by Jennifer Berry Hawes

This story contains a racial slur.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Join us for a virtual discussion of how private schools known as “segregation academies” in the Deep South continue to preserve divisions within communities even 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education.

A mile of Alabama country road, and a history of racism, separate the two schools. At the stop sign between them, even the road’s name changes. Threadgill Road, christened for a civil rights hero, becomes Whiskey Run. Black students take Threadgill to one campus; white students turn off Whiskey Run toward the other.

Both schools are shrinking. Wilcox County, a notch in the swath of old plantation country known as the Black Belt, struggles with declining population — a common scenario across this part of the South. In such places, the existence of two separate school systems can isolate entire communities by race.

The private school, Wilcox Academy, is what researchers call a “segregation academy” due to the historic whiteness of its student body and the timing of its opening. It’s down to 200 students across 12 grades. Housed in a single-story building with beige siding and brown brick veneer, the school offers chapel and core academic classes but not music, theater or band programs.

Down the road, the county’s public high school has more students and course options. Wilcox Central High’s building, with a medical-training lab and competition-sized swimming pool, could house 1,000 students. Instead, it barely draws 400, virtually all of them Black, from across the entire 888-square-mile county.

Divisions like this have long played out across the region. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring public school segregation unconstitutional. As the federal courts repeatedly ruled against the South’s massive resistance, many white people pivoted to a new tactic, one that is lesser known and yet profoundly influences the Black Belt region today: They created a web of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of private schools to educate white children.

Now, 70 years after the Brown decision, ProPublica has found about 300 schools that likely opened as segregation academies in the South are still operating. Some have flourished into pricey college-prep behemoths. Others, like Wilcox Academy, remain modest Christian schools. Many have accepted more nonwhite students over the years, and some now come close to reflecting the communities they serve.

But across Alabama’s 18 Black Belt counties, all of the remaining segregation academies ProPublica identified — about a dozen — are still vastly white, even though the region’s population is majority Black. And in the towns where these schools operate, they often persist as a dividing force.

Even when rural segregation academies offer fewer amenities than their public-school counterparts, white parents are often unwilling to voluntarily send their children to majority-Black public schools. That can be to the detriment of all students, especially in struggling communities where money is tight. It means doubling up on school overhead costs, and fewer students at each school means neither one can offer the robust programs that they could provide if their resources were combined.

“You’re dividing money you don’t have in half,” said Bryan Mann, a University of Kansas professor who studies school segregation and school choice.

And soon, far more tax dollars will be flowing into private schools. Republican lawmakers are adopting plans for massive infusions of state money to help thousands more students who want to attend them. It’s part of a movement barreling across the country, particularly the Southeast — where, in Black Belt counties like Wilcox, a segregation academy may be the only nearby private school option.

In March, Alabama’s Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, who is from Wilcox County, signed the CHOOSE Act. It creates a program of voucher-like education savings accounts and directs the state legislature to devote no less than $100 million a year to fund them. Students can apply for up to $7,000 a year to pay for private school tuition, among other costs.

Since the start of 2023, North Carolina, Arkansas and Florida have joined Alabama in opening voucher-style programs to all students over the coming years, as opposed to limiting them to lower-income students or those in low-performing schools. South Carolina created one that extends to middle-income and some upper-income families. Georgia adopted its own for children in low-performing public schools. Governors in Texas and Tennessee pledged to continue similar fights next year.

To Alabama native Steve Suitts, history is repeating.

After the Brown decision, Southern legislatures provided state money to help white students flee to the new academies. Alabama was among the first states to do so, said Suitts, a historian and author of “Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement.” Even the language used — framing the movement as parents’ right to “freedom” and “private school choice” — was the same then as it is now.

“I cannot see how there will be any difference,” Suitts said of recent laws. He dubbed Alabama’s new voucher-style program the Segregation Academy Rescue Act.

Republican lawmakers strongly disagree. They argue that today Black and white students alike can use the money to attend private schools. The new law bars participating schools from discriminating based on race, though it does allow them to choose which applicants they want to admit.

During House debate earlier this year, Republican state Rep. Danny Garrett, the education budget chair, heard many Black legislators argue that the law is about race, its aim to bolster segregation. “Of course, neither of these statements are true,” he told them.

In Camden, the pastoral county seat of Wilcox, Black and white residents said they would like to see their children schooled together. But after so long apart, they aren’t sure how to best do that.

High school juniors Jazmyne Posey and Samantha Cook hadn’t met until they started working at Black Belt Treasures, a nonprofit in downtown Camden that sells the wares of hundreds of Black Belt artists.

On the surface, the teenagers appear to have little in common. Jazmyne is Black; Samantha is white. Jazmyne likes rap and hip-hop; Samantha likes indie pop. Jazmyne goes to the public school; Samantha goes to Wilcox Academy.

But they soon bonded over similar life experiences and problems, both teenagers navigating high school relationships. They wonder what it would be like to be in class together. Would their friends get along?

Once, when they........

© ProPublica