Too Poor for the Academy and Better For It 

Jon Altman–Class of 1977–Greenville High School–Greenville,Mississippi

My family moved from Jacksonville, Florida to Jackson, Mississippi in October of 1969.  There were issues in my parents’ marriage and my faither’s professional life that drove the move. I had just turned ten years old and was in fifth grade.  

I was also unaware that there was a major court case (Alexander v Holmes County) moving to resolution in the U.S Supreme Court that would result, fifteen years after the Brown v Board of Education decision, in the full integration of Mississippi’s public schools.  In the middle of January, Jackson Public Schools got an additional week of “vacation,” as new attendance lines and teacher assignments were drawn.  We three siblings had new Black classmates and teachers at our Jackson elementary.  I’m sure my parents were anxious about these developments, but their marriage breakup was coming to a head.  My father resigned his job at Broadmoor Baptist Church and left the family to move back to Jacksonville.  The turmoil at our house came from those developments, not school integration.  We remained at Boyd Elementary, as Broadmoor Church allowed us to continue living in their house, even though the employee with the claim on the house had resigned and left town. 

Soon, my mother trained to become a medical records administrator. We moved into a three-bedroom apartment in the Fondren neighborhood of Jackson, we three siblings still in Jackson public schools. I didn’t even know that huge numbers of white parents had removed their children by the beginning of the 1970-71 school year, fleeing to the new all-white academies. 

What did make my family anxious, however, was our severely limited income.  We regularly scoured the Fondren neighborhood for discarded soft drink bottles to turn in for cash. We would use the money to pay for groceries at the Jitney Jungle. I have heard that people scrounged for money to pay private school tuition during those years. They were unaware of what real scrounging looked and felt like.  

My mother eventually got a job as Director of Medical Records at King’s Daughters Hospital in Greenville. We had no family or friendship ties to Greenville or to the Mississippi Delta.  I did not know that a community meeting had been held in Greenville more than a year earlier at which the white elites had determined that private schools would be established to avoid participating in integration coming to Greenville public schools. By the time my family arrived in August 1971, the private schools were an established fact. There were two private schools in Greenville, Washington Day School and Greenville Christian. If my mother ever considered placing us in one of the private schools, I didn’t hear about it. Her salary did not provide enough income for private school tuition for three children in any case. Her place in the social hierarchy of the Delta was hired help. Throughout our years in Greenville, we lived very close to the financial edge. 

Through the 1970s, the Greenville public schools maintained about a 35 percent white enrollment. For many white families, that was an economic decision. Most of the white students came from the working class, as did most of the white families in Greenville. There were, nevertheless, a few white students whose families were one of the professional and even ownership classes who continued to support public schools.  Everyone in town knew that the private schools were established to avoid integration. 

I began that 1971-72 school year as a seventh grader at Coleman Junior High School.  I did not know(initially) that this had been Coleman High School, the Black High School for Greenville. That school had been an academic and athletic showcase for Black Mississippians for decades. During my seventh-grade year, the stands at the football field were dismantled. I now recognize that that was an act of cultural erasure.  There were several incidents in which the “Junior” part of “Coleman Junior High School” was erased or painted over. The Black community had lost something of value in the way integration was implemented in Greenville.

Midway through my seventh-grade year, my mother married an assistant coach at Coleman, who was also the study hall supervisor.  My brother and I warned our mother that he was mean. She waved this off, saying this was a persona he had to adopt as a teacher.  As she was to learn the hard way, he indeed was actually mean.  We lived for more than three years in a house of domestic violence. This made school and church our refuges.

One blessing of that first year at Coleman was my enrollment in chorus during the second semester.  I eventually became a member of the Concert Chorus.  Kaye Ventura, the chorus teacher, became the first Black teacher who was also a mentor and encourager to me. I was not a soloist, but I was consistently present and put in the work to learn my part.  Mrs. Ventura “saw” me and valued me as a person.  That’s a prized quality in a teacher, regardless of race. 

 The local newspaper, The Delta Democrat-Times was published by the Carter Family.  Hodding Carter  II had won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. He’d taken a moderate stance on racial matters and had been critical of the White Citizens Council.  His son, Hodding Carter III, was the editor and publisher then.  Mr. Carter was my parents’ age and his children’s ages corresponded roughly to my siblings’ and mine. He had urged calm and support of the public schools. He had put his money where his mouth was, keeping his own children in public school. That support from the Carters as well as from some other white-collar white families was appreciated by working people like my mother.  

We joined First Baptist Church in Greenville. I became intensely aware of the church class system. There were nice enough people among the class elites, but I knew where I fit on the hierarchy.  As the son of a twice divorced (by 1975) woman, I was at the bottom of the social system at First Baptist. Many of the elites at First Baptist had been founders of the private schools, often personally guaranteeing the loans needed to get the buildings up and equipped and teachers hired. The children of the elites were the elites at church. Much social conversation revolved around the athletic rivalry between the two private schools and events at those schools. I had nothing to add to those conversations.  

One absence through the years were school-sponsored social activities. There was no school prom.  White parents independently arranged things like homecoming dances, graduation dances, etc.  I presume that Black parents did as well.  Dances and social events weren’t really my thing, anyway, but interracial social events just didn’t exist in those days.  

The two stated reasons for the founding of the private schools had been “quality” and “safety.”  I was never bullied because I was white, even though whites were a minority at all of Greenville’s public schools. I was bullied because I was unathletic and socially awkward, which is pretty much a universal experience. I got the difference between the two even then.

Beginning in tenth grade, I began to find my way to challenge the claim that only the private schools provided a “quality education.” I discovered that I was excellent at rapid recall trivia competitions.  I was on the Literary Bowl team. I was the only junior on a Challenge Bowl team that won the state championship in 1976. I was also a member of the Literary Bowl team that won the County Championships in 1976 and 1977. This was the only activity in which public and private schools directly competed.  It was satisfying to be able to take on that academy claim that theirs were the schools of “quality” and public schools weren’t. 

My education at Greenville High helped make me a National Merit semi-finalist and finalist. I was encouraged by the school guidance counselor and my teachers to aim high for college. I was accepted to Vanderbilt, Rhodes College, and Millsaps College. That spoke well of the quality of education I had received in Mississippi’s integrated public schools. I chose Millsaps because of its financial aid package. I graduated Magna Cum Laude and had a full tuition scholarship to Garrett-Evangelical Seminary, where I earned a Master of Divinity degree. 

My brother and sister did well too. My brother earned an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and my sister was Phi Beta Kappa at Agnes Scott College and earned a psychology PhD from the University of Illinois Chicago. 

Our family was too poor to pay for a segregation academy and, thanks to our limited means, we got to see that staying in integrated public school wasn’t the damaged experience that academy backers claimed. Fear tactics fueled the private schools’ existence, then and now. While our financial hard times weren’t a gift, our lack of money did, as a side effect, allow us to prove wrong all the disparagement that academy backers leveled. Meanwhile, although my siblings and I fared fine, there’s not a happy ending to this story when it comes to Greenville. By the 1990s education in Greenville grew more segregated, not less. The public school system is almost all Black, with whites in private school. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the entire town has shrunk as its support for its public schools has. 

Jon Altman is a retired United Methodist Pastor. He served thirty-eight years in the Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church. He is the widower of Carol Lynette Little (Pillow Academy, Class of 1978) and the father of two adult children, Luke and Sarah.