Joel L. Alvis, Jr.—- Class of 1973 —- Jackson Preparatory School —- Flowood, Mississippi
The flight back to Jackson that night in June 2023 was full. I was then serving as an interim pastor in the city after a lifetime away.
I had already boarded the plane and was settled into my seat when a young Black man in sports coat and tie carrying a huge trophy over his head came down the aisle. The trophy was at least four feet tall. About the time he got to my row, a middle-aged white man wearing a cord coat turned around and took the trophy and placed it in an overhead bin. They looked like student and teacher. Or maybe debater and coach. I had been on the debate team in high school and college. It had been a long time ago. But the wardrobe looked the same.
He took his seat opposite mine on the aisle. Due to plane noise on the small jet and a chatty neighbor next to him, I didn’t have a chance to speak to him until we landed and were standing in the aisle ready to deplane.
“Nice trophy. “
He won it that morning at a national debate tournament in Phoenix. He was beaming. He should be. I asked where he went to school. He said Jackson Prep. Wow.
I was part of the Jackson Prep class of 1973. I never went to a national debate tournament. No one from Prep did back then. In college I had teammates who did. But I never went. There were no Black students at Prep in my days there. The only Black people on campus then were the maintenance and custodial staff.
Through the years my mother and I talked about changes that happened in Mississippi and the world. She would often end the conversation by saying: “But look how far we have come.”
My parents were always concerned that I get a “good education.” It was a mantra for them. I think they meant they wanted my brother and me to develop critical thinking and communication skills. But it was otherwise undefined.
When I was a public Bailey Junior High School seventh grader in 1967, I assumed I’d eventually be at Jackson’s flagship Murrah High School. A Murrah Mustang. My parents took me and my brother to Murrah football games. They had awesome teams in the late 1960s. A neighbor played for the Mustangs and went on to Georgia Tech to play, or so I was told. I attended the student musicals at Murrah. My parents were friends with the principal and his wife. We had cookouts at each other’s homes along with other friends from church. That was the way it was supposed to be. But it did not last.
Things changed in the 1969-1970 school year. I’m not sure when I first learned about Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case that ruled “separate but equal” for schools was unconstitutional. There was another case, Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, decided in 1969 that ordered no further community stonewalling. But it was a long time before I knew the name of that case. While it charted my path away from public Murrah High School to private all-white Jackson Prep, it was not a foreordained path.
Talk about “good education” was everywhere in my white world. I recall my parents sharing their concern with me. They and their friends were concerned that the “new” teachers would not have the necessary skills and attributes to provide the “good education” they wanted for my brother and me. But most of these “new” teachers came from “other” schools. Schools where the students were Black. The teachers were as well.
As a ninth grader at Bailey, I did not know about these court cases. I heard my parents and other adults talk about the “Court” but did not know specifics. The talk was that schools would be closed after Christmas break (never “winter break” in those days) for three weeks while some plan was drawn up for school attendance in the spring of 1970 and into the next year. There was even a chance I would not finish the year at Bailey. But I did.
But the high school arrangement would be different. Murrah was paired with Brinkley High School, one of the all-Black high schools in the Jackson Public Schools. On the street where I lived, we said there were five high schools: Murrah. Central, Provine, Wingfield, and Callaway. Those were the historically white ones. We didn’t count the “others.” Didn’t compete against them. Didn’t know anyone who went to them. Couldn’t have gotten to them by ourselves. Didn’t know the names of these schools. So, they did not exist in our little bubble of the world.
But they did exist. Brinkley, Jim Hill, and Lanier, schools created for the purpose segregating Black students, all existed. There were real students who attended, real teachers who taught, real parents concerned about their children’s “good education.”
I know that growing up my parents taught me the importance of respecting individuals for who and what they were. My father made a medical mission trip to the Eku Hospital in Nigeria in 1968 during the civil war there. My mother was deeply involved in the Women’s Missionary Union at Woodland Hills Baptist Church. They received and entertained missionaries from around the world. It was always understood that racial epithets, slurs, and characterizations were not accepted in our home.
But one evening a group of their church friends came over. A comedian/evangelist had recently spoken at church and sold copies of his LP album: Laughin’ With ‘Em. There was a second album too. My parents bought them. After dinner the guests gathered around the new Fischer stereo console and played the albums. The comedian spoke in dialect. The punch line of each yarn made fun of the Black folk in each story. Just like Amos N’ Andy. Everyone in the room laughed. I was listening from the hallway. No doubt I laughed too. This form of racism was in the air we breathed and the water we drank on my street in the “Closed Society.”
My parents were “good people” and respected “all” people. But not accepting that a teacher was capable of providing a “good education” to me or my brother because that teacher was Black was racism. It still is.
The search for a “good education” took me afield from Mississippi. My parents did not want to give in to the private school bonanza that spread like wildfire in 1970. My mother stopped us from visiting her brother and his family in the early 1960s. She was disturbed by the racist reading material from the John Birch Society that she found everywhere at their house. But they were not prepared in any way for the tidal wave of change that broke in the wake of the Alexander v. Holmes decision. Good intentions and family disagreements take on a different meaning in the eye of a hurricane landmark court case.
