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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2020
In 1969, four years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, African Americans in Greene County, Alabama, reclaimed control of local government, becoming the first community in the South to do so since Reconstruction. A half century later, however, Greene County remains an impoverished and largely segregated area with poor educational outcomes, especially for Black children. This essay explores the history of Greene County from 1954 to the recent past, with a particular focus on Warrior Academy, a segregated private school (“segregation academy”) founded by Whites in 1965. As a case study of “school choice” in the context of the “long civil rights movement,” it complicates scholarly definitions of “massive resistance.” Furthermore, it demonstrates the ways in which an emerging “color-blind” conservatism premised on White concerns about “educational quality” thwarted Black efforts to achieve educational equality, even in places where African Americans achieved significant political victories.
1 “Negro Begins Classes at GCHS,” Greene County (AL) Democrat, Sept. 9, 1965, n.p.
2 Four decades ago, William Chafe identified in Greensboro, North Carolina, what he called the “progressive mystique,” in which community leaders promoted Greensboro as a forward-looking “New South” city friendly to business interests. Central to this mythos was a putative racial harmony. Historians have subsequently demonstrated the existence of a similar mythos in other southern cities. A form of the “progressive mystique” clearly existed in rural Greene County as well, however. See Chafe, William H., Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 6Google Scholar.
3 “QuickFacts: Greene County, Alabama,” US Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/greenecountyalabama.
4 Cumming, Joseph, “Slumbering Greene County, a Remote Sliver of Alabama, Where Blacks and Whites May Realize the Highest Hope for the South and America,” Southern Voices 1, no. 1 (March-April 1974), 22–24Google Scholar.
5 Enrollment Characteristics for Eutaw Primary School, Robert Brown Middle School, and Greene County High School, 2018–2019 School Year, Greene County (AL), NCES District ID: 0101680, Common Core of Data, National Center for Education Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/schoolsearch/school_list.asp?Search=1&DistrictID=0101680.
6 Trisha Powell Crain, “Here Are Alabama's 2018 Test Results for K-12 Schools,” AL.com, Jan. 4, 2019, https://www.al.com/news/2019/01/here-are-alabamas-2018-test-results-for-k-12-schools.html.
7 “2016 American Community Survey (ACS) State and County Dashboard,” US Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/acs-5year-datamap.html.
8 “Warrior Academy Opened Last Week, 36 Students Enrolled,” Greene County (AL) Democrat, Sept. 9, 1965, n.p.
9 Cumming, “Slumbering Greene County,” 22.
10 “Warrior Academy Opened Last Week.”
11 Prince Edward County offers perhaps the most dramatic example of “massive resistance” through private education. Located in Virginia's Black Belt (known locally as “Southside”), Prince Edward was the source of one of the five cases eventually consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education. In the late 1950s, having lost in Brown and facing the courtroom defeat of massive resistance laws, Whites in Prince Edward County ceased all funding for public education—White as well as Black—and opened Prince Edward Academy. As a University of Virginia report noted in the 1970s, Prince Edward became “the spiritual center” for proponents of segregated private education, and it has held almost as much appeal for scholars interested in segregation. As a start, see Smith, Bob, They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1951–1964 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Murrell, Amy E., “The ‘Impossible’ Prince Edward Case: The Endurance of Resistance in a Southside County, 1959–64,” in The Moderates’ Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia, ed. Lassiter, Matthew D. and Lewis, Andrew B. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998)Google Scholar; Turner, Kara Miles, “‘Getting It Straight’: Southern Black School Patrons and the Struggle for Equal Education in the Pre- and Post-Civil Rights Eras,” Journal of Negro Education 72, no. 2 (Spring 2003), 217–29Google Scholar; and Titus, Jill Ogline, Brown's Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
12 Nevin, David and Bills, Robert E., The Schools That Fear Built: Segregationist Academies in the South (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1976), 8–9Google Scholar. The book provides an early overview of the private school movement.
13 Porter, Jeremy R., Howell, Frank M., and Hempel, Lynn M., “Old Times Are Not Forgotten: The Institutionalization of Segregationist Academies in the American South,” Social Problems 61, no. 4 (Nov. 2014), 578CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 George W. Noblit, ed., School Desegregation: Oral Histories toward Understanding the Effects of White Domination (Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2015), 8–11. See also, Payne, Charles M., I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 437–38Google Scholar; Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Landing on the Wrong Note: The Price We Paid for Brown,” Educational Researcher 33, no. 7 (Oct. 2004), 3–13; and Theoharis, Jeanne, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018)Google Scholar.
