Skylar Smith-Northwest Rankin High School- Class of 2021-Flowood, Mississippi
Growing up in central Mississippi as a public school student, I constantly heard about the army of private schools nearby. I’d spot Jackson Prep and Jackson Academy students, identifiable in their plaid uniform pleated skirts or a team shirt or a school hoodie. I would always hear other students complain that our school did not equal the quality of education that private schools supplied. In retrospect, I see we bought into the belief that selective and expensive private schools are necessarily better. Would we still have bought in if we understood these schools come out of a racist legacy? But that’s the point. We didn’t understand their legacy because it’s kept quiet as much as possible.
I gradually started catching wind of the troublesome past of these schools. My junior year history teacher at Northwest Rankin High School told us the tip of the iceberg version. In retrospect, she was the youngest teacher I had and maybe too green to understand how off limits it’s been to discuss those schools’ ugly history. I didn’t hear the topic discussed thoroughly in my presence until after I had graduated high school.
The moment I learned was when I attended the McMullan Young Writer’s Workshop on the campus of Millsaps College in Jackson in 2021. During the week, we visited historical sites in the city such as the COFO building (the civil-rights era Council of Federated Organizations) on John R. Lynch Street and Eudora Welty’s leafy Tudor home in the Belhaven neighborhood. The workshop served as incredible inspiration for my writing. I was even more intrigued when a woman named Ellen Ann Fentress came to discuss the history of segregation academies with us.
I knew how Mississippi schools were desegregated by law. Despite 1954’s famous Brown versus Board of Education ruling, it actually took until 1970 for school districts in the Magnolia State to be integrated. As white parents braced for their children’s school life to change, panic ensued.
Fentress explained that in the years before 1970, private schools were established to combat the expected unwanted desegregation. Parents were appalled at the thought of their children going to a school where they would meet kids that did not look like them. These private schools were founded as desperate grasps to restore segregation. White parents sent their kids to these so-called “segregation academies” to receive their education in an all-whiteenvironment.
She introduced us to the online project, The Admissions Project, which collects written first-hand accounts from those that have attended/been impacted by segregation academies as well as race-centered stories from public schools. She gave a prompt for us to write about our own experience. At first, I was at a loss. I thought I had nothing to add to the conversation. After all, I didn’t go to a segregation academy and, well, I had only heard that particular term that day.
Yet, now I’m beginning to think that my lack of awarenesss is common and represents a continuing part of the Mississippi education story. Mississippi students are not properly educated on the history of the private schools that many enviously long to attend.
After two generations in operation, thanks to these schools’ trademark silence surrounding their history and pop culture prep-school messaging, we can create fantasies about these places with hateful pasts and look down on our own education. The suppression of their pasts empowers their continued existence for the select few, in fact. It feeds the aspiration to want to go to them as well.
I watched movies with elite schools like Dead Poets Society and dreamed of having a teacher as cheerfully enigmatic as John Keating. I confess I longed for the brick walls of Hogwarts, the courtyards, and the unique campus. I thought the private schools near me gave the same inspiring education and experience as they do in the movies. I know now that graduates from Jackson Academy and Jackson Prep did not get the experience I longed for either. In fact, I believe my own high school allowed me to create a deep understanding of the diversity of the world, harder to come byin private schools.
Northwest Rankin was bursting with individuality and loud, empowering minority voices. At 30 percent, students of color at Northwest Rankin represented slightly more than the 22 percent of residents of color overall in Rankin County. At school, there were lectures about racism in Mississippi where white students were not allowed to talk unless they were asking respectful questions. We had pep rallies in celebration of Black History Month, and our teachers made sure we were educated on holidays that celebrate minority groups.
I will admit that my district was exceptional on many fronts compared to others in the state. There is a long and complicated conversation to be had about the poverty found in the Delta, parts of Jackson and other areas and how it relates to education. My story, however, is this: I witnessed and experienced what public schools can achieve with proper funding and a lack of fear of critical race theory.
