People talk about Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and how the South converted from Yellow-dog Democrats to the world’s most conservative Republicans. Nixon was taking advantage of a situation that was already developing. In 1969, most of Mississippi blamed the Democratic party for our position on the Rubicon of integrating our public schools and the panic that ensued. When I look at the list of names of the men who formed the Board of Directors for Jackson Preparatory School in 1970, it’s really easy for me to see the seeds of a revolution. I can’t look at a single name on that list and say, “I did not love this man,” but the truth is the truth, and the Republican takeover of Mississippi started in Jackson, and it started with those men, and it started over the issue of integration.
A lot of people are already tired of discussing the birth and growth of private schools in Mississippi around 1970. I think it’s important we do discuss it because it has a lot to do with the state of our schools today, and the state of our schools today has a great deal to do with the state of our state. It’s also important to remember that we were just children. Nearly all of the people who made these decisions passed away ten years ago.
You’ll often hear said that St. Andrews and St. Richards were parochial schools and shouldn’t be included in this, and JA was started as an alternative school that taught phonics in early reading as an alternative to what JPS was teaching. All of these things were true. These three schools were started under very different conditions than what happened in 1970. When the purpose for them was formulated, the idea of most of white Jackson abandoning the public schools wasn’t a consideration. When these schools began, nobody believed we would be forced to integrate.
St. Andrews, St. Richards, and JA all experienced massive growth in 1970. While these schools weren’t created as an alternative to integrated public schools, there were parents who considered that, if they were going to leave the public schools, they would rather their children attend a school like that rather than a school like Prep or Manhattan. My parents were one of these.
The superintendent of Jackson Public Schools told my grandfather to “tell Jim he better get those boys into private schools because I don’t know what will happen next year.” Next year in this story was the year Murrah would be forcefully integrated. Normally, a comment like that would be of concern, considering what my father did for a living; it was a paradigm shift and a huge amount of pressure beyond just wanting to do the best he could for his children. For the superintendent of Jackson Public Schools, my father’s biggest client, to say he should move us out of the JPS system was disturbing on many levels, disturbing enough that this is what my parents decided to do.
My oldest brother went to Prep because his football coach was also going to Prep. The same coach noticed my early growth spurt and the size of my arms and asked me when I was going to prep every time I saw him until I was a sophomore at Millsaps. He caught me with a pitcher of beer at Mr. Gattis Pizza in the 10th grade and asked when I was going to Prep. The rest of us, my other brother, my sister, and I, went to St. Andrews. In the late 70s, there were some concerns about what was going on at St. Andrews, so my sister transferred to Prep, just in time to miss David Hicks. That’s another story.
With integration, there was a lot of pressure for both JA and St Andrews to add a high school, and neither had the money. St. Andrews spent a great deal of money building what remains one of the most attractive lower schools in Mississippi. There were still loans out for it, and nearly all the sources they had for large gifts were tapped to build it.
The high school St Andrews eventually built looked like it was erected by an entirely different organization than the lower school. One building had a second floor that could never be used because the building inspector wouldn’t approve it, so the planned staircase was never built, and those rooms were used for storage. Every so often, you’d see Jessie on the maintenance staff haul a broken chair-desk up an extension ladder to store it in this unused portion of the building so that it could be used for parts later on.
There was a struggle for a while to decide what the future of JA would be. Many saw it as a feeder school for Prep. Prep already had a preferred feeder school in First Pres, though, so the relationship became strained. JA was also working under a different educational paradigm than Prep. Prep was very traditional, basically, the same curricula as Murrah (since that’s where most of their staff came from), whereas JA was interested in more modern curricula (at least, more modern in terms of the 1960s). More than ten years into it, JA decided they, too, must have a high school, but where would they find the money?
While most of the banks had the motivation to loan these new schools money, they still required some backup to the loans. More often than not, these came in the form of personal guarantees from board members. Often, a willingness to personally guarantee a banknote was how one became a board member. The money for these banknotes paid the construction companies, companies like my dad’s that provide chairs, desks, and blackboards, and most importantly, the salaries of the teaching staff, almost all poached from the public schools. Some people will take offense that I use the word “poach” here. I hold nothing against anyone who left a job in our public schools for a job in our private schools. These people, mostly women, were excellent educators, and considering the stories I’ve heard about the chaos in the administrative side of Jackson’s public schools at the time, I don’t know that I can blame them for switching.