Together we found the Darlington School for Boys in Rome, Georgia, where I attended tenth grade as a boarding student. Isn’t it ironic that to avoid going to a segregation academy, I chose to go to an all-white school almost 400 miles away from home? There were a number of boys from Mississippi whom I met that year. I don’t recall talking about why we were there. Though, I am sure we did. And I would hazard a guess that it would revolve around “good education.” Of course. There were no Black students at Darlington that year. Irony abounds.
Once I went to the hallway bathroom eager to relieve myself. Standing at the urinal, I looked down on a photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. I just left it there. I knew this racist act was wrong. But I lacked the courage to remove it. And I knew the Black custodian could be counted on to clean it up.
Most of my psychic energy during tenth grade at Darlington was used to figure out how to return “home.” Would I attend Murrah as I had always planned? Another option presented itself: Jackson Prep had emerged from the primal slough of the segregation academies. Or at least that’s what those in prosperous, professional northeast Jackson told itself. The rationale was that this school would be different from an academy. A couple of founders were world renowned physicians on the University of Mississippi medical school faculty. This certainly impressed my father and mother. And me as well.
Many prominent businesspeople and professionals had organized the school. As I recall, each student family purchased “stock” which provided capital for the school. On top of that, tuition was paid for each student. As if to emphasize the distinction, the name of Prep did not include “academy.” It was as if the organizers were trying to create distance between Prep and the reality of the time. “People” said that Jackson needed a “real” option that was a “college preparatory school.” And Jackson Prep was meant to deliver that. I believed it. At least, I wanted to believe it.
But somehow it rang hollow. There was a gathering of student leaders from around Jackson at the Mississippi Fairgrounds my senior year. Public and private schools sent groups. Another Prep student made a speech that attempted to demonstrate that students, regardless of the school attended, had more similarities than differences. I was moved by his persuasiveness. But his argument was empty rhetoric. The exodus to private schools I was part of had been prompted by fear of the “other.” The eloquent oratory of a classmate could not stave off the trauma we all were living with. That we all continue to live with.
Many of the “best” faculty from Murrah moved to Prep. The English and drama teacher I had in eleventh and twelfth grade was one of them. The football coach and most of the white players came to Prep. There was a sense that Prep was a continuation of pre-integration Murrah. I don’t recall talking about the why’s or how’s of that happening. It just was.
I was glad to be back “home.” There were many students who would have been my classmates at Murrah had we not opted out. Did we talk about this obvious fact? I don’t remember if we did. But I do remember driving by Murrah often as it was on the way to my grandmother’s apartment in Belhaven. The question of what had happened hung in the air. Unspoken. But very real. When I look back, I see how careful and intentional a lot of our silences were. We Prep transplants wanted to believe we were a cut above academy “rednecks.” In our DNA, though, Prep was as white and as new as the other estimated four thousand white-flight private schools that popped up in the South at the time of integration.
I joined the debate team and participated in dramatic productions; signed up for the Key Club; found a group who played the board game Risk; went to most football games; had my first rum and coke. I wanted to think of myself as an “academic.” Actually, I was a pseudo-intellectual. Or maybe, I was just an awkward teenage boy in a shifting white world.
All of our parents were middle and upper class. I don’t know what the “stock” buy-in was, nor the amount of tuition, but the costs were considerable. I knew the cost kept some from attending. I heard somewhere that maybe, one day, there would be a Black student at Prep. Maybe. One day. When a Black student had the potential to be a star athlete or win a national debate tournament was found. Then.
There was something Prep offered that Murrah could not. Murrah drew from a set city attendance zone. As a private school, Prep took in white students from beyond northeast Jackson and even outlying towns. The sectional divisions of north, south and west Jackson were quite real. Even among the white population, there were economic and class messaging for each section. In more recent years, a couple of my non-north Jackson classmates told me how awkward they felt due to the weight of class and Jackson social strata. But all of us were white.
My journey took me to college in Alabama before returning to Ole Miss for grad school. I don’t know when, or even if, I decided I’d become a Mississippi ex-pat. It just happened. There was an invitation to enroll in an Auburn Ph.D. program, a job in North Carolina and then seminary in Kentucky. I honed an interest in church history, especially how what is said correlates with what is actually done. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, that’s what I’m examining in my own school history here. That focus also led to my book, Religion & Race: Southern Presbyterians 1946-1983 and some published articles on religion, race, and faith.
Along the way my father retired. My parents moved to North Carolina. I found my way back to North Carolina and then to Georgia, where I’ve resided longer than I lived in Mississippi. Yet, it is Mississippi, not Georgia, that has always been on my mind. I wondered if there was a “call” for me to serve as a pastor in Mississippi. There were some conversations and interviews when our sons were school age. No offers were made. Even so the topic my wife and I often turned to in those times was how to provide our children with a “good education.”
As it happens, I did return to Jackson for a season. I served as the interim pastor of Fondren Presbyterian Church for eighteen months. So much had changed. There I found white folk who had stood firm for public schools back in that day. They seem to have found the “good education” my parents sought.
As my mother would say: “Look how far we have come.”
I would respond: “And look how far we have to go.”
The Rev. Joel L. Alvis Jr. is a retired Presbyterian PC(USA) minister and author. He lives in Dunwoody, Georgia. He has served in a variety of pastoral roles and denominational leadership positions.
Facebook: Joel Alvis Jr or @jalvis2.bsky.social