Assignment: Focus Paper Response

My immediate response to Elizabeth Savage’s focus paper on white segregation academies was dismay. She--along with Dave Molina, who also discusses the academies and offers a similar explanation for their longevity--describes the determination of whites in Mississippi to perpetuate segregation by founding and fleeing to private schools that effectively bar blacks from attending. Perhaps the grimmest revelation in Elizabeth’s paper is how much political support these white academies have received. She traces a lineage of state-sponsored organizations that have worked to shore up the legal legitimacy of and public support for these academies, from the Legal Education Advisory Committee that was created soon after the Brown decision, to the State Sovereignty Commission of Gov. James Coleman, to the present-day Council of Conservative Citizens, which counts Trent Lott as an honorary member.

Elizabeth also suggests that these academies are finding support within the public school system. While students in the public schools are overwhelmingly black, the administrators who staff the school boards and district offices are predominantly white. Many of these white administrators send their children to these private academies and—if they thus feel a greater responsibility to these private institutions than the public schools—they are ideally positioned to keep the cost of public education low for the white population, by minimizing school spending (and consequently the income tax).

I’m in no position to agree with or dispute Elizabeth’s claims, since I’ve been here for less than a week and haven’t ventured outside of Oxford except for summer school. But despite my dismay, I don’t doubt that the kind of corruption and entrenched racism she depicts could be the law of the land. The adversity that poor black children in Mississippi are up against seems systemic. I remember using Google maps a few months ago to find the school I’d be teaching at. There are two middle schools in Cleveland, one on the west side of the train tracks, with the Cleveland Country Club and Delta State University, and the other on the east side. It was no surprise to find that I’d be teaching at the one on the east side, that over three-quarters of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, that its average class size is well above the state and district averages, and that 100% of its students are black.

It was sad to hear Ashley and ‘Vette say that their highest goal is to get out of Hollandale and out of the Delta. You’d like to think they could go to college and change their hometown, change the way things work. But I don’t blame them for wanting to leave it all. And I’m at a loss as to how anyone might go about changing something so insidiously backwards and well-supported as this quasi-institutional racism.