Seg Academies Redux 0

When I was a young ‘un, back in the olden days, and my previously all-white high school started to integrate, suddenly two private all-white schools sprang up in my rural community (I think one of them still exists). To be blunt, they enrolled kids of white parents who were afraid of black folks.

That’s why we called them “seg academies.”

Those of us who stayed in the public schools and got to know and study and play sports with the black kids (who I am certain were carefully screened and chosen to be the early integrators of the previously all-white schools in those early days of integration) looked on those schools–well–somewhat contemptuously. We were in school with the black kids, we got to know them at least a bit, and we realized that they were people like us. True, we may not have gotten to know them all that well, but we got to know them enough to realize that they were human beings like us.

Later on, when I was well out of school, my mother, who was a math teacher, taught for many years in my county’s now-integrated school system. More than once, she told me that they had more problems from (oh what the heck, white) parents than they ever had from students. She was born and raised in South Carolina, but she was able to rise above prejudice to see persons.

And now comes Thom to point out that the proponents of seg academies are still around and still trying to pervert public education to promote racial prejudice.