15 The existence of “segregation academies” is well known to historians, and many have mentioned their establishment in the context of broader White conservative reaction to the civil rights movement. However, few have examined the long-term evolution of such schools or considered their contemporary implications in depth. See, for instance, Kruse, Kevin, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lassiter, Matthew D., The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; and Crespino, Joseph, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. For more direct treatments of private schools, see Michael W. Fuquay, “Civil Rights and the Private School Movement in Mississippi, 1964–1971,” History of Education Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Summer 2002), 159–80; and Myers, Christopher, “White Freedom Schools: The White Academy Movement in Eastern North Carolina, 1954–1973,” North Carolina Historical Review 81, no. 4 (Oct. 2004), 393–425Google Scholar.
16 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005), 1235.
17 On the distinction between extremists and “moderates,” as well as massive resistance as a failure, see Bartley, Numan V., The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950's (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Lassiter and Lewis, The Moderates’ Dilemma; Patterson, James T., Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 99, 114Google Scholar; Klarman, Michael J., From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 462Google Scholar; and Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 40. It should be noted that a few scholars have begun to challenge this consensus. See Mark Golub, “Remembering Massive Resistance to School Desegregation,” Law and History Review 31, no. 3 (Aug. 2013), 507; and Bagley, Joseph, The Politics of White Rights: Race, Justice, and Integrating Alabama's Schools (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 7–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Paul Gaston, foreword to Lassiter and Lewis, Moderates’ Dilemma, xi.
19 Calvin Trillin wrote about a perceived divide between “dumb segregationists” and “smart segregationists.” See Calvin Trillin, “Reflections: Remembrance of Moderates Past,” New Yorker, March 21, 1977, 86.
20 Bartley, Rise of Massive Resistance, 126. Interposition is the dubious legal theory that claims for the state a right to “interpose” itself between the federal government and its people, thereby nullifying federal law that the state deems unconstitutional.
21 Lassiter, Silent Majority, 30, 39.
22 McMillen, Neil R., The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954–64 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 303Google Scholar.
23 Joseph J. Thorndike, “‘The Sometimes Sordid Level of Race and Segregation’: James J. Kilpatrick and the Virginia Campaign Against Brown,” in Lassiter and Lewis, Moderates’ Dilemma, 59.
24 Thorndike, “The Sometimes Sordid Level of Race and Segregation,” 52.
25 Thorndike, “The Sometimes Sordid Level of Race and Segregation,” 70.
26 My analysis in this paragraph draws heavily from Thorndike, “The Sometimes Sordid Level of Race and Segregation,” 51–71. See also, William P. Hustwit, “From Caste to Color-Blindness: James J. Kilpatrick's Segregationist Semantics,” Journal of Southern History 77, no. 3 (Aug. 2011), 639–70; and Hustwit, William P., James J. Kilpatrick: Salesman for Segregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819).
28 Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925).
29 On the Supreme Court, see Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 306–19, 333. Klarman offers an extensive analysis of the justices’ internal memoranda, revealing their concerns about resistance and their desire to embolden southern White moderates, but even those moderates who sought to remain above the fray turned the specter of violence—perpetrated by others—to their political advantage in framing the issue in terms favorable to the continuation of segregation. On the Cold War context, see also Mary L. Dudziak, “Brown as a Cold War Case,” Journal of American History 91, no. 1 (June 2004), 32–42; and Derrick A. Bell Jr., “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93, no. 3 (Jan. 1980), 518–33.
30 In fact, the continuation of massive resistance in ever-changing guises benefited—and arguably continues to benefit—from the notion that it died at the hands of moderates in 1959. A nineteenth-century prose poem by Charles Baudelaire puts it well: “Never forget, when you wish to boast about the progress of enlightenment, that the finest of all the devil's tricks was persuading you that he doesn't exist!” See Baudelaire, Charles, Paris Spleen and La Fanfarlo, trans. McKenzie, Raymond N. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2008), 61Google Scholar.