The idea of offering stock in the school as a way of raising a little extra money was a part of nearly every school other than St. Richards and St. Andrews; both of those had already built most of their lower school and had a more stable economic situation due to their parochial nature. Many of these personally guaranteed notes were called as the need for money soon outstripped the money coming in from tuition. Everything was happening so fast; this was almost guaranteed to happen. Some of these men, who had to pay out of their pocket for the loans the school could not pay, took stock in the school as payment. That way, for quite a while, when a new student would enroll and buy stock, they were buying it from Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones, who still had five hundred shares left from when he had to pay off the school's banknote.
The question of integrating the schools was a complicated one. Prep, Woodland Hills and Manhattan had no interest in integrating, they couldn’t legally refuse to admit anyone based on race, and there were parents who tested the waters, but no black students were enrolled. JA had staff members who were very open to integration, but the cost of attending prevented it for many years. Glenn Cain and I discussed this several times. He even showed me some of the applications from black parents to prove he was telling me the truth. Glen, I think, at times, was in an impossible situation where everyone wanted something different from him, and his own vision for the school became difficult to manifest. Jesse Howell found it easier to realize his vision and get others to back him up. Part of that was just his magnetic personality, but part of it was an unwillingness to challenge the status quo. For many people, Prep was the new Jackson Central High School, but without any of that integration nonsense. If you look at the board and the faculty, you’ll see the names of an awful lot of Central alumni.
St. Andrews and St. Richards were both very motivated to integrate on orders from their respective religious organizations, but again cost became an obstacle. St. Andrews ultimately became the first private school to integrate willingly. They were, and are now, pretty proud of that. While he was a good student and well-liked, there was still an enormous economic gap between white and black parents, and the cost of attending St. Andrews prevented him from graduating there. His presence started something, though. Soon, every grade would have at least one black student, and the number grew every year. James Meridith sent his sons to St. Andrews. During my entire tenure at St. Andrews, there were talks of merit-based and need-based scholarships, with experiments with both. While nearly everybody was in favor of it, paying for it was an obstacle. It was expensive enough to keep the doors open; adding that sort of expense on top proved too difficult.
A lot of us noticed that black students would drop out around Jr High School. Part of that, I think, was the idea that, if their parents were going to spend that much money, it’d be better invested in the early grades so their children got a good foundation. I’m sure the idea that being around other black students as a part of social life was also more of a consideration in the upper grades.
The baby boom had already stretched Jackson’s educational resources thin. Although considerably larger, Murrah wasn’t nearly the architectural marvel of Bailey or Central. The cost was the primary consideration. Jackson barely had enough money to meet its public school needs and then voluntarily put on themselves the added burden of duplicating it as private schools. Considering just how much of a task this was, regardless of whether it was a good idea or not, makes me have some respect for the people who did it. It was, however, a horrible idea. None of the terrible things predicted to happen at Murrah happened. There were no murders in the hallway, and the drug problem at Murrah was considerably smaller than the drug problem at the private schools. The kids who stayed at Murrah got every bit as good of an education as the kids who went to Prep. The difference is, Prep is well-funded and going strong today, but Murrah struggles to meet the basic needs of its students. Murrah is far more segregated now than it was in 1975. We’ve struggled to keep a superintendent of Jackson Public Schools every year since 1970.
A lot o people don’t want to talk about this. “It was fifty years ago.” “We were children.” “The world is different now.” All of this is true, but when I look out at what’s happening educationally now in Mississippi, what I see are the scars that were left when most of Mississippi abandoned the public school system. Scars that won’t heal unless we talk about this. A lot of people think they’re safe from all this as long as they can send their kids to private schools. It’s not that simple. Our culture and our economy depend on the families who can’t afford to send their kids to these private schools. Your kids who went to private schools will be left with the same unanswered questions we were left with by our parents, and the longer we take to address these issues, the more our society will become polarized and dysfunctional.
Prep, St Andrews, and JA all seem pretty well-heeled now. That’s an illusion created by fifty years of investment. The first few years, the schools looked nothing like that. Mississippi still struggles to meet its basic educational needs. If you look at the money spent on our private schools, it might become clear where the money went. The cities that are now mostly white won’t remain so. We didn’t escape the problem of integration; we postponed it. Sooner or later, those chickens will come home to roost.
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