Anisa Khalifa: It's been more than 70 years since the landmark court case Brown versus Board of Education fundamentally changed the American classroom. Abolishing segregation in public schools sent shockwaves through our education system. But in response to that decision, the South saw an increase in the founding of mostly white private schools that allowed some to sidestep integration.
Jennifer Berry Hawes: These private schools were opened as a way for white families to leave public schools, just as Black students were arriving.
Anisa Khalifa: Many of those private schools are still operating today. And a recent report shows that little has changed in the way of racial diversity.
Jennifer Berry Hawes: 鈥奍 did some reporting around a community called Somerton, South Carolina and 鈥奿t still looked very similar to the way it did after the Brown decision. Almost all of the Black children in the community attended public schools and almost all of the white students in the county attended private schools.
Anisa Khalifa: I鈥檓 Anisa Khalifa. This is the Broadside, where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week, how segregation found a new home in private academies, and America鈥檚 long 鈥� and sometimes forgotten 鈥� history of resisting integration in the classroom.
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Jennifer Berry Hawes: My name is Jennifer Berry Hawes, and I am a reporter with the South office at ProPublica, which is a national nonprofit investigative news outlet.
Anisa Khalifa: As a reporter, Jennifer writes about all kinds of issues across the South.
Jennifer Berry Hawes: Including education
Anisa Khalifa: Recently, she looked into increases in state funding across the region for voucher programs designed to allow parents to use public funds to pay for private school tuition. Jennifer was curious to know if this money was being used for specific private schools in the South, colloquially known as 鈥渟egregation academies.鈥�
Jennifer Berry Hawes: Segregation academies are private schools that open during desegregation and basically, that means a school that opened between 1954 when the Brown decision came down through about 1976, which is shortly after the last federal court decision mandating that schools absolutely had to desegregate and offer a unified school system. many of them still operate. They were obviously all white at the time. Many of them remain vastly white today, and continue to have a segregating effect on the communities where they operate.
Anisa Khalifa: So why the focus on these types of schools and voucher money? Well, it turns out, they go way back.
Jennifer Berry Hawes: The origins of vouchers are in segregation academies. They were started across the South to fund students who are leaving the public schools, white students, to leave the public schools and go to these new private academies. That was the reason they were created. We published a story that focused on Mississippi, because there's a court case that lists the private schools that received voucher money in the 鈥�60s, and how much, and what percentage of their operating budget that was used that money constituted. And we were able then to go see if those schools are still operating, and many of them were, and interestingly, that means that voucher money basically was like seed money that got those schools started.
Anisa Khalifa: As they began their research, Jennifer and her colleagues at ProPublica found about 300 segregation academies still operating in the region.
Jennifer Berry Hawes: 鈥奡o the roughly 300 schools operating across the South, many of them are still in very rural communities where Black and white children have still never really gone to school together.
Anisa Khalifa: In her reporting, Jennifer specifically highlighted North Carolina. Where she says they found 39 schools in the state that likely opened as segregation academies after Brown v Board.
Jennifer Berry Hawes: And of the 39, 20 of those schools reported student bodies that were at least 85 percent white. And we found none that reflected the demographics of their communities
Anisa Khalifa: She says North Carolina offered a good look into segregation academies in the South for two reasons. First, because of the local data. They were able to see how much voucher money goes to each school every year.
Jennifer Berry Hawes: And not every state tracks that and also they have an older voucher program and one that was recently expanded to become universal so that all students are eligible, which just gave us some history to work with. A number of the states have adopted universal programs, but they're not fully in place yet.
Anisa Khalifa: On the issue of funding, why is more and more state money going towards school vouchers?
Jennifer Berry Hawes: Well, the expanding voucher programs are part of a national push especially by Republican-led legislature and that's why we're seeing a lot of this across the South. So the big argument is that the education dollars should follow the child, and so you shouldn't be essentially trapped in a public school that you feel is not serving your child. That's really the foundation of pro voucher arguments, is really tied to parents' ability to send their child where they feel they would be best educated, and it reflects their values and what they want out of an education.
