Around 1970, in defiance of court-ordered public school racial integration, up to 4,000 all-white private academies opened across 11 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 continued to shape 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 wider project publishes essays on the public school experience as well.
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 being a platform for hard conversation, I hope the site has value as an online archive of first-hand accounts of the segregation academy experience and public school stories from the three generations following court-ordered school desegregation. The project has broadened how history is being told, with a number of academic papers and 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.
Donations are appreciated to keep the project publishing these primary documents of American history. Tax-deductible donations go to our nonprofit Eyes on Mississippi, managed by the Community Foundation for Mississippi.
Coverage
Washington Post
Forbes
The Hechinger Report
Conversation on The Admissions Project
History Is Lunch, Two Mississippi Museums
Oct. 1, 2025
Mississippi Free Press Live.
July 28, 2022
Prince George’s County Memorial Library System/Human Rights Commission
Jan. 13, 2021
The Academy Stories/Admissions with Neely Tucker
Prince George’s County Memorial Library System/Human Rights Commission
April 21, 2021
With Ralph Eubanks and Paulette Boudreaux