As a core part of our curriculum, my peers and I were taught about racism in Mississippi. The first-ever research paper I did was on the history of the Ku Klux Klan and how it still impacts the state (and the country as a whole). We were brought to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson to read about the history of our state alongside the objects connected to what happened. We stood before the engraved names of known lynching victims in the “Mississippi in Black and White” gallery, silently understanding that the list would expand exponentially if history was all-knowing.
Every year in high school I learned about the civil rights movement in at least one class. We learned more as the semesters went on. Of course, we became intimately acquainted with the stories of Mississippi civil rights leaders; Medgar Evers was often the topic of discussion, reigning as a hero for the work that he did with the NAACP (and beforehand). I cried silently as we listened to speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, marveling at her bravery. I realized that history is not static. There is always more to be learned about someone or something; important context can be added, and it can dramatically deepen one’s understanding by exposure to civil-rights history year after year.
As I’ve already mentioned, we were briefly educated about segregation academies in my junior year, yet I don’t remember much emphasis there. Why was that, I wonder now. For one, there is still a stigma around talking about it in Mississippi. Talking poorly about other schools to students might create a sense of shame for those who had attended a segregation academy or had friends attending.
Yet, it is important to have these conversations.
In my public high school, our teachers talked about how to be anti-racist, not just not racist. They encouraged us to have these conversations with each other, too. By creating an environment that celebrated our differences and informed us about social problems still impacting the world, my public school developed our minds in a unique way. Many of the younger teachers at my school dared to talk with us about topics that would be criticized by conservative parents if they knew. In the environment today where bills banning critical race theory run rampant, our teachers dared to face angry messages from parents simply for the sake of opening our minds.
The Rankin County elementary school I attended began explaining to us why racism was so wrong and harmful at a young age. Growing up in a red state that still flies Confederate flags on suburban streets, if my response to people that didn’t look like me was not intercepted by quality education in a well-funded school district, it’s entirely possible the historic stench of racism could have affected my mind. That is why I think it is so important that kids are educated by schools that celebrate diversity and are able to support dynamic lessons as my school district did.
Yet, many kids do attend schools that were founded as segregation academies. There, they are surrounded by a vast majority of white peers. In the 2012-2020 school year, only around 3 percent of Jackson Prep students were Black. Meanwhile, it was reported that less than two percent of students in Jackson public schools were white. Jackson Prep is technically located in suburban Flowood, but it is still a legacy segregation academy that largely serves Jackson (hence the name).
Another Jackson area legacy segregation academy is Jackson Academy. The school was founded in 1959. While they brag about their inclusivity and diversity, they still have a reported 85 percent of students being white. Mississippi schools remain nearly segregated, and these academies are the prime reason why such divisions occur.
When students are educated in an environment that lacks adequate diversity, they miss out on important lessons about how to be anti-racist. How can white students listen to the voices of many minority students if there is such a lack of representation? Although there are some black students at schools that were originally founded to avoid such attendance, there still are not enough. Power comes in numbers, and a small percentage is not enough to help educate the vast majority.
I do not blame the students that attend legacy segregation academies. They often do not have a choice in the matter. In fact, I don’t blame the parents that send their kids to them, either.
Because segregation academies were created in the first place, resources, and peer pressure that could have helped public schools were redirected to private schools. Today, individuals are not at fault for participating in a broken system. Rather, it is now simply important to educate those that are not knowledgeable about the impacts of segregation academies. Thus, change can be made to help ease the hurt that these schools have caused.
I hope that education on this topic can open up a conversation of its own. A problem must be acknowledged to bring about change. Maybe you know people who go to segregation academies, or maybe you even went to one. You can read personal stories about these academies on this website that I find fascinating. Perhaps we can inspire change while working towards a truly desegregated Mississippi, almost seventy years after Brown v. Board of Education.
Skylar Smith is currently a sophomore at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. She is studying communications, creative writing, and English. She is also managing editor for the Millsaps campus newspaper the Purple and White.