Anisa Khalifa: So let's talk about the recent history of school vouchers in North Carolina. The state started its modern voucher program about a decade ago, which is not connected to the historic programs. What was the original impetus of that newer program?
Jennifer Berry Hawes: So the voucher program in North Carolina is called the Opportunity Scholarships. And they started in the 2014-2015 school year. And at the time, they were only for low income families. And supporters argued that this would help level the playing field for families with few resources who wanted to send their children to private schools. When the program started, it had about 1,200 participants, and at the time, more than half of those recipients were Black children.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh, interesting.
Jennifer Berry Hawes: Now fast forward into 2023 when the state legislature expanded eligibility for the Opportunity Scholarships to include children from any income level and those already attending private schools. And it's worth noting that since they did so, now only about 17 percent of recipients are Black. So we went from a decade ago, more than half to only about 17 percent and that has been steadily declining.
Anisa Khalifa: In November of last year, the North Carolina legislature voted to override the governor's veto of funding for private school vouchers. How will this affect the number of students and the amount of money going toward private schools?
Jennifer Berry Hawes: So the North Carolina legislature, um, expanded the vouchers to become universal and the number of parents who flocked to the program was so great that they wound up running a wait list of about 54,000 students. And the state was not prepared to pay that out at the time. So last fall, the North Carolina legislature passed a bill that included funding about $248 million to pay for all of those children who were on the waiting list. Well, the Democratic governor of the state, Roy Cooper, vetoed that measure. And then in November, the state legislature came back, they had a Republican supermajority at the time, so they overrode his veto, and as a result, because it could fund that waiting list, basically, the number of students participating in the voucher program doubled in the state of North Carolina just last year as a result.
Anisa Khalifa: How might an increase in funding for school vouchers affect public school funding in North Carolina?
Jennifer Berry Hawes: So it's important to remember that school funding is largely tied to enrollment, so that schools receive funding based on how many students they're educating. And you look at a place like Bertie County, this is a tiny rural public school district in eastern North Carolina. It's one that the state budget management office recently estimated would be likely to lose the most students under the newly expanded voucher program, so they estimated that next school year, the Bertie County School District could lose about a half a percentage point of the state public school funding, and that's just in that one year. And interestingly, the private school in that county, which is then likely to gain students as a result of the expansion, is called Lawrence Academy. And this is a Christian private school that is a segregation academy. Its student body is 97 percent white in a county that's only about a third white. And yet, it reported in the last federal government survey that only 1 percent of the student body is Black. And keep in mind that this is a county where more than 60 percent of residents are Black. Anisa Khalifa: Wow. Jennifer Berry Hawes: Now, over the past couple of years, Lawrence Academy has received more than half a million dollars in taxpayer funded voucher money. So we can see or assume how much voucher money is going to fund this kind of school segregation. So I think that county is indicative of many, but it's one that could, based on the state's own assessment, be most affected.
Anisa Khalifa: Jennifer says that in districts like this, the parallels with the past are clear.
Jennifer Berry Hawes: So the origins of vouchers are in school segregation. They were used as a tool to fund white students leaving public schools and what we've seen today is a resurgence of this money being used to send children to private schools. And the reason that you might want to know if they're creating segregating forces is because of this history, right? Are we just repeating history or not? I would think you'd want to know that.
Anisa Khalifa: You can check out more of Jennifer Berry Hawes鈥� reporting on school vouchers and segregation academies in our show notes. Just ahead, how the seeds for vouchers 鈥� and using taxpayer money to resist integrating classrooms 鈥� were planted well before the Brown decision.
We鈥檒l look at a long forgotten program that forced thousands of students to leave their home in search of a quality education.
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Anisa Khalifa: Crystal Sanders grew up in the Black church. She vividly remembers a day many years ago when something strange caught her attention.
