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By Phil McCausland
The decision of the Supreme Court in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education, ordered the desegregation of public schools in the United States, but it took more than 15 years in Mississippi and other southern states to respect order – and many have found ways to bypass them. new system.
About 200,000 students went to private schools between the 1960s and 1980s immediately after a series of Supreme Court decisions that began with the 1954 case. Two-thirds of these students came from six states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina, according to the Southern Education Foundation.
After Mississippi Governor John Bell Williams, who has consistently supported segregationist policies, enforced the order in the winter of 1970, many white families of the state contributed to the creation or to flight to private schools, which remained essentially white and became commonplace in the state. These so-called segregationist academies created barriers to entry – whether through discriminatory monetary practices or undeclared practices – that black students could not overcome.
Today, while some argue that the prevalence of these private schools in states like Mississippi is due to the deterioration of their public schools, experts point out that their foundation bears witness to a troubling racist story that does not exist. Has never been addressed.
The Jackson Free-Press put the issue first by announcing on Friday night that Senegalese Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith attended the Lawrence County Academy in Brookhaven, Mississippi, in the 1970s. The school, today Closed, was founded in 1970 with the aim of overriding the order of integration and possessed a confederate general mascot, according to the local weekly.
Hyde-Smith will face former Vice Minister of Agriculture Mike Espy on Tuesday as a senator in Mississippi.
A 2012 study by the Southern Education Foundation found that while only 50.6% of Mississippi's school-age students are white, almost 87% of enrollments in private schools are white, in stark contrast to their enrollment. to blacks, which is 9%.
Although Mississippi still remains the first state in this expensive category, this system is used in the 15 southern states, according to the same study. In this region, the average number of white students enrolled in private schools exceeded that of white students enrolled in public schools by 20% in 2012.
"The most overwhelming evidence of racism is the rise of segregation academies in Mississippi, just as school integration is underway," said Richard Kahlenberg, senior researcher at the Century Foundation and expert in education and training. in segregation in the United States.
But it's not just his enrollment at the Lawrence County Academy that has earned Hyde-Smith critics. In the weeks following the ballot, as the second round loomed on the horizon, Hyde-Smith made a series of racist comments that sparked a strong condemnation.
Hyde-Smith was caught in the act of video joking about "attending a public hanging" and asserting that the removal of voters is a "good idea". These statements made him lose the support of many donor companies. His critics also pointed to the senator's apparent disregard for Mississippi history, which included 581 lynchings from 1882 to 1968, the record for all states in this period, according to the NAACP.
It took nearly a week for Hyde-Smith to apologize for the first remark, and she read a pre-written statement during a live televised debate.
A few days before President Donald Trump traveled to Mississippi and organized two campaign events for her, she was again criticized for her segregation academies – this time for having enrolled her daughter at the Brookhaven Academy, also considered an academy of segregation.
The sitting senator is not the first Mississippi candidate to be criticized for sending his child to a so-called segregation academy.
An article in the Clarion-Ledger of June 18, 1987, indicated that three of this year's Democratic candidates – all advocates of public education – were enrolling their children in private schools. One of the three candidates enrolled her child in a school founded by the White Citizens Council, a group of white segregationists who defended this type of academy.
"For many years, the schools were all white, then a Supreme Court decision in 1976 stated that you lose your tax-exempt status if you discriminate on the basis of race," Kahlenberg said. referring to the decision of the Supreme Court Runyon v. McCrary. "At present, these schools are taking a symbolic number of black and Hispanic students. Are they just trying to circumvent the decision of the Supreme Court? In many cases, it looks like what is happening. "
This system has not changed much since the 1970s, when Hyde-Smith went to school and desegregation began in Mississippi, and it is still an integral part of some middle-class white families. Superior State.
It's this story and this division between public schools and private schools that should inform policy makers in the future, Kahlenberg told NBC News, because it's the public sponsorship that allowed segregation academies to develop in the past.
"It's not just that white families have left the public school system when integration has begun seriously," he said. "It was worse than that because the state of Mississippi and other states started offering vouchers for private schools to support this effort to bypass integration."
Today, conservative decision makers are generally in favor of coupon programs. Kahlenberg said that this concept is based on the debate around these academies of segregation.
"Conservative support for private school checks must address this deplorable story that explains how private school checks were born in the South to support segregation," Kahlenberg said. "For me, that's why this story is so important today."
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