of vouchers. A panel of federal judges found that the program supported “the establishment of a racially segregated private school system as an alternative available to white students seeking to escape desegregated public schools.”
The program violated the Constitution, the judges ruled. Parents could choose individual private schools for their children, but the voucher program involved the state in this discrimination.
In a way, it was too late. Academies started working.
“Obviously, the schools would not be able to survive as even a semblance of an educational institution without these contributions,” The US Department of Justice found after examining the academies’ finances as part of a federal lawsuit.
By then, state taxpayers had funded more than 5,000 vouchers.
Segregated academies continued to receive others for a time forms of state aidincluding publicly funded textbooks, property transactions and school equipment donations. But the vouchers were dead.
Then, five decades after a court struck down the early childhood voucher program, the Mississippi Legislature found a way to restore funding for private schools.
In 2019, the state launched its own Child Promise Actwhich provides incentives for businesses to participate in a publicly funded program for private schools. The program gives businesses a tax credit of up to 50% of their total tax liability for donations to certain educational charities, including private schools. The law aims to help low-income children living in foster care or diagnosed with chronic illnesses or disabilities.
But there is no public disclosure of how much schools focus on any of these things. Their pleas to the state to qualify for donations — and thus they make statements about how many students they serve in those categories — not published. But it’s clear that tax-reimbursed donations are flowing into the segregated academy.
In his last annual reportThe Midsouth Association of Independent Schools, founded in 1968 by a group of segregated academies, said Mississippi’s tax credits are now a “critical source of funding.” (Association ethics guidelines declare that any member school “shall not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, color, national or ethnic origin in the administration of its admissions practices.”)
ProPublica found that segregated academies make up at least a fifth of all schools receiving tax credits.
Central Holmes is one. Since 2020, the school has received $812,150 in tax credit donations. These resources help improve curriculum, update technology and promote professional development, said Head of School Chris Terry.
In the latest federal survey of private schools, Holmes Central reported that its student body is 82% white, up from 95% white a decade ago, but far from representative of the community around the school. Holmes County is just over 15% white.
Terry, who has been principal since 2022, noted that during that time the school has had Asian, Hispanic and black students who have “enjoyed success.” Among them were the blacks and the homecoming queen. “To me, this shows our school’s desire to move past the past and create a new future for our students and families,” Terry said in an email.
He added that he could not comment on the origins of the school because he was not alive at the time.
Those who were alive at the time of the discovery in 1965 expressed different views on the future. In 1970, a black legislator representing the Holmes Central district predicted that white students would return to public schools in “two or three years.” But Central Board Chairman Holmes, a former legislator, disagreed. He predicted that the school would “last forever.”