Crystal Sanders: My family and I attended a Baptist church in Smithfield, North Carolina, and I was reading the biographies of some elderly women in my church who are retired public school teachers. And what I noticed about their biographies was that all of them had received master's degrees from institutions in the Northeast, places like Teachers College, Columbia University, or NYU. And I asked my father, why did they go so far away for graduate school? Because it was clear that most of them had earned these degrees in the late 1940s, early 1950s. And my father responded in a very matter of factly way. Do you think they had a choice? That always stayed with me.Anisa Khalifa: Today, Crystal is an African American studies professor at Emory University in Atlanta. A few years ago, she started to look seriously into what her dad said in church that day.
Crystal Sanders: So let me figure out why they didn't have a choice. And so I began digging into graduate study in North Carolina. I realized that North Carolina began paying for African American residents to go out of state for graduate study in 1939.
Anisa Khalifa: The state did this through what Crystal calls 鈥渟egregation scholarships,鈥� offered to Black students seeking a graduate education in the Jim Crow South.
Crystal Sanders: 鈥夾nd the more digging I did, I realized that this was not limited to public school teachers and this was not an arrangement limited to North Carolina. I learned that this was a practice that 16 southern and border states had in an effort to preserve segregation at their flagship institutions.
Anisa Khalifa: Here鈥檚 how it worked: Instead of admitting a Black student to a predominantly white school, or creating a similar program at a Black university as the "separate but equal" clause required, states would offer them money to pursue their graduate studies outside the South.
Crystal Sanders: It 鈥奲ecomes a system of requiring or compelling Black students to go out of state. That is a catch-22 because African Americans wholly understood that segregation was wrong, that segregation was unconstitutional. And so, for many students, by taking the scholarship they somehow felt that perhaps they were being complicit with segregation. But on the other hand, these were individuals who wanted the opportunity to pursue their highest potential. They wanted the opportunity to acquire the skills and credentials that would allow them to come back to the South and improve life for other African Americans, so all too often they do find themselves in a bind.
Anisa Khalifa: Crystal examines the history of segregation scholarships 鈥� and of the Black students who received them 鈥� in her new book. It鈥檚 called 鈥淎 Forgotten Migration.鈥�
Crystal Sanders: All too often when I tell people about this book project, they say, wow, Black students got the opportunity to go to Harvard, to go to Chicago, to go to Michigan. Those are the best institutions in the world. That doesn't sound like such a bad thing. And I have to remind people that number one, You know, it's, it's one thing to have a choice in where you go to school, but it's another thing to be compelled to leave your home communities and your family and forced to go far away to get the same opportunities that your white peers are able to get at home.
Anisa Khalifa: One of the things that I found really striking while I was reading the book is like so many of the names of the people, many of them are unknown to me, but many of them are giants of the civil rights movement, you know, men and women who are very familiar to me, and so many of them went through these scholarships, and I had no idea. That's why it's really interesting that you call this the forgotten migration, because I think outside the Black community, most Americans probably have not heard of this. So what is the difference between this forgotten migration and the great migration?
Crystal Sanders: 鈥�Most people of all races in the United States are familiar with the Great Migration, the largest internal migration in the United States history, where African Americans were voting with their feet and leaving the South or leaving rural areas of the South and going to urban areas and throughout the United States in an effort for better jobs, better schools for their kids, in hopes of escaping sites of racial violence. And with the great migration, oftentimes African Americans had to leave under the cover of darkness because white farmers, white landowners did not want African Americans leaving the region, they wanted a cheap labor force. 鈥奧hereas with this educational migration, um, number one, you know, African Americans aren't having to leave under the cover of darkness because their state governments are subsidizing their migration. They are essentially trying to get these highly educated African Americans out of the region.
Another huge difference between the great migration and the smaller educational one that I write about. is that over 90 percent of participants in this educational migration come back to the South. They understood the great need in the South for black doctors, for black attorneys. They understood the need for pharmacists. They understood the need for Black children in underfunded public schools to have access to the best teachers. And so with this forgotten migration, these are individuals who had no plans of staying in the North, but we're coming back to the South to improve life for African Americans.
