Around 1970, in defiance of court-ordered public school racial integration, up to 4,000 all-white private academies opened across 13 southern states. An estimated 750,000 students enrolled in the hastily organized schools by 1975. Thousands of academies closed after a few school terms. Others have survived for nearly three generations, becoming unquestioned, embedded local institutions. In many communities, academies operate as almost parallel white systems to the Black public schools. Their gravitational force shapes the dynamics of public resources and, of course, an area’s young people. Among well-known graduates of the schools are writers Donna Tartt and Kathryn Stockett and actor Sela Ward. Other academy alumni are former Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant and the state’s U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith.
The online project The Academy Stories launched in 2019 as a public conversation on how academies have shaped the South in terms of people, resources, perceptions and community systems. The first-person forum grew into The Admissions Project: Race and the Possible in Southern Schools the following year. www.admissionsprojects.com The nonprofit initiative comes at a time when schools across the nation are becoming increasingly resegregated.
This is an effort at home-led truth telling. I’m an academy alum myself: Pillow Academy, near Greenwood, Mississippi, Class of 1974. It’s time to talk about our formation in white academies along with other reckonings underway in southern history. Besides as a platform for hard conversation, I hope the site has value as an online archive of first-hand accounts of the segregation academy experience along with public school stories from the three generations following court-ordered school desegregation. The project has broadened how history is being told, with four recent books (The Injustice of Place, Southern Beauty, The White Bonus and American Crusade) drawing from Admissions Project first-person accounts as primary documents of history.
The expanded site Admissions: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schools launched in 2020 to capture public school stories as well as academy ones. Even as white students in the South abandoned public schools by the thousands with integration, the public school experience remained white-driven, site contributors observe. Typically, Black students were expected to assimilate into long-time, frequently unwelcoming white spaces. Many Black schools, with long community traditions, closed.
If you are interested in supporting this effort to capture primary documents of American history, consider supporting our work through our nonprofit Eyes on Mississippi, managed by the Community Foundation for Mississippi.
News coverage:
Washington Post
Forbes
The Hechinger Report