31 “Southern Railway System, Travelers Club-Greene County High School, Eutaw Alabama, Educational Tour of New York, N.Y., and Washington, D.C.,” folder 80, box 3, Armistead I. Selden Jr. Papers, University Libraries Special Collections, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
32 Richard Martin, “Around Town: On the Square,” Greene County (AL) Democrat, April 29, 1954, 1.
33 “Editorial Comment: What about the Negroes Themselves?” Greene County (AL) Democrat, June 10, 1954, 4. Such statements cannot be taken at face value, of course, and are indicative instead of subterranean White resistance. As McMillen points out, Citizens’ Council publications frequently included statements from African Americans critical of the NAACP and of desegregation more generally, and councils were not above denying or obscuring authorship of their work. See McMillen, Citizens’ Council, 247–48.
34 George C. Wallace, Inaugural Address, Montgomery, AL, Jan. 14, 1963, http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/digital/collection/voices/id/2952.
35 Klarman argues that the “difference between white ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’ was not in their preference for segregation, but in the sacrifices they were prepared to make to maintain it.” Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 415. But we should be skeptical about the willingness of the supposed extremists to make meaningful “sacrifices.” Wallace was only the latest arch-segregationist to cave under pressure. Like Kilpatrick and Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver before him, Wallace frequently made concessions or stood down in the face of federal authority despite rabid rhetoric to the contrary.
36 Bass, Jack, Taming the Storm: The Life and Times of Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., and the South's Fight over Civil Rights (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 207–10Google Scholar; and Brian K. Landsberg, “Lee v. Macon County Board of Education: The Possibilities of Federal Enforcement of Equal Educational Opportunity,” Duke Journal of Constitutional Law & Public Policy 12, no. 1 (Fall 2016), 14–15. Landsberg notes that the governor's effort to interfere spanned the state, from Mobile to Huntsville, but the Department of Justice, working through federal courts, thwarted his strategy.
37 Bass, Taming the Storm, 215.
38 Gray, Fred D., Rus Ride to Justice: Changing the System by the System: The Life and Works of Fred D. Gray, Preacher, Attorney, Politician (Montgomery, AL: Black Belt Press, 1995), 213Google Scholar.
39 Bass, Taming the Storm, 219.
40 Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, 138.
41 Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, 139.
42 Jeffries, Hasan Kwame, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in the Alabama Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1Google Scholar.
43 “Journey through Two Americas,” Time, April 6, 1970, 30.
44 Don McKee, “After 6-Month Cessation—Demonstrations on Rights Back in Central Ala.,” Indiana (PA) Evening Gazette, Nov. 10, 1965, 27; and Ray Jenkins, “Majority Rule in the Black Belt: Greene County, Alabama,” New South 24 (Fall 1969), 62.
45 US Commission on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: The First Months (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965), 48–49.
46 Jenkins, “Majority Rule in the Black Belt,” 63.
47 “Sum It Up—What Happened?” Greene County (AL) Democrat, May 5, 1966, n.p.
48 Martin Waldron, “Alabama Blacks Seek County Rule in Special Vote,” New York Times, July 27, 1969, 53; and “King Charges Bias in Alabama Voting Setup,” Chicago Daily Defender, May 9, 1966, 3.
49 Jenkins, “Majority Rule in the Black Belt,” 64.
50 United States v. Jefferson County Board of Education, 372 F.2d 836. See also, Bass, Taming the Storm, 219–22.
51 Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, 267 F. Supp. 458 (M.D. Ala. 1967).
52 Wallace v. United States, 389 U.S. 215 (1967).
53 Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430 (1968).
54 John Cashin, interview by Hardy T. Frye, 1972, transcript, interview 6, box 1, Hardy T. Frye Oral History Collection, Auburn University Special Collections & Archives Department, Auburn University Libraries, Auburn, AL.
55 “West Alabamians Flock to See Wallace,” Greene County (AL) Democrat, June 27, 1968, 1.
56 Willis McGee, interview by author, Tuscaloosa, AL, April 7, 2007; Mary Morgan Glass, ed., A Goodly Heritage: Memories of Greene County (Eutaw, AL: Greene County Historical Society, 1977), 151; and “Warrior Academy's New Building,” Greene County (AL) Democrat, Sept. 19, 1968, 1.
57 Jenkins, “Majority Rule in the Black Belt,” 64–65. See also, Joseph N. Boyce, “Black Power in Greene County,” Time, May 11, 1981, 25; and “In Greene County, Here's the Results,” Greene County (AL) Democrat, Nov. 7, 1968, 1. In the 1968 presidential election, Republican Richard Nixon won the electoral vote handily despite receiving only half a million more votes than Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey. The race was complicated by Wallace's presence, of course, and it is worth noting that Wallace earned almost ten million votes nationwide. As a product of the Black Belt himself, Wallace's insurgency suggests that Black Belt rhetoric—an updated version of the rhetoric of massive resistance—had begun to transcend regional boundaries. Wallace carried his native state easily, but reflecting the changing political landscape, he did not win Greene County, one of only three Alabama counties to award Humphrey a majority. See Dave Leip, “1968 Presidential General Election Data—National,” Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/.
