Segregation Academies Proliferate as White Families Flee Integrated Public Schools With Public Subsidies

Between 1964 and 1975, as public schools in the Deep South begin to slowly desegregate through federal court orders, at least half a million white students are withdrawn from public schools nationwide to avoid mandatory desegregation. Private school enrollment across the South increases by more than 200,000 students from the mid-1960s to 1980, with about two-thirds of that growth occurring in six states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

These “segregation academies”—private schools founded by white parents to avoid having their children attend desegregated public schools—are established throughout the South between 1954 (when the Supreme Court ruled segregated public schools unconstitutional) and 1976. The movement accelerates dramatically after the 1968 Supreme Court case Green v. County School Board of New Kent County hastens public school desegregation. In Mississippi alone, private school attendance soars from 23,181 students in 1968 to 63,242 students in 1970.

Southern state legislatures enact as many as 450 laws and resolutions between 1954 and 1964 attempting to block, postpone, limit, or evade the desegregation of public schools, many of which expressly authorize the systematic transfer of public assets and monies to private schools through tuition grants, tax credits, and tax deductions. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when some states (including Alabama, Virginia, and Louisiana) close their public schools to protest integration, figures like Jerry Falwell Sr. take the opportunity to open “Christian academies” for white students, including Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian Academy.

In Mississippi, many segregation academies are first established in the black-majority Mississippi Delta region in northwestern Mississippi, with white parents establishing segregation academies in every county in the Delta. The potential for integration results in white families avoiding integration by withdrawing their children from local public school systems to enroll them in newly founded segregation academies.

During this period, the Internal Revenue Service vacillates in its treatment of private schools. In the early 1960s, facing growing backlash from civil rights organizations, the IRS temporarily suspends applications of avowed “segregation academies” for federal tax exemptions. But in 1967, the IRS announces tax deductions for contributions to any segregated academy, effectively providing federal subsidy for segregation.

Many segregation academies claim they are established to provide a “Christian education,” but sociologist Jennifer Dyer argues that such claims are simply a “guise” for the schools’ actual objective of allowing parents to avoid enrolling their children in racially integrated public schools. Emergent conservative ideologies—namely the New Right and Religious Right—tie together these motivations ideologically, making individual personal motivations difficult to disentangle.

The segregation academy movement establishes the infrastructure and ideological framework that is later repurposed as the “school choice” movement. The strategy of using public subsidies (tax credits, vouchers, charter schools) to undermine public education while framing the effort as expanding educational freedom becomes a core conservative movement tactic. The same institutions and networks that establish segregation academies provide the foundation for the Religious Right’s political mobilization in the late 1970s.