In 1940, Governor Paul Johnson pushed for a change to the Mississippi code to allow for the state to pay for free textbooks for Mississippi undergraduate students. Many other states had similar laws, and Johnson wanted Mississippi children to have the same educational opportunities as children in other states.
Using Texas as a model, my Uncle Boyd applied for and made a contract with the relative textbook publishers to maintain and operate a textbook depository in Mississippi. Publishers would print the books, mostly in Nashville, and ship them to our warehouse on South Street, which is now the Cathead Vodka distillery. The state of Mississippi would pass laws specifying the funds available for textbooks, and the schools would apply to the State Textbook Commission to make an order for the books they wanted. We would ship them and bill the state of Mississippi. When the state paid us, we kept eight percent and sent the rest to the publishers. This is how textbooks were bought and sold in Mississippi until the change in the Mississippi code in the 90s, which abolished the State Textbook fund and allowed schools to order textbooks out of the general education funds.
When students got their books at the beginning of the year, they had a stamp on the inside front cover that said, “This Book Is The Property of the State of Mississippi and is assigned to:” and then a blank for the student’s name and the year. The state of Mississippi owned your fourth-grade reading textbook and let you use it for a year. The next year, they added a name to the stamp and let another student use the same book.
This system worked great for quite a while. Even schools like St. Andrews and St. Richards qualified for free textbooks as long as the students were citizens of Mississippi. In 1964, the United States passed the Civil Rights Act and its several chapters. Chapter Six of the Civil Rights Act made it illegal to use federal funds for segregated programs.
“Section 601 provides that recipients must comply with the mandate that no person, on the basis of race, color, or national origin, “be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under” any federally funded program or activity.” That’s where Mississippi ran into a problem. Our schools were still very segregated. That segregation of public schools would soon be struck down, in some parts because of chapter six, but Mississippi would attempt to escape segregating its schools by creating new, private schools that could still legally segregate because they didn’t receive federal funds or state funds.
After salaries and insurance, textbooks are the next largest yearly expense for most schools. Many of these private schools tried to make a case that they were still eligible for state textbook funds. The first case came in 1970 in Tunica. A young lawyer from Oxford made the case that the Superintendent of Tunica public schools was ordering textbooks for the public schools but delivering them to the Tunica Institute, a private academy. The case went before Judge Keady, who ordered that the practice not continue but didn’t rule on whether or not it happened in the past since Tunica Institute was only six years old and is generally considered one of the very first segregation academies. I don’t have access to our records from 1969, but I’m pretty sure we shipped textbooks to the Tunica superintendent that ended up a the Tunica Institute.
Almost two years later, the Mississippi Association of Private Schools sued the State Textbook Commission because parochial schools were receiving textbook funds, but they were not. Bill Goodman had a team representing the Textbook Commission, Ed Bruini had a team representing us, and the judge was Bill Coleman. This was pretty serious stuff. The private school association tried to prove that since they had no verbiage about segregation in their charter, they should be allowed free textbooks. The state’s position was that the parochial schools were, in fact, integrated, even if they didn’t have very many non-white students, and at that time, none of the Association of Private Schools members were integrated, even though they had no verbiage in their charter preventing it. Missco, for their part, sat in the corner, trying not to offend anyone as both sides were our customers.
Coleman ruled in favor of the state and said the academies would not get any textbook money as long as they were defacto segregated, no matter what their charter said.
None of this was very flashy news. There are one or two articles in the Clarion Ledger about either case; none were very long as there wasn’t much public interest. There were some hurt feelings, though. The next year we were subject to a Peer Committee review and audit. They said in their report that we were a “paragon of efficiency” that became part of our marketing material for years after, but the message was still pretty clear. “Choose your friends, and stick with them.” We honestly didn’t have much choice. The public schools were much bigger customers, and we were doing our best to stay very well within the letter of the law.
Another outcome of the case was that we could no longer charge adopted textbook materials to private schools. They could order books from us, but they had to pay cash lest we get accused of mingling adopted textbook money with their accounts receivable. Many of the academies ended up buying their textbooks by mail order, partially out of spite but also because that way they could get 120-day dating on their invoices, and in those early days 120, day dating on invoices was a heck of a gift.
I was a kid when most of this happened. Most of it I know about from talking to the principal players years after the fact and looking it up on microfiche at the Millsaps Library. Mississippi went to great lengths to avoid cooperating with the spirit of the Civil Rights Act. At the time, people thought they had beaten the system, but here fifty years later, I wonder if maybe we didn’t break the system.
I don’t think there’s anybody left alive who is still angry about decisions my dad or anyone at Missco had to make in those days. There were at the time, but that was a long time ago. The state of your public schools has such a major role in the quality of life in a community. It’s so easy to say that the state of Jackson Public Schools is the Mayor’s fault or the city council’s fault, but as much as I respected him as a person, I’m looking much more at the decisions Dr. Walker and Mr. Howell made in 1969 as an explanation for the state of Jackson Public Schools today. A lot of people will point to the Citizens Council, and I will too. I knew those guys too, but our educational leaders honestly should bear a special burden here because they had the most reason to know better. Bob Fortenberry had a big role in keeping Jackson Public Schools in a workable state, but after he moved on it was, and still is a struggle to find anyone to take that position.
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