58 Martin Waldron, “Six Negroes Win Alabama Offices,” New York Times, July 30, 1969, 1; and “Six Negroes Elected to County offices in Special Election Held Tuesday,” Greene County (AL) Democrat, July 31, 1969, 1.
59 Martin Waldron, “Election of 6 Alabama Negroes Hailed as ‘Giant Political Step,’” New York Times, July 31, 1969, 21.
60 “Six Blacks Take Political Offices in Ala.,” Chicago Daily Defender, Aug. 12, 1969, 6.
61 “Hildreth Boosts County to the World,” Greene County (AL) Democrat, Aug. 14, 1969, n.p.
62 Jenkins, “Majority Rule in the Black Belt,” 67.
63 “Enrollment Doubles at Warrior Academy School,” Greene County (AL) Democrat, Sept. 7, 1969, n.p.
64 Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 396 U.S. 19 (1969). See also, US Commission on Civil Rights, Fifteen Years Ago: Rural Alabama Revisited (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983), 4; and Tom Jory, “Brewer Says Court Orders Create School Problems,” Anniston (AL) Star, Oct. 29, 1969, 2.
65 Reese Cleghorn, “The Old South Tries Again,” Saturday Review, May 16, 1970, 76; and Southern Regional Council, The South and Her Children: School Desegregation 1970–1971 (Atlanta: Southern Regional Council, 1971), 16, 70–79; and Nevin and Bills, Schools That Fear Built, 8–9.
66 “Plans for Mix Established: Greene County's 1970–71 School Plan Accepted by Court,” Greene County (AL) Democrat, Feb. 19, 1970, 1.
67 “Enrollment Soars at Warrior Academy,” Greene County (AL) Democrat, March 26, 1970, 1; and “With Enrollment Up Over 400 percent [at] Warrior Academy, New Building Contract Awarded Henderson Construction Company,” Greene County (AL) Democrat, April 2, 1970, 1.
68 Hustwit, James J. Kilpatrick, 125–26.
69 John J. Synon, “Why Our Schools Are Going Under!” Greene County (AL) Democrat, Nov. 6, 1969, n.p. For more on John J. Synon, see Hank Burchard, “John J. Synon, Fought for Conservative Causes,” Washington Post, April 8, 1972, B10.
70 Crespino, In Search of Another Country, 8.
71 Indeed, as Fuquay concludes, Synon's support for private education “succeeded in wedding the southern planter class's historic antipathy to the expense of public education with the anticommunist, free-market ideology which was becoming prominent in the right wing of the national Republican Party.” In that sense, private schools were integral to southern party realignment—and not only in the Sunbelt suburbs. See Fuquay, “Civil Rights and the Private School Movement,” 178–79.
72 Elizabeth Tornquist, “Rebel Yell Academies,” Ramparts, Sept. 1971, 12.
73 Nevin and Bills, Schools That Fear Built, vi.
74 Anonymous former student, telephone interview by author, Tuscaloosa, AL, March 7, 2007. In the course of my research, I spoke to several former students and employees (former and then-current) of Warrior Academy, most of whom wished to remain anonymous.
75 Marlin Barton, email message to author, Feb. 27, 2007.
76 See Bagley, Politics of White Rights, 6.
77 “MCS History,” Meadowview Christian School, Selma, AL, http://mcstrojans.org/mcs-history/.
78 “Our History,” Crenshaw Christian Academy, Luverne, AL, http://crenshawchristianacademy.com/about/our-history/.
79 “Our History,” Fort Dale Academy, Greenville, AL, https://www.fortdale.com/about-us/our-history.cfm.
80 For an overview of meritocracy, particularly in the mid-twentieth century, see Lemann, Nicholas, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2000)Google Scholar; and Kett, Joseph F., Merit: The History of a Founding Ideal from the American Revolution to the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.
81 Lassiter, Silent Majority, 28.
82 “Journey Through Two Americas,” 30.
