Now that the Supreme Court has decreed an immediate end to racial segregation in Southern public schools, many white resisters have only one place left to turn: private white "segregation academies." In recent years, the South has blossomed with more than 200 such schools, which are set up for the sole purpose of excluding blacks. According to one recent estimate, at least 300,000 white students out of 7,400,000 now attend segregated private schools in eleven Southern states. By all the evidence, the new academies will increase that total fast.
Few of them are quite so openly redneck as the Marvell Academy, a private elementary school that opened last year in two frame houses in the Arkansas Delta town of Marvell (pop. 1,916). Declared the school's founders, who are also members of the resurgent white Citizens' Council: "Integration is the corruption of the true American heritage by alien concept and ideology." More discreetly, most of the new private schools advertise "quality education," a slogan appealing to the genuine fear of many Southern whites that a massive influx of black students into formerly white public schools will slow down learning.
Narrow Curriculum. So it may, but meanwhile the segregation academies have had a hard time delivering "quality education." The problem is mainly a lack of money. Because few of the parents are wealthy, tuition fees must be kept modest (average: $300 a year). Attempts by Southern legislatures to help the segregation academies by providing state tuition grants have been struck down by federal courts. Thus the schools are now forced to live inadequately off tuition, plus whatever meager gifts they can attract.
As a result, the schools often use retired or uncertified teachers, who are almost always paid less than the going public school rate. The range of the curriculum tends to be narrow. Such semiessentials as labs, libraries and gymnasiums are frequently lacking. Accreditation is hard to come by, and graduates consequently face severely restricted choices in planning for higher education. On the whole, concluded a recent report by the Southern Regional Council, the segregation academies ironically offer the white pupil "an education that is not 'separate but equal,' but separate and inferior."
Nice Plant. The haste in which most segregation academies are conceived and born hardly helps. Typical is the new Sandy Run Academy in Swansea, S.C., a rural town whose population of 1,800 is 40% black. Until a year ago, Swansea had escaped all but token integration. But when the school board finally bowed to federal court orders to integrate Grades 10, 11 and 12, Swansea parents boycotted the public school. When the boycott petered out after two weeks, its instigators rushed ahead with plans to start a private high school.