Ellen Ann Fentress, The Academy Stories Editor
“It’s the Christian thing to do,” she declared. As a high school freshman, I was overhearing adults discuss the coming white flight to segregation academies in our area. For months, court-ordered public school integration had dominated the conversation in white Mississippi. That day, the woman explained that white families who could afford academy tuition had a moral duty to donate extra. That would help poor white children flee integration too via seg academy scholarships. She had a logic-twisting—and white— sensitivity to income inequality in her support of racial inequality.
If that sounds absurdly in contrast to an expected Christian talking point, it didn’t to regular white churchgoers in the South in the Seventies. White churches rarely preached loyalty to public schools. In fact, Protestant churches gave essential support to segregation academies in community after community. Typically churches helped new academies by volunteering use of their Sunday School rooms until an actual academy’s construction.
Briarcrest Baptist School in Memphis, which proclaimed itself the biggest non-Catholic Christian school system in the nation, initially spread out its classes between about a dozen Southern Baptist churches in the area. The school, organized for students to flee 1973 court-ordered busing in Memphis, was the setting for the book and film The Blind Side. The motto of its building campaign as busing began: “With God, nothing is impossible.”
Faith and Leadership magazine at Duke Divinity School had me consider the role of churches in segregation academies along with an update on The Academy Stories project.
For a rich full examination of the intersection of the white church and academies, read Joseph Crespino’s In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counter-Revolution. His history has become more essential than ever in 2020 as the nation confronts its systemic racist past.
A Macon, Mississippi native who now teaches at Emory University, Crespino said, “I had always thought that the isolation, distrust and misunderstanding between blacks and whites in my hometown was part of Mississippi’s unique history. What I came to realize, of course, was that my own experience was just one part of a larger story.”
Crespino stated “emphasizing the uniqueness of southern racism obscures how white southerners were able to reframe their opposition to the civil rights movement in ways that resonated with white Americans in other parts of the country.” Trent Lott and Haley Barbour rose to national attention plying familiar white Mississippi dog whistles about intrusive government and bootstraps economics for national consumption.
When I asked Crespino about the church role in academies, he told me, “White churches were involved with segregation academies at every step. Many academies sprung up almost overnight in small towns where Sunday School classrooms were the only place that could house students and teachers.”
“Later, segregation academies found legal shelter under the umbrella of the church school movement,” he said. ”Yet, in almost every case, when you go back and look for the tipping point for the exodus of whites out of southern public schools, it wasn’t about religion (it’s not like southern public schools were run by a bunch of secular humanists; local teachers and principals were almost all church-going people themselves), it was about race.”
This is so true and needs to be said. When I had time last year during the height of the pandemic, which wasn’t often, I’d attend the Zoom mtgs on inter-racial discussions between my current Episcopal church and the black Methodist church in Frederick, MD (where I live now). Talk about a seriously deep slice of American history in just these two churches. In one of the discussions on radicalization, I got the feeling that the folks on the call just didn’t understand the South. It seemed that they wanted to put the rise in racial tensions in a nice little box called “radicalization” that would help them understand it and put a face on the rising racism around us. However, in the world I was raised, it’s not radicalization when you’re brought home from the hospital into a segregated way of life. To a lot of people with whom I grew up, I’m the one that’s radicalized. I do remember there was little separation between the church and our school. Aside from church sponsorship, active and engaged members of several of the local churches were some of the biggest parent supporters at our all-white school.
Coming from a southern state of NC and the mountain section of Hendersonville attended Hendersonville Jr. High School which was the “Black” High School(the 9th Ave School) in 1965 when it was desegrated according to everyone I have spoken with it was just another day….” one day there were no whites at the school and then the next there were” so I can’t speak to the experiences most had. But what I do know when we moved in 2012 to Hattiesburg, MS from Alaska(military) the state of public schools here was not very good and we sent our kids to a local Christian “Independent” school. I noticed the first year that, wow, there are a lot of independent/private schools in such a small state. I had never seen so many and that’s when someone explained to me the “Great White Flight” and went on to tell me to make sure when I go to these private schools for events to check the founding year of them and they’re pretty much all the same year…Man, I had no idea. I can’t say much or get on a high horse, my hometown of Hendersonville, while I thought, was the perfect example of an integrated southern town until I learned from my grandfather that owned an old home delivery grocery store on Main Street the now 7th Ave was the “Black” Main Street and that one of the reasons everyone appeared to get along was that the black and white business owners agreed that if the white business owners didn’t put businesses on 7th ave, that the black business owners wouldn’t put their business on Main Street….I was so disappointed.