83 McGee, interview.
84 Lassiter, Silent Majority, 1. See also, Fuquay, “Civil Rights and the Private School Movement,” 170.
85 US Commission on Civil Rights, Fifteen Years Ago, 4.
86 Minutes, Oct. 30, 1976, Greene County Board of Education. Those wishing to access local records should contact the Greene County Board of Education, 220 Main Street, Eutaw, AL 35462.
87 Marlin Barton, interview by author, Tuscaloosa, AL, Feb. 16, 2007; and Marlin Barton, e-mail message to author, Feb. 26, 2007.
88 Anonymous former student, interview. The alumnus's comments, coupled with his desire to remain anonymous, speaks to the continuing sense of racial division within the community as well as the tenuousness of claims to “color-blindness.”
89 Jim Leeson, “Private Schools for Whites Face Some Hurdles,” Southern Education Report 3 (Nov. 1967), 13; and US Commission on Civil Rights, Fifteen Years Ago, 5.
90 “Branch Head Bill Says,” Greene County (AL) Democrat, Oct. 23, 1969, n.p.
91 Regarding the length of Alabama's state constitution, see Campbell Robertson, “Alabama Simmers Before Vote on Its Constitution's Racist Language,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 2012, A15.
92 US Commission on Civil Rights, Fifteen Years Ago, 5. For more on the lid bills, see Bagley, Politics of White Rights, 209, 213–15, 223–25.
93 Murrell, “‘Impossible’ Prince Edward Case,” 151.
94 Lassiter, Silent Majority, 169.
95 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971).
96 The three schools founded in the immediate wake of the court order are Charlotte Latin School and Providence Day School in Charlotte proper, and Cabarrus Academy (now known as Cannon School), located in suburban Concord. See Andrew Dunn and Brianna Crane, “16 Biggest Private Schools in Charlotte, Ranked by the Cost of Tuition,” Charlotte (NC) Agenda, Aug. 25, 2019, https://www.charlotteagenda.com/16698/private-schools-in-charlotte-ranked-by-the-cost-of-tuition/.
97 Lassiter, Silent Majority, 6–14.
98 Charles T. Clotfelter, “Private Schools, Segregation, and the Southern States,” Peabody Journal of Education 79, no. 2 (March 2004), 91–92; and Clotfelter, Charles T., After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 115–16Google Scholar.
99 Much recent scholarship on White southern resistance has responded to Lassiter's call for a “metropolitan framework.” See Lassiter, Silent Majority, 6–9; and Lassiter, “Ten Propositions for the New Political History,” in Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century, ed. Brent Cebul, Lily Geisner, and Mason B. Williams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 364. However, in addressing one historiographical blind spot, the “metropolitan turn” has created another and risks (to borrow a phrase from Lassiter) reducing rural communities to a mere “appendage” of the ascendant Sunbelt. As such, this essay calls for more careful attention to the reciprocal relationship between the rural South and the metropolitan South.
100 Green v. Connally, 330 F. Supp. 1150 (D.D.C. 1971).
101 Randall Balmer, “The Real Origins of the Religious Right,” Politico, May 27, 2014, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133.
102 Runyon v. McCrary, 427 U.S. 160 (1976). See also, Lesley Oelsner, “High Court Curbs Private Schools on Racial Barrier,” New York Times, June 26, 1976, 52.
103 Internal Revenue Service, “Update on Private Schools” (Exempt Organizations-Continuing Professional Education, 1982), https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopici82.pdf.
104 Stuart Taylor Jr., “Ex-Tax Officials Assail Shift on School Exemption Status,” New York Times, Jan. 12, 1982, D23.
105 Anonymous former headmaster, interview by author, Tuscaloosa, AL, Feb. 22, 2007.
106 Anonymous former headmaster, interview.
107 Anonymous former headmaster, interview. This evasive response, coupled with the interviewee's desire to remain anonymous, suggests the flimsiness of the “color-blind” fiction.
108 Anonymous former student, interview.
109 “One Group Discourages Warrior-WAP Merger Idea,” Demopolis (AL) Times, June 7, 2004, https://www.demopolistimes.com/2004/06/07/one-group-discourages-warrior-wap-merger-idea/, para. 8–9. See also, “Warrior Academy Finds Religion,” Demopolis (AL) Times, June 25, 2004, https://www.demopolistimes.com/2004/06/25/warrior-academy-finds-religion/.