Anisa Khalifa: As Crystal and I chatted, the topic of school vouchers came up 鈥� and how they originated as a tool to preserve segregation in Southern classrooms. I asked Crystal how she sees segregation scholarships fitting into this history.
Crystal Sanders: I argue in my work that we really shouldn't date the origin of vouchers to massive resistance or the wake of the Brown decision, because we can see as early as 1921 with the creation of a segregation scholarship program in, um, Missouri, that southern states understood that they could use state funds to preserve segregation, but they could use state funds to outsource the state's responsibility to educate all of its citizens. And so when I see the rise of private schools in the South especially, and the use of public funds to help students attend these schools, I am troubled because I know that long history of finding ways of using public money to, um, prevent black and white students from learning together.
Anisa Khalifa: You use a phrase that's really stayed with me since I read your book.鈥奩ou talk about how many of the students who took these scholarships were engaged in intellectual warfare. What do you mean by that?
Crystal Sanders: I use the phrase intellectual warfare to describe what I consider to be the subversive act of segregation scholarship recipients acquiring knowledge that they plan to use to dismantle segregation and other forms of racial discrimination in the South. And so, you know, I write about someone like Fred Gray. He was a native of Montgomery, Alabama, and he knew from an early age that he wanted to be an attorney. The only law school in the state of Alabama was at the University of Alabama Law School, and they didn't admit African Americans, so he knew he would have to leave home. He matriculates at what is present day Case Western University Law School in Ohio, but even before he left Alabama, he had made up his mind that he was going to return home after law school and sue the state of Alabama every chance he got, and he has made a long career out of doing just that. He would go on to not just be Rosa Parks attorney, but he would go on to be Martin Luther King's attorney, E.D. Nixon's attorney, and the attorney for every other participant in that Montgomery Bus boycott that lasted over a year. But even after they are able to desegregate Montgomery city buses, attorney Gray is going into court and challenging segregation in public schools. He is responsible for opening up over 100 school districts in the state of Alabama.
Anisa Khalifa: Wow. I just can I just say like what an incredible life? I mean, what an incredible person.
Crystal Sanders: I mean attorney Gray is a force. He's a perfect example of intellectual warfare because he uses that legal training that he received in part with financial assistance from the state of Alabama to come back and show Alabama all of the ways in which it was not living up to the Constitution.
Anisa Khalifa: Crystal says segregation scholarships didn鈥檛 go away overnight after the Brown decision in 1954. It wasn鈥檛 until the late 1960s when all southern states finally got rid of the practice. But she says in the years since, higher education has continued to feel the lingering effects.
Crystal Sanders: One of the things that I stress in the book is that in several of these states that had segregation scholarship programs, they paid for their segregation scholarships by taking money out of the operating budgets of their public Black colleges. And so when we think about this compounded, when we think about this existing for 20 or 30 years of taking money out of public Black colleges to preserve segregation through segregation scholarships, we began to understand why many of these institutions today are experiencing financial crisis.
While North Carolina did not fund its segregation scholarship program on the backs of its public Black institutions, we have to ask ourselves, what if North Carolina had invested in its public institutions, Black institutions by putting more graduate and professional school programs at them? What if we had not outsourced the state's responsibility to provide medical education to Black students? That's a question that every Southern state needs to ask itself with respect to its public Black colleges.
Anisa Khalifa: Crystal Sanders' new book is called 鈥淎 Forgotten Migration: Black Southerners, Segregation Scholarships, and the Debt Owed to Public HBCUs.
This episode of the Broadside was produced by Charlie Shelton-Ormond. It was edited by Jerad Walker. Wilson Sayre is our executive producer.
The Broadside is a production of 瓜神app鈥揘orth Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR Network. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend!
I鈥檓 Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening y'all. We'll be back next week.