110 Anonymous school employee, interview by author, Eutaw, AL, March 7, 2007.
111 Tax forms associated with the school's income tax exemption reveal an increasingly bleak financial picture. The school's 2016 Form 990—the last available—reports total revenue of $61,320 and total expenses of $66,204. “Warrior Private School Foundation,” Nonprofit Explorer (ProPublica), https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/636052037; Warrior Academy, “Are you a cheerful giver? Are you looking for good ground to sow?” and “Deer Hunt Fundraiser is Saturday,” Facebook, Jan. 12, 2012, https://www.facebook.com/pages/category/Private-School/Warrior-Academy-127557367282610/. Targeting, as they do, parents who might have “concerns” about the safety of public schools, such posts offer further evidence of the “color-blind” rhetoric by which private schools have promoted themselves.
112 Details about Warrior Academy's closing are hard to come by. The school's Facebook page has seen no activity since 2012, and its phone number is disconnected. A representative from the Greene County (AL) Independent, a competing newspaper founded by Whites in the 1980s, confirmed that Warrior Academy closed and that most White students in the county now attend private schools in Tuscaloosa or Greensboro, or public schools in Demopolis in Marengo County, which allows nonresident enrollment. Sharon Trammell, electronic message to author, June 19, 2020.
113 James D. Anderson, “A Long Shadow: The American Pursuit of Political Justice and Education Equality,” Educational Researcher 44, no. 6 (Aug./Sept. 2015), 319–29.
114 Crespino wrote about “strategic accommodations” by Whites. See Crespino, In Search of Another Country, 9. I argue that not only did they “accommodate” Blacks in certain respects, they largely abandoned civic institutions where they could not maintain control.
115 Jason Zengerle, “The New Racism: This Is How the Civil Rights Movement Ends,” New Republic, Aug. 25, 2014, 12–21.
116 Kim Chandler, “Republicans in Bombshell Move Push Through Bill Giving Tax Credits for Kids at ‘Failing’ Schools to Go to Private Schools,” AL.com, Feb. 28, 2013, https://www.al.com/wire/2013/02/republicans_push_through_bill.html, para. 1.
117 Kim Chandler, “From ‘Historic’ to ‘Sleaziness’: Reaction to the School Choice Bill and How It Was Approved,” AL.com, March 1, 2013, https://www.al.com/wire/2013/02/from_historic_to_sleaziness_re.html, para. 3 and 6. See also Erickson, Ansley T., “The Rhetoric of Choice: Segregation, Desegregation, and Charter Schools,” Dissent 58, no. 4 (Fall 2011), 41–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
118 Krista Johnson, “Reality vs. Intent: Alabama Accountability Act Serves Mostly Students from Nonfailing Schools,” Montgomery Advertiser, Aug. 3, 2018, https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/education/2018/08/03/reality-vs-intent-alabama-accountability-act-serves-mostly-students-non-failing-schools/727038002/, para. 6 and 10. See also, Lassiter, Matthew D., “De Jure/De Facto Segregation: The Long Shadow of a National Myth,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Lassiter, Matthew D. and Crespino, Joseph (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 25–48Google Scholar.
119 Trisha Powell Crain, “Here's the New List of ‘Failing’ Schools in Alabama,” AL.com, Nov. 1, 2019, https://www.al.com/news/2019/11/heres-the-new-list-of-failing-schools-in-alabama.html. See also, Challen Stephens, “Four Decades Later, Alabama Poised to Subsidize Private Schools Built to Resist Desegregation,” AL.com, April 1, 2013, https://www.al.com/wire/2013/04/in_the_black_belt_nowhere_to_r.html; and Bagley, Politics of White Rights, 7, 219–23.
120 The Alabama Education Association has long opposed charter schools in the state but has seen its influence wane since the historic sweep of state government by Republicans in 2010.
121 Trisha Powell Crain, “Alabama Charter School Commission Remade, Here's Their Track Record So Far,” AL.com, Nov. 1, 2019, https://www.al.com/news/2019/08/alabama-charter-school-commission-remade-heres-their-track-record-so-far.html; Sherrel Wheeler Stewart, “In a Segregated County, a New Charter School Offers an Alternative,” NPR, Aug. 23. 2018, https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/21/640437944/charter-school-aims-to-diversify-sumter-county-alabama; Trisha Powell Crain, “Rural Alabama Charter Opens as First Integrated School in Sumter County,” AL.com, Aug. 13, 2018, https://www.al.com/news/2018/08/charter_school_opens_doors_as.html; and “Our Board,” University Charter School, Livingston, AL, http://www.universitycharterschool.org